TABLE OF CONTENTS Dear Friend, Mark Rothko was 4 Meet the Author / commissioned to Theatre Gym create the Sea- 5 Title Page gram Murals in 6 Cast / Setting / Show Staff / 1958, so the play Special Thanks you are about 7 – 8 Company Bios to see takes place in the few 9 Tragic and Timeless years following that date, when 10 – 11 Mark Rothko Rothko himself was in his late 14 Staff 50s and early 60s. Being at that same point in my life and career, I quickly found that a lot of what MISSION Rothko had to say resonated with me when I first read this script. In some ways, I feel very different Virginia Repertory Theatre from Mark Rothko; in many ways I creates in Central Virginia feel the same. professional productions of the great comedies, dramas and Following the events of this play, musicals—past, present and Rothko began to view his work future. We seek to be a regional as spiritual expression. One of his theatre of national standing. final works—a transcendent work, We embrace the art form in its he hoped—is the Rothko Chapel entirety, presenting plays of in Houston, Texas. He was eager 3 all genres and national origins, for the chapel to be as far away serving an audience of all ages from the center of the art world and backgrounds. as possible—an environment for spiritual contemplation. In keeping with the legacies of Barksdale and Theatre IV, All artists view their work differ- the hallmark of our nonprofit ently. I’m fascinated by playwright company is community engage- John Logan’s take on the angels ment. To that end, we seek and demons that haunted the national caliber excellence in the later life of the great American arts, education, children’s health, painter, Mark Rothko. I hope you and community leadership. will be too.
All the Best,
Bruce Miller Artistic Director
Cover Illustration by Robert Meganck MEET THE AUTHOR
John Logan was DiCaprio), Sweeney Todd (2007, born in San starring Johnny Depp), Hugo Diego in 1961, (2011, Oscar nomination Best the son of Nor- Screenplay), and Skyfall (2012, thern Ireland starring Daniel Craig and Dame émigrés. Judi Dench). He attended Chicago’s RED, Logan’s most successful Northwestern play, premiered at London’s University, Donmar Warehouse in 2009 and graduating in 1983. For 10 years transferred to Broadway in 2010, he was a successful playwright where it won six Tony Awards, at Chicago’s acclaimed Victory including Best Play. This past Gardens Theater, serving as a March, Logan’s new play, Peter founding member of the com- and Alice, opened In London pany’s playwrights ensemble. to rave reviews, starring Dame At Victory Gardens, he pre- Judi Dench. Peter and Alice miered Never the Sinner (1985), concerns an actual meeting that Hauptmann (1986), Music from took place in 1920s London a Locked Room (1989), and between the aging woman who Scorched Earth (1991). In the late inspired Alice in Wonderland 4 90s he began a successful career and the young man who inspired in film, creating the screenplays Peter Pan. This month (April), for Any Given Sunday (1999, Logan’s newest play, I’ll Eat You starring Al Pacino), Gladiator Last, opens on Broadway, (2000, starring Russell Crowe, starring Bette Midler as the noto- Oscar for Best Picture), The rious Hollywood super-agent, Aviator (2004, starring Leonardo Sue Mengers.
AT THIS THEATRE: THEATRE GYM
The lobby, rest rooms, rehearsal in which you now sit is named hall and dressing rooms at Theatre Gym. It was originally Virginia Rep Center are housed a retail store known as Marshall’s in what used to be the historic before being converted to a Little Theatre, which opened Piggly Wiggly sometime in the next door to the Empire (now the 1920s. Theatre IV transformed November) in 1912 as Richmond’s the space into a studio theatre in first purpose-built movie theatre. 1990. Several of Richmond’s All previous cinemas in Richmond “Best Play of the Year” winners were converted storefront nick- took place here, including Crimes elodeons. From 1936 until 1969, of the Heart, Frankie and Johnny the Little Theatre was known as in the Clair de Lune, and August: the Maggie Walker. The facility Osage County. MEET THE AUTHOR Artistic Director Bruce Miller Managing Director Phil Whiteway
by JOHN LOGAN
RED is presented by special arrangement by Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.
