A tomato, a rabbit nose, an albino’s eyes, ruby slippers, the Russian flag, China’s flag, persimmon, red light district, lava, scorpions, flame, passion, sun rise, Satan; what does Red mean to you?

In Alberta Theatre Project’s last act of the season, two men portray the artistic struggle of defining one’s craft against the tide of corporatism and a change in popular movement.

Red is a play written by Jeff Logan, for which the playwright received the 2010 Tony, as well as the Drama Desk, Outer Critic Circle and Drama League awards.

Set in the studio of famed abstract painter Mark Rothko, aptly played by Allan Morgan, the play centres on the dialogue between a cranky, loudmouthed and arrogant master and his devoted pupil, an assistant called Ken, under-played by Braden Griffiths.

The production is dialogue heavy, and script rich. While Morgan brings his character to life with robust voice and vibrato, his assistant falls to the stage’s wayside – too devoted, too needy, too rehearsed.

Indeed Morgan brings to his character the asset of a mutual artistic experience.

"Sweet Lord I guess I graduated from theatre school in 1984, so almost 30 years [I’ve been in theatre]," he says with gaiety.

Morgan is a graduate of Studio 58 in Vancouver and is a recurring face at Calgary’s Epcor Centre, Red being his seventh or eight show with the company since 1997.

In between his performances at ATP he freelances "all over the place" including stops at the National Art Centre in Ottawa, performances with Calgary Theatre Projects, and in Montreal.

In Red, Morgan tackles the role of an artist much loved but, perhaps, even more hated for his abstract canvases of murky painted rectangles – the types of painting that might make many of us say, "man I could do that!"

However in Red we learn that these swatches of colour, often vibrant and often red in hue, are like children to the painter; something he loves and is willing to lay down his honour for.

The play allows us a glimpse into a popular artists’ musings. While Rothko’s assistant is weak, he challenges the famed painter to face his own hypocrisy, which in turn prompts him to turn down ‘one of the largest commissions offered to a painter since the Sistine Chapel’.

In reality, Rothko was an "extraordinary volatile" New York abstract expressionist painter, "part of the same group of artists that came to rise with Jackson Pollock," Morgan says, though in the play he jests that the paintings of Rothko would have been cheaper than his contemporary’s.

"He’s an American painter but he’s originally from Russia. His family immigrated when he was 10."

Rothko took great inspiration from the artist Henri Matisse, specifically from his painting The Red Studio (L’Atelier Rouge). His biggest fear in life was that black, representing death, would swallow the red in life, or the joy de vivre.

"He became very famous for a style of painting," Morgan continues, explaining Rothko’s technique as incorporating "bricks of very intense colour."

Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of paintings for the Seagram Building, located in New York City’s Midtown Manhattan district, which were to hang amid the silver tinklings of diners at the Four Seasons Restaurant.

"It was one of the sort of statement buildings of the modernist times," Morgan says of the Park Avenue skyscraper.

The artist was offered $35,000 for the project. "Which is like $2-million now," Morgan says. "The most money that had ever been paid to an abstract artists for his art."

But Rothko, somehow swayed by the assistant he seems to have no greater regard for than he would a friend’s nuisance pet, withdraws at the last minute.

I’m no fan of Rothko myself, and so thought I would be unable to like the character. But Morgan offers a candid rendition that is indeed likable. He comes across as an artist who realises that his life’s work – his greatest passions – are being hung over the mantles of Manhattan’s society ladies’ homes; that they are being used as furniture accents, breakfast nook décor, status symbols, or "anything but what they are."

"This is the time of Andy Warhol and the beginning of pop art," Morgan explains. Another variable in Rothko’s crumbling sense of artistic identity.

"Those [commissioned] murals now live in various museums in the world," he says, adding that while performing in London, England he was fortunate enough to see them at a showing in the Tate Modern.

"[Red is] a funny and a really great discussion about art, and about death, and about mortality, and about living," Morgan says. "An idea driven play."

He hopes the show will rouse discussion on human responsibility to art.

"How do we continue to make art as we get older or does it fade away from us?" he says.  "All of us think, did I do enough? When we start to sort of look back, at my age, we think Jesus Christ, did I do enough?"