Georgia and the Butch

Tweet

Georgia & the Butch is a new play chronicling the decade-long relationship between celebrated painter Georgia O’Keefe and her younger lover Maria Chabot. Evoking A R. Gurney’s Love Letters, Carolyn Gage’s adapted script is drawn primarily from the two’s written correspondence throughout the 1940s. The unlikely pair was introduced by a mutual friend, Mary Cabot Wainwright (Haneen Arafat Murphy), who serves as a narrator for the show, providing context to the letters themselves. The pair’s relationship lasted through the decade as Chabot (Ria T. DiLullo) oversaw the construction of O’Keefe’s (Gael Schaefer) famous residence in Abiquiú, New Mexico. Shortly afterwords, their relationship ended bitterly.

Andrew Coopman’s directing enhances the distance inherent to the play’s format, with Chabot and O’Keefe rarely even looking directly at each other as they read their letters on stage. The two spent summers together regularly (especially in the first half of the decade), but we only see them apart through their correspondence. The minimalist set (handled by director Coopman and actor/artistic director DiLullo) emphasizes the two worlds the women inhabit, with O’Keefe’s paintings and leather briefcase contrasting with Chabot’s gas-powered lantern and beat-up notebook. Both are artists, but only one of them gets here work displayed in galleries.

Costume designer Hope Salvan turns Gael Schaefer into the spitting image of the famous painter in her breezy dress shirts, dark slacks and ever-present hat. Chabot, by contrast, is given flannel and jeans to reflect her blue collar occupation. Lighting designer Jonathan Cottle gives Chabot far softer light than O’Keefe, with the former delivering her lonely soliloquies in intimate blues to responses from her brightly-lit object of desire.

Schaeffer’s O’Keefe is aloof to the point of being doddering. Speaking in an over-exaggerated manner, Georgia is imbued with an almost-gleeful callousness. It’s both humorous and tragic to watch Maria pour her heart out only to be met with Georgia’s absentminded ponderings about furniture. The deliberate theatricality of it all sometimes serves to heighten the drama, but sometimes it can blunt any emotional impact.

DiLullo’s turn as Maria Chabot is captivating – building the Abiquiú house is an arduous task, but the real sisyphean endeavor is winning the painter’s affection. Even when her letters are discussing dry business matters, DiLullo injects a degree of longing into the prose – like she’s always looking for the right words to charm Georgia into reciprocating her affections. There’s an intensity to her affection, but the play spends little time directly grappling with the question of why. Maria’s pain is captivating, yet one struggles to grasp what she saw in O’Keefe at all.

The play’s title, Georgia and the Butch, is fitting. Only O’Keefe is named, while Maria Chabot is simply “the butch,” reflecting both how she devoted herself to O’Keefe completely (to the point of neglecting herself) but also the way she’s often written out of O’Keefe’s biography. Gage brings Chabot to the center of the narrative. By nature of the play’s format, the audience is deliberately not privy to the pair’s private moments. Instead, we are left to ponder their time apart.

Georgia and The Butch (through March 12, 2025)

The Skeleton Rep(resents)

The Tank, 312 W. 36th St, New York, NY, 10018

For tickets, call 212-563-6269 or visit: https://thetanknyc.org/calendar-1/2025/2/25/georgia-and-the-butch

Running time: 90 minutes without an intermission