“Georgie & The Butch” Explored Relationship Between Woman and Famed Painter Georgia O’Keefe
Georgia O’Keefe, known as the “Mother of American Modernism,” was married to a man and never publicly identified as a lesbian, but a new play, told through letters, shed new light on an intimate nine year relationship with Maria Chabot in the 1940s.
| 08 Mar 2025 | 07:05
Georgia O’Keefe was married to Alfred Stieglitz in 1924 until his death in 1949 but from 1941 to 1949 she had an unusually close and at times explosive relationship with a woman in the Southwest, which was also the scene of some of her most vivid paintings over the years. (
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The painting, entitled Green and Blue Music, an example of O’Keefe’s abstract style, hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. (
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I confess I have always loved plays about letters. I even wrote one for kids, called “Dear Maudie.” That began as a book idea, but then I saw one of the many versions of the play “Love Letters,” and changed my choice of medium. There have been others over the years, including one based on the correspondence between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Can anything be more dramatic than hearing or reading what someone preferred to put in writing? And can it change our perception of the correspondents?
Well, New Yorkers now have a chance to answer those questions. Because a new work, called Georgie & The Butch, has just opened. It is being called a documentary play—these days also called Verbatims—meaning all words were actually spoken or written. These are from the letters between famed artist Georgia O’Keeffe and Native American advocate and rancher Maria Chabot. It turned out that they had an unusually close relationship, from 1941 to 1949.
Most of us likely associate the artist with photographer, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz. They resided mostly in New York. But she was clearly a woman in love with the West and Southwest, where she spent critical time working. Playwright Carolyn Gage says the production is intended to highlight an intense intimacy that she believes has been minimized, mischaracterized, or written out of O’Keeffe’s history. Reading the letters, (which were encapsulated in a book) one cannot dispute that the women spent many hours—and words—with one another. Their camping trips together, for example, resulted in the artist’s most iconic landscapes. The house and garden at Abiquiu, designed and built by Maria, became a tourist favorite and remains a testament to a young lesbian’s all-consuming devotion to her muse.
“They wrote a copious amount of letters,” says Gage, who lives in Maine. “I retain the integrity of them, I believe.” She smartly added a third role, based on an actual woman who knew both the players. “There are gaps between the letters, so she, as a sort of narrator, fills us in on who some people are, and how some very explosive fights between the two main women emerged. As one actual result of the book’s publication, Gage says, there were a lot of women who then headed West to reinvent themselves. “They lived in a free-range single women’s community, exploding out of their Victorian corsets.”
Still, the main relationship here is between an artist we perhaps thought we knew about, and a young woman who saw all the colors of the personal palette.
As the Tank notes in highlighting the short run play: “It is a relationship between an older, gender-non-conforming, fiercely independent artist and a young lesbian butch who was experiencing profound confusion about her identity and about her place in the world. Whatever imbalances and dysfunction there may have been between these incredibly strong-willed and visionary women, one cannot dispute that the camping trips with Maria resulted in some of Georgia’s most iconic landscapes, and that the house and garden at Abiquiu, designed and built by Maria, stand as a stunning testament to a young lesbian’s all-consuming devotion to her muse.”
“Maria did everything for Georgia,” says Gage. “She drove her, cooked for her, built the famous house. Was she a companion or a servant? They write about sleeping on a roof together, but when someone famous would come, Maria would sort of hide out like a servant.” Yes, it was clearly complicated.
Will audience