For long-time theater-goers in Los Angeles, the current production, “Red,” at the Mark Taper Forum is like deja-vu mutation. We have Alfred Molina again on stage discussing art and color, this time in a 90-minute intermissionless play.

In 1999, Molina was one of three men in the original Broadway cast who was imported to the UCLA/James Doolittle Theatre in a production of the Tony Award-winning (for best play) “Art.” As the title suggests, the topic was art, but in Yasmina Reza’s 1994 French-language play (which was translated into English by Christopher Hampton) none of the three men were artists. Theoretically, the men were friends.  One man, the dermatologist Serge (Victor Garbor) has bought a painting that is various tones of white. His intellectually arrogant friend Marc (Alan Alda)is appalled but it’s not clear at first if this is because his friend has challenged his authority of matters intellectual and artistic or because he’s genuinely insulted that a white canvas can be called art. In the Broadway version of that production, Molina received a Tony Award nomination.

In the current show at the Mark Taper Forum, Molina is the artist and the color isn’t white, it’s “Red.” Molina plays Mark Rothko.  Rothko wasn’t born in America; he was born in Russia (Latvia) in 1903 and came to the United States when he was 13 and went under the name Marcus Rothkowitz.

As his name suggests, Rothko was Jewish. He was given a scholarship to Yale, but he left soon after it ran out during his second year. He moved to New York and became an artist. The play starts when Rothko had obviously changed his name (in 1940), his divorce from his first wife Edith Sachar in 1943, his fortunate meeting with his benefactor, noted collector Peggy Guffenheim, and his second marriage to Mary Ellen “Mell” Beistle. Rothko had already begun contemplating Matisse’s “Red Studio” and taken to his multiforms–blocks of color.

The conceit of John Logan’s play is that Rothko needs an assistant, who is the eager Ken (Glee’s Jonathan Groff). It’s 1958. Rothko is 55 and has been awarded a major mural commission by the the Joseph Seagram and Sons beverage company for their Park Avenue building’s restaurant, Four Seasons. History tells us this will end badly.

Ken comes dressed in a lovely brown suit, something more appropriate for an accountant than an artist. Rothko is in faded jeans and an olive green shirt, tucked in.  He asks Ken what he sees and Ken says, “Red.” This is like a red flag before a bull.

Just last month, I was in LACMA regarding a hexagonal painting that was entirely white and joking with my nephew that he could easily become an artist. Rothko’s painting are more dynamic than the painting in question at LACMA and the painting that might be described as a snowstorm in the play “Art.” The layered blocks of color seem to move, almost vibrate. you can have that sort of experience yourself on your own walls by painting two similar colors one on top of the other, particularly with a sponging technique. That’s wall painting and not art. That’s my opinion or art. You might have the same feeling, but you’ll want to overlook it and come into this play with an open mind although you might have fun snarking much in the same way that Alan Alda’s character did in “Art.”

At this point in time in art history, abstract expressionism wasn’t new. The more colorful and outrageous Jackson Pollock (whom the young assistant favors) is dead (1956). Molina’s Rothko calls it a long suicide. When you drink and drive and there’s that sense of danger that sometimes is even reveled in, particularly among men. Pollock was an alcoholic and drunk when he crashed his car, killing himself and one of his passengers.

What Ken finds is that Rothko isn’t concerned about him as a person, his friends, his family or his work. We rarely hear about Rothko’s personal life, but we do get to hear about his philosophy, including his affection for the philosopher Nietzsche. But Rothko has challenges coming his way. He is troubled by his success. He’s troubled by the rise of pop art which he considers not serious enough because of the “importance of seriousness.”

Yet this play foreshadowed this well enough. “The child has banished the father. Respect him but kill him,” Rothko tells Ken. When Ken questions the Seagram murals, the conceit here is that Ken spurred Rothko’s eventual rejection of the commission in which he returned his advance. In reality, Rothko completed 40 paintings in three months and after his family traveled to Europe, he and his wife returned to New York and dined in the restaurant. Those paintings were kept in storage until 1968 and now are in one of three museums: London’s Tate Modern, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The subject of suicide isn’t just a tangental remark to indicate Rothko’s opinion of a contemporary and there’s another moment, which I won’t spoil, that considers the topic. This isn’t idle chatter. Rothko would commit suicide and his own life of drinking, heavy smoking and little exercise or attention to his diet was also a kind of slow suicide that ended in a more direct approach a few months in 1970 after he separated from his second wife.

His assistant, a man named Oliver Steindecker found him. What happened later in the so-called Rothko Case adds a layer of sadness, revealing that even as an artist his so-called friends sought to exploit him and his work was actually more valuable than he knew.

Logan’s play doesn’t go past the Four Seasons project or even mention his family enough for you to realize how much he must have cared about him. This is a play about two men talking, arguing about the philosophy of art. What is art? What makes art? Who are real artists? What is meant by a single color, red or white?

On Broadway in 2010, with Molina and Eddie Redmayne, “Red” won six Tony Awards including Best Play. Even if you don’t like abstract expressionism, a term Rothko rejected, even disliking the term abstract painter, if you’re open to listening to a man pontificate about his art and, to a certain extent, to life, then this may make you appreciate abstract art or, at the very least, Rothko’s multiforms.

Director Michael Grandage, who won a Tony for Best Direction for his work here,  shows us the process of painting without boring us with smooth transitions despite a lot of paint being sloshed around (Christopher Oram won a Best Scenic Design Tony and Neil Austin won for lighting). This is a male-bonding, territorial growling match and Grandage shows us the young bull initially afraid to challenge the established male evolve slowly. That approach emphasizes the loneliness of Rothko because in his nine-to-five work ethic where he’s neither fatherly nor friendly, he’s utterly isolated himself from the joy of teaching as well as the joy of finding inspiration in his fellow man.

“Red” continues until Sept. 9 at the Mark Taper Forum. For more information, visit the Mark Taper Forum website.