"Red," the Tony Award-winning play by John Logan opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Rather than attempting to explain why Mark Rothko's paintings are meaningful — or trying to duplicate the magic that happened when they were painted — the sensible drama shows two people — Rothko (played by Alfred Molina) and his studio assistant Ken (played by Jonathan Groff) — arguing over a roomful of canvases, some finished, some works in progress. The Russian-born painter, who died in 1970, was a notoriously slow worker , known to ponder his expansive abstractions for months, sometimes years, before allowing them to leave his studio. As strong-headed as every other member of the New York School — which put American art on the map after World War II — he brought a profound sense of moral purpose to painting. "The challenge," Logan says of doing a play about a great artist, "is pretension. The challenge is pompousness. The challenge is 'because I am an artist I will treat my profession in an elevated way, as if it's somehow floating above the clouds...'" The play strips away sentimental myths about artistic integrity. Despite our tendency to separate style from substance, Logan does not gloss over Rothko's showmanship: "You walk into that room [at the Tate Modern, where the Seagram Murals hang]. He is like the P.T. Barnum of the Abstract Expressionists. It is all theater. It is all drama. It is completely staged." "Red" also debunks myths about the creative process. "The mechanics of what we do," Molina says, "is really rather dull. The notion that there is some kind of process, some kind of magical alchemical formula is nonsense.