In a vast workshop in Dundas, Ont., amid large, brightly painted panels and risers, actor Jim Mezon targets a canvas with a broad brush. There’s already a trail of red dots spattered like blood across the top of his shaved head as he fires off a round of black. This time, the paint flies through the air safely clear of his face and hits the canvas with a splat. He immediately attacks with his brush, spreading it up and down.

Mezon, who loves art but has never previously attempted to paint, is learning how the great American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko created his huge, luminescent and mystically hovering rectangles of colour. The veteran Shaw Festival actor is playing the artist in Red, John Logan’s hit play about Rothko, which opens at Toronto’s Canadian Stage Thursday before moving to Vancouver and Edmonton in 2012.