Juan Echanove, directs and stars with nerve function of John Logan, winner of six Tony awards. Seconded by Ricardo Gómez, the actor delves into the tortured mind of this genius of abstract expressionism.
At the end of the 50s, Mark Rothko received one of those orders that serve to consecrate to an artist. He was paid $ 35,000, some two million euros today, so that pintase a few murals that decorasen (and here the word is important so painful) the Four Seasons restaurant of the Seagram Building, built by Mies van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson. “I’m going to create something that would remove the appetite those sons of a bitch”, he went on to say. However, he ended up returning the check after working in a series of huge canvases that ended up disseminated in various art galleries in the world. Still missing a decade for this Russian jew, depressing and great, to end his life with a cocktail of alcohol and barbiturates in 1970.
The playwright californian Josh Logan, candidate for the Oscar for the script of Gladiator (Ridley Scott) and The aviator (Martin Scorsese), explores in Red springs mental Rothko, the crossroads staff, during the time that he was working for this ambitious commission. What does through her relationship with a young assistant, Ken, who acts as the student and sparring partner of the genius of abstract expressionism.
The feature, written in 2009, he took six awards Tonys on Broadway, including Best Play, after its initial success in the West End. Almost a decade after its premiere at the Tame Waehouse, arrives in Spain, directed and starring Juan Echanove, who has completed the work begun by Gerardo Vera, with whom he collaborated on his latest Dreams, of Quevedo, and The idiot, Dostoyevsky. The health problems made the veteran director of August I had to give a mount that you would like ring to the finger.
Despite the fact that Echanove has hardly any experience in the direction (The assembly of the women who presented at the Festival of Merida was more a funny to the greater glory of Lolita that a serious attempt to approach to Aristophanes), the text of Logan is so accurate that the actor will simply follow that score millimetric to sign up an excellent function.
In Red, with a version of José Luis Collado, Logan x-ray, the liturgy of creation, it captures the desasosgante fear of the artist, his insecurity and frustration. It also speaks of how an author can end up become a commodity, how the new generations should be buried to their teachers (If Rothko boasts of having finished with cubism, it feared that the lightness of pop art bury his legacy), of the tensions between the dionysian and the apollonian, but, above all, and this is what makes the work transcend the lessons of art to become painfully human, of a man who confronts his mortality and the meaning of his existence. The mark you will leave. And here gives the same thing that the protagonist paint pictures or to scrub stairs. When Echanove expressed his fear that “the black gulp red”, all tremble. That trip colour is the essence of the mount.
In the function, Rothko, by the mouth of Echanove says that “each brushstroke should be a tragedy”. Logan applied the same in each replica. Nothing is incidental or superfluous. Each sentence has a meaning and, often, an idea hits to the viewer. “Painting is above all to think”. Red could be too dialectical (if the text is French, sure that Flotats I had ridden for years) however, Echanove prints a nerve and a humanity to the role that makes her throb as the colors of Rothko.
For this mounting, the veteran actor features as an accomplice with Ricardo Gómez, an actor that has seen him grow (literally) in Tell me. He is the incarnation of Ken, the young assistant. While Rothko is a man of volcanic, irascible and choleric. Ken withstands, receives the knocks and waits for his moment.
an actor torrential volcanic and as Echanove, the role of the painter fits you perfectly. Perhaps start the function with too much momentum, even histrionic (his Rothko does not seem so far removed from his Karamazov at some point). But you know give it a humanity that disarms and moves, primarily, in the third end of the assembly when the emotions have caught temperature. It is the time in which falls the mask and the genius presumptuous shows their contradiction, their frustration, their fear. When it becomes human.
Ricardo Gomez already showed in Mammón that is one of the best actors of his generation and who likes to take risks. Here is an involved role in how much that Rothko is the center of the story, he should be patient and listen to his brilliant monologues on the art. But Logan gives a wound to his character and Gómez know to take advantage of that vulnerability. When it is your turn to speak you release the anger accumulated in balance, looking for the damage because he also must kill the father. It is a composition that knows how to measure well. It would be easy to succumb to a monster like Echanove and it does not.
The Teatro Calderón in Vallodolid provided a standing ovation to both actors, their chemistry is fundamental so that the red is not swallowed up by the black. The function will arrive at the Teatro Español in Madrid on the 29th of November.
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