criticalrant.com Alexandra Bonifield

Gazing through the bones...O'Keeffe!

One person staged performances based on “the lives of famous people” tend to fall into two categories: the hopeless – fawning, reverential hero worship, or the excruciating – tedious, linear depiction focused on minutiae, ignoring universal relevance. Lucinda McDermott’s one woman show “O’Keeffe!”, featuring  Carolyn Wickwire, escapes both pitfalls. Surprisingly fresh and dynamic, the play revels the often-conflicted inner life and feelings of the world famous artist and leaves her well-known body of work well enough alone. Not one Kinko’s-enlarged, blurred print nor one clumsily painted attempt at reproduction sullies the performance. It’s an austere production, minimalist in setting, lights and props, allowing the ideas, dreams and perspectives of Georgia O’Keeffe, the woman, to flow through Wickwire’s nimble expressions as a masterful, versatile performance artist. Drawing from her voluminous correspondence, interviews and biographies, McDermott introduces O’Keeffe as a ghost, returned to speak directly to an audience, The performance offers a pleasing, reflective perspective on the internal life of this unique, ambitious, honest, creative woman.

Carolyn Wickwire as Georgia O'Keeffe

Wickwire transforms herself as she externalizes O’Keeffe’s personal world, through direct address or interactive scene recreation. Her Georgia charms and challenges, instructs and admonishes, seduces and engages the audience, always brutally honest and totally committed to her art and world-class Alfred Stieglitz, her life partner, whom she affectionately calls “Old Crow”. “Is it me, or is it Stieglitz?” she ponders repeatedly, regarding her imagined work and the fame it engendered. She fades away at the end into her “big, wide, quiet space”, murmuring gently, “Keep a little something for yourself, as well” to the entranced audience. Surely artist Georgia O’Keeffe would approve. Directed with focused restraint by Ouida White. Costumes by Aaron Patrick Turner. Co-produced and designed by Dennis West.

“O’Keeffe!” concludes today April 22, at Theatre Three’s downstairs space Theatre Too. Watch for other regional and national performance bookings. For tickets, contact the box office at Theatre Three, 214/871-3300. http://www.flowerandbone.com

Feature article about production: https://criticalrant.com/2012/04/19/where-her-spirit-walks-on-okeeffe-at-theatre-too/

Blue Logic Photos

Review also posted on media partner TheaterJones.com