SET DESIGN LIGHT DESIGN COSTUME DESIGN STAGE MANAGEMENT Jacob Sailer Lynne M. Hartman+ Sarah Grady Rick Brandt* 5
DIRECTION Christopher Owens
THEATRE GYM AT THIS THEATRE: THEATRE GYM VIRGINIA REP CENTER
SPONSORSHIP SUPPORT BY Frances, Andy and Ginny Lewis
ADDITIONAL FUNDING BY CAST
Mark Rothko David Bridgewater* Ken Maxwell Eddy*
FOR THIS PRODUCTION
Stage Manager Rick Brandt* Light Board/ Sound Operator Linwood Guyton Wardrobe Nikki Wragg Deck Crew Joey Sauthoff
TIME & PLACE
Rothko’s studio, 222 Bowery, New York City, 1958 - 1959
6 SPECIAL THANKS
Virginia Rep wishes to thank John Ravenal, Sarah Eckhardt, and Suzanne Hall from the Virginia Museum, Aimee Joyaux from the Visual Arts Center and visual artists Javier Tapia and Brad Birchett for their time and expertise.
+Member of USA, United * Member of Actors’ Equity Association, Scenic Artists’, local 829 the union of professional actors and stage managers in the U.S.A. COMPANY BIOS
David Bridgewater (Mark Rothko) has been working professionally as an actor, director and instructor for the past 29 years. He was last seen as Tupolski in The Pillow- man with Cadence Theatre. Other past local credits in- clude Bill in August: Osage County and John in Oleanna also with Cadence Theatre, Jim in Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music and Joe in Becky’s New Car with Barksdale at Hanover Tavern, and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra with Richmond Shakespeare. With Virginia Repertory Theatre, Dave has performed over the years as Cyrano in Cyrano De Bergerac, Lennie in Of Mice and Men, John Proctor in The Crucible, and the title role in Hamlet. Film and TV credits include Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, Nothing But the Truth, Commander in Chief, Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, Surface, and Line of Fire. Richmonders may recognize him as Otto from Chesterfield Auto Parts ads. Dave was the recipient of the 2008 Theresa Pollak Prize for excellence in theatre and is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor cur- rently working as an instructor with SPARC’S Live Art Program.
Maxwell Eddy (Ken) is proud to be making his Virginia Rep debut in RED, far and away one of his all time favorite plays! NY credits include: Elmina’s Kitchen (SoHo Rep. dir. Oscar Eustis), A Doll’s House (Theater 7 Reconstruction Ensemble) PunkRockLoveSong (Horse Trade Theater Co.), and A Midsummer Nights Dream (Hudson Warehouse). Regional credits include Les Femmes Savantes and Richard II (Shakespeare Theatre of NJ), as well as Our Farm (Fresh Ground Pepper/Underground Arts Center, Phila). NYU Tisch credits in- clude Moments (dir. Moises Kaufman), The Frogs (dir. David Herskovitz), Oliver!(dir. Lear DeBessonet), and Bruce in Blue/Orange. Training: The Studio New York Conservatory. BFA: NYU Tisch, ETW. Thanks to Jessica, for reminding me.
Christopher Owens (Direction) has been the Artistic Director of the Virginia Shakespeare Festival in Williamsburg since 2004, having spent eighteen years prior heading professional theatre companies in Dallas, Texas and Winchester, Virginia. He has directed over 120 professional stage productions from Seattle to Sarasota including such favorites as King Lear, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Amadeus, Noises Off, Summer and Smoke, the national tour of The Fourposter, and ten regional productions of A Christmas Carol. For VSF: The Tempest, Mac- beth, Love’s Labours Lost, The Complete History of America Abridged, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and Art. This fall he staged Serious Money for the UH/Alley Theatre program in Houston and will be directing Macbeth in Detroit in June. Training: Southern Methodist University in Dallas and The Juilliard School in New York un- der the direction of John Houseman. He is an Associate Professor COMPANY BIOS (continued)
of Theatre at the College of William & Mary where he is a recipient this year of the Plumeri Award for faculty excellence.
Jacob Sailer (Set Design) is a junior scenic design major at the Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the assistant designer for VCU’s The Elephant Man and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. He has worked as a carpenter for The Shenandoah Summer Music Theatre in Winchester Virginia and at The Monomoy Theatre in Cape Cod Massa- chusetts. This is Jacob’s first design for Virginia Rep.
