What gives art value? This is the central question of Twarkowski’s Rothko, a dazzling multimedia epic which blends live performance, live to film recording, an extravagant set, and overwhelming encompassing music. Positioned as a documentary, but in overlapping timelines, the play digs into the historical moment when a Rothko was sold posthumously at a record fee, but then identified as a fraud, actually made by someone in China. The core event is surrounded by its past and future, layering a single place — the restaurant frequented by Rothko and his contemporaries in New York — with the current reflective documentary moment, the moment itself, and Rothko himself.
It would be challenging to say there is a narrative here (although there are elements of story), but rather the production is an argument. We see layers of “real” and “fake”, authentic and inauthentic, high art and workaday. They overlap and bump into one another. The text at times is scenes, but at others is documentary, while still others arguments, almost ted talks.
This is compelling, deeply intellectual work — and yet it didn’t feel like a lesson. The pace and inventiveness of the way the piece moves, both physically and intellectually, is blistering, relentless. Absolutely incredible, and its questions are still cropping up in my mind, even weeks later.