Theater Review - The painted desert

Early in O’Keeffe: Paintings From the Faraway Nearby, a joint production between Theatre Gael and Theatre Decatur, iconic painter Georgia O’Keeffe (Josie Burgin Lawson) openly scoffs at the value of biographies and even questions the worth of biographers as human beings. If a lengthy, thoroughly researched book can fail to capture the essence of a person or her art, a two-hour biographical play can have an even harder time providing a complete portrait.

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Atlanta playwright Marki Shalloe seems well aware of these challenges and in O’Keeffe, a one-woman show presented as a one-sided monologue with the crotchety painter opening up to a potential biographer with uncharacteristic cooperation at her New Mexican home. O’Keeffe’s covers most frequently asked questions that audiences and art lovers may have about Georgia O’Keeffe, whose peppery personality compensates for the show’s occasional difficulties in generating dramatic tension.

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Lawson certainly fits one’s mental image of the painter, alternately severe and sprightly. O’Keeffe’s best moments involve Shalloe’s lovely descriptive writing of natural beauty, sensuous artwork and how they interrelate, and Lawson’s performance conveys the exultation O’Keeffe feels in her painting. The only discordant note is her habit of frequently chuckling to herself when she cracks wise, to the point where the character seems more self-amused than simply funny.

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Nevertheless, the actress brings out plenty of humor in the quirky biographical anecdotes, such as the painter laughing uncontrollably at the first sight of her first art-school nude model, or having a tantrum when her first New York gallery show is held, without her permission, under the name “Virginia O’Keeffe.” Shalloe demonstrates her characteristic pleasure in wordplay, such as O’Keeffe’s denial that she’s an easily-labeled “cubist” or an “impressionist:” “I’m an antagonist.”

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The play touches on more melancholy moments when the painter recalls her troubled marriage with renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz. She points out the mistake in letting him photograph her nude alongside her paintings was that her work was forever sexualized, even if her trademark oversized flowers weren’t (just) meant to be eroticized. The famous love affair sounds complex and fascinating, but the play’s format remains at a remove from the high emotions. If the monologue, life-in-retrospect format of O’Keeffe has limitations as drama, it still offers a lively evening of art appreciation.