Lynne M. Hartman (Lighting Design) has worked with Virginia Rep for 20 years. Recent Virginia Rep designs include Hay Fever, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, The Magic Flute, Madeline’s Christmas, The Producers, Night Blooms, Spring Awakening, Seussical, Legacy of Light (2011 RTCC Award), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Sound of Music (2010 RTCC Award). Lynne has designed locally for TheatreVirginia, CenterStage, Richmond Ballet, Theatre VCU and Dogwood Dell among others. Regional design credits include The Lost Colony, McCarter Theatre, Auburn University, and Kings Dominion. Lynne held a Fellowship in Theatre at VMFA and was educated at Mary Washington and University of Maryland. Member USA, Local 829. 8 Sarah Grady (Costume Design) is the Assistant Costume Director for Virginia Repertory Theatre. Designs include: Madeline’s Christmas, Spring Awakening, God of Carnage, Circle Mirror Transformation, Sound of Music (a RTCC nominee for Best Costume Design), Children of a Lesser God, The BFG, Annie, A Christmas Story Brooklyn Boy, Scap- ino & Patchwork (Virginia Repertory Theatre); A Winter’s Tale (Henley Street & Richmond Shakespeare); Children’s Letters to God & Tick, Tick…Boom! (Stage 1 Theatre Company). For three lucky summers, Sarah traveled to Roma, Italy to work with the Operafestival di Roma to coordinate costumes for The Magic Flute, Suor Angelica, The Marriage of Figaro and Die Fledermaus.
Rick Brandt (Stage Manager) is happy to be back at Virginia Rep and working with this wonderful company. His previous credits include Night Blooms, Hay Fever, God of Carnage Lend Me a Tenor, Circle Mirror Transformation, Legacy of Light, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Children of a Lesser God, The Little Dog Laughed, This Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Onstage appearances include Gross Indecency: The Three Tri- als of Oscar Wilde, The Lark, Light Up the Sky, Talley’s Folly (Virginia Rep); Raised in Captivity, Bash: Latterday Plays, A Devil Inside (Theatre Gym), Richard III (Richmond Shakespeare Company), and Edward II (LiveArts). TRAGIC AND TIMELESS by Sarah Eckhardt
In a 1943 letter to the art editor at that a Rothko painting bought in the New York Times, Mark Rothko 1955 for $1,250 would be worth and his close colleague Adolph $25,000 to $30,000 in 1965. (The Gottlieb wrote, “art is an adven- Mad Men writers were not far off ture into an unknown world, which to have Bert Cooper reference can be explored only by those the Rothko painting on his office willing to take the risks.” They fur- wall and confide, “between you, ther asserted that the subject of me, and the lamppost, that thing art had to be “tragic and timeless” should double in value by next and therefore that “it must insult Christmas.”) Suddenly Rothko had anyone who is spiritually attuned to confront his paintings as com- to interior decoration; pictures for modities that had, in fact, become the home; pictures for over the “pictures for the home” (despite mantle; pictures of the American their enormous scale), sought af- scene; social pictures.” Indeed, ter by those who were “spiritually over the next decade only a small attuned to interior decoration.” group of fellow artists, critics, and museum curators followed RED situates Rothko in the Rothko on this adventure. By the midst of a struggle between his late 1940s he had gained critical driving ambition and fear that acclaim yet, like the rest of the his paintings have become Abstract Expressionists, he sold merely popular. He imagines 9 very few paintings and struggled himself making an art historical to pay the bills. contribution on par with Rem- brandt, yet the immense murals Starting in the mid-1950s, how- he is painting throughout the ever, Rothko’s financial situation play are planned for display in changed dramatically. Between a posh restaurant rather than 1955 and 1957 his income in- a museum or a cathedral. When creased from $3,000 a year to his assistant Ken points out the $20,000 before tripling in 1958 absurd clash between Rothko’s to $60,000. Fortune magazine’s lofty rhetoric and the paintings’ two-part article, “The Great proposed placement, he accu- International Art Market,” pub- rately implies that Rothko’s lished in December of 1955 and success is part of the tragedy. January of 1956, helped provoke a run on the market by describing contemporary artists in general, Sarah Eckhardt is the Assistant and Rothko specifically, as great Curator of Modern and speculative investments. The Contemporary Art at the Virginia article went so far as to predict Museum of Fine Art
