First, let's shoo away the pedantic pikers who'd use Red (a 2009 play about the avuncular relationship between prickly color- field painter Mark Rothko and his jejune fictional assistant Ken) as a launching pad for their own opinions about Rothko and his legacy. John Logan wrote a play, not a PhD thesis, and we are not his dissertation committee.

That said, Red is an interesting failure. Rothko (Denis Arndt), a famous, aging, and cranky painter, hires a young assistant (Connor Toms). Rothko works from 9 to 5—"just like bankers"—and is too fixated on his work to get out much. Ken, on the other hand, craves action, the heat and light of late-1950s New York. From this premise, you can deduce most of the conversations.

Some moments painfully flatten Red's characters, as when Ken, an orphan, recounts the death of his parents. He kneels downstage and speaks his painful childhood memory with the hot, false anguish of television melodrama. The fault lies partly with the playwright, whose direction to Ken at the beginning of the scene says "reliving it." The rest of the fault lies with director Richard E. T. White for not ignoring the playwright. In another scene, after the color red has been established as the hue of vitality and black as the hue of death, Rothko portentously intones: "There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend... one day, the black will swallow the red."

But other bits between the young man and the old man are delicate and lovely, as when they prime a large canvas with large brushes, working in concert, the one intuitively crouching down while the other reaches up and over. It is painting—er, priming—as dance, the master and the assistant in a moment of the action Ken desires. And Arndt (balding, graying, slightly stooped but full of fury) delivers Rothko's best lines with a sharp slice. After Ken tries to cheaply overlay Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy on Rothko and Pollock, the former snarls back: "You think human beings can be divided up so neatly into character types? You think the multifarious complexities and nuances of the psyche—evolving through countless generations, perverted and demented through social neurosis and personal anguish, molded by faith and lack of faith—can really be so goddamn simple?... You embarrass yourself. Think more."

That's a lesson all of us, especially us pedantic pikers, could learn from. recommended