Consider three paintings by the great American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. The first, from 1929, is called "Black Cross, New Mexico," and shows a landscape of rolling hills — or are they sand dunes? — almost entirely obscured by a black cross in the foreground that's as uncompromisingly rectilinear as the hills are undulating and round. Is there a critique of Christianity in the blackness of the cross and how it keeps us from seeing the horizon beyond the hills? Here's another painting, this one from 1930: It's called "Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV," and though it clearly, on one level, is just a close-up of a flower, on another it's an almost obscene depiction of a penis-like bulb poised at the entrance of the long white slit between two thick black lips. You'd have to be blind not to see the sexuality of the painting. Now one last painting, this time from 1935: "Ram's Head, White-Hollyhock-Hills" is its name. Suspended in the air, hovering over low hills dotted by trees, is the grotesquely detailed skull of a ram; right beside it is a floating flower. Why a skull, why the flower? Why the rain clouds over so much of the picture? All right, call it surrealism, but what sense can we make of the floating, sun-bleached ram's head and the blooming hollyhock?
I walked into The Studio@620 the other evening with these sorts of questions on my mind. After all, the play I was going to was called A Conversation with Georgia O'Keeffe, and I thought it reasonable to expect some answers. I was even enthusiastic: Here was a real chance to learn of the mind behind these famous icons, to find out what really motivated these famous shapes of death and sex, of ominous irises and sun-dried animal bones. A one-woman show "drawn from the artist's journals" was sure to be an illuminating experience.
Or not.
Conversation, written by Constance Congdon and coproduced by Stageworks, is in fact an insistently shallow, blandly selective tour of O'Keeffe's life that tells you next to nothing about the paintings and little more about how she spent her most important days and nights.
It starts with O'Keeffe denying that sex has anything to do with her paintings — "So we got that subject matter out of the way, I hope" — and goes on to ignore the poverty of her childhood, the real sources of her inspiration, the infidelity of her great love (and the nervous breakdown that followed), as well as her own cruelty in her final years.
The problem is apparently that Congdon fixed solely on O'Keeffe's memoirs — memoirs that one biographer calls "idealized" — and ignored the unlikelihood of such controversial paintings emerging from such an insipid narrative. Result: If, like me, you're tantalized by O'Keeffe's art and eager to know more about it, don't expect answers from this misleading Conversation. It's friendly enough, but so short on real truth that it's finally boring. If this were all there were to O'Keeffe, those wonderful paintings could never have existed.
What Conversation does give us is Georgia O'Keeffe — played capably by Midge Mamatas — portraying herself as an American original, someone who one day looked into herself, saw what was special and then transferred that uniqueness onto hundreds of waiting canvases. Dressed mostly in black (costume by Robin New), and on a set composed of little more than a wooden chair, a platform and a rug (set by Keith Arsenault), O'Keeffe tells us of a few happy childhood memories, of her natural instinct to draw and paint, and of a few classes she happened to take.
Then she meets Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallery owner who admires her work and eventually exhibits some without her permission. O'Keeffe teaches and paints out West, and only shows up in New York at the last moment to see her first solo show in Stieglitz's gallery. She goes back to Texas, but Stieglitz summons her east; the two become lovers and eventually marry. She paints various masterpieces and then decides (for no apparent reason) to relocate to New Mexico.
And so on.
What's missing from this rosy narrative? Well, O'Keeffe's childhood wasn't golden — it was troubled by her parents' unhappy marriage and her father's financial losses. She wasn't her own fully formed artistic inspiration, but was much influenced by the theories of artist Arthur Wesley Dow and the photographs of Paul Strand, with whom she had a romance. The relationship with Stieglitz was far from perfect: After a time, he strayed into the bed of a certain Dorothy Norman, and his long affair with her resulted in O'Keeffe's nervous breakdown and two months in a psychiatric hospital.
And so on.
The whitewash wouldn't be so very troubling if Congdon at least gave us some clues as to the source of those sun-bleached skulls, those pornographic flowers. But what she offers us is almost embarrassing in its insufficiency. For example, about those flowers: "If I were a botanist, I would paint them the way they are in nature — delicate and small. But I'm not a botanist. So I paint a flower the way I see it — big— so big that everyone will stop and look at it. So big that even a New Yorker will see it." At least Anna Brennen's direction is unobjectionable, and the slide projections of the paintings are far more provocative than anything O'Keeffe says about them.
Kudos to The Studio@620 for bringing a new theater space to the Tampa Bay area. I look forward to seeing many challenging plays there.
And that floating ram's skull? It's still a mystery to me. Something about death and beauty and the American West. Something about the supernatural.
For more information, don't turn to this Conversation.
This article appears in Apr 11-17, 2007.