James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko, A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 340. MARK ROTHKO BIOGRAPHY
10 Born Marcus Rotkovitch in the life baring the soul of those living town of Dvinsk, Latvia, then part through The Great Depression of the Russian Empire, Mark Rothko in New York. The painter Milton immigrated to the United States Avery offered Rothko both artistic with his family at the age of ten, and nutritional nourishment settling in Portland, Oregon. during these lean years. In the 1930s, Rothko exhibited with A gifted student, Rothko attended The Ten, a close-knit group of Yale University on scholarship American painters, which included from 1921-23, but disillusioned fellow Avery acolyte, Adolph by the social milieu and finan- Gottlieb. Success was moderate cial hardship, he dropped out at best but the group provided and moved to New York to important incubation for the “bum around and starve a bit.” Abstract Expressionist school A chance invitation from a friend to come. brought him to a drawing class at the Art Students League The war years brought with it an where he discovered his love of influx of European surrealists, art. He took two classes there but influencing most of the New York was otherwise self-taught. painters, among them Rothko, to take on a neo-surrealist style. Rothko painted in a figurative Rothko experimented with mythic style for nearly twenty years, his and symbolic painting for five portraits and depictions of urban years before moving to pure abstraction in the mid 1940s and RED presents a fictionalized ultimately to his signature style of account of Rothko’s frustrated two or three rectangles floating in first attempt to create such a fields of saturated color in 1949. space in New York’s Four Season’s restaurant. Rothko sought to Beginning in the early 1950s create art that was timeless; Rothko was heralded, along with paintings that expressed basic Jackson Pollock, Willem deKo- human concerns and emotions oning, Franz Kline and others, that remain constant not merely as the standard bearers of the across decades but across New American Painting—a truly generations and epochs. He American art that was not simply looked to communicate with his a derivative of European styles. viewer at the most elemental level By the late 1950s, Rothko was and through his artwork, have a celebrated (if not wealthy) a conversation that was intense, artist, winning him three mural personal and, above all, honest. commissions that would dom- A viewer’s tears in front of one inate the latter part of his career. of his paintings told him he had Only in the last of these, The succeeded. While creating a Rothko Chapel in Houston was he deeply expressive body of work able to realize his dream of a and garnering critical acclaim, truly contemplative environment Rothko battled depression and his 11 in which to interact deeply with brilliant career ended in suicide his artwork. in 1970. Pop Art and Beyond: Tom Wesselmann
Apr 6 – Jul 28
Tickets: www.VMFA.museum z
| 804.340.1405 | www.VMFA.museum
Pop Art and Beyond: Tom Wesselmann is organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with the collaboration of the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, New York. This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Sydney and Frances Lewis Endowment Fund. The Banner Exhibition Program at VMFA is supported by the Julia Louise Reynolds Fund. Media Partners: CBS 6, Style Weekly, RVANews. Image: Still Life #35, 1963, Tom Wesselmann (American, 1931–2004), oil and collage on canvas. Estate of Tom Wesselmann. Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Virginia Repertory Theatre STAFF
ARTISTIC Artistic Director Bruce Miller Associate Artistic Director Chase Kniffen Assistant to the Artistic Director Kate Belleman Intern and Volunteer Manager/Production Assistant Katie Monfet
ADMINISTRATION Managing Director Phil Whiteway Controller Tracy Coogle Accounting Manager Lucas Hall Accounting Assistant Sara Heifetz Willow Lawn Manager Tom McGranahan
PRODUCTION Technical Director Bruce Rennie Production Manager / Asst Technical Director Wendy Vandergrift Technical Director – Hanover David Powers Designer/Charge - Hanover Terrie Powers Master Carpenter Hans Paul Carpenters Luke Robinson, Doug Wilkinson Scenic Charge Kristen Myrick Master Electrician Jenna Ferree Audio/Visual Supervisor Derek Dumais Props Master Alex Whiteway Costume Director Sue Griffin Asst Costume Director Sarah Grady Cutter/Draper Marcia Miller Hailey Costumers Lynn West, Abby Winship Production Interns Emily 14 Clarkson, Tommy Hawfield, Lauren Mistilis, Joey Sauthoff, Samantha Stephens, Nikki Wragg
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