Georgia and the Butch at New Mexico Actors Lab

New Mexico Actors Lab opens its Tenth Anniversary 2024 Fall Season with the world premiere of Carolyn Gage’s Georgia and the Butch, directed by Robert Benedetti as a staged reading performed by Suzanne Lederer, Kat Sawyer, and Mary Beth Lindsey.  This dramatic adaptation, which opens on Friday, August 9, and runs through Sunday, August 18, uses excerpts from the letters between Maria Chabot, a young, gender-non-conforming lesbian and the renowned artist Georgia O'Keeffe, with additional narration by their mutual friend, museum founder Mary Wheelwright.

All performances will be held at NMAL’s permanent home, the Lab Theater, located at 1213 Parkway Drive in Santa Fe – one block from Meow Wolf. Evening performances Thursday through Saturday begin at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday performances begin at 2 p.m. A talkback session will be held after the show on Sunday, August 18. 

Tickets are now on sale at the NMAL website, www.nmactorslab.com or at www.tix.com/ticket-sales/NMActorsLab/6585. Individual tickets are $35. Students as well as workers in the food and beverage industry and in theater receive a $15 discounted rate. 

Georgia O’Keeffe is, of course, known internationally and to New Mexicans in particular, as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century.  In the summer of 1929, she made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in her art. For the next two decades she spent most summers living and working in New Mexico.  During this time, she met anthropologist Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who founded what is today the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. 

Wheelwright in turn, introduced O’Keeffe to Maria Chabot, an accomplished photographer. Maria subsequently spent summers with O’Keefe at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu and took “Women Who Rode Away,” the iconic photograph of O’Keeffe riding off behind a motorcycle driver.  A powerful non-conforming lesbian decades ahead of her time, Maria was instrumental in reviving the moribund Santa Fe Indian Market. O’Keeffe also hired her to redesign and renovate the crumbling adobe structure in Abiquiu that eventually became O’Keeffe’s permanent home and is now a national landmark. She also arranged Georgia’s camping trips and accompanied the artist on the plein air excursions that produced some of O’Keeffe’s most famous work.

Director Benedetti notes, “The letters between these two powerful women revealed a depth of relationship that has been previously unknown, a surprising and complex side of Georgia. Playwright Gage has expertly arranged the letters, and has added a contextual narration by Mary Wheelwright, who was a close friend of both women (in fact, Mary left the land at her Los Luceros ranch to Maria in her will). Mary herself deserves to be better known beyond the museum she founded; she was, in fact, an accomplished anthropologist. She is the perfect hostess and guide for the revelations of the letters.”

After the seven performances in Santa Fe, the reading performance will tour to the Taos Art Center on Thursday, August 29, at 7 p.m., and then to the Las Cruces Community Theater on Saturday, August 31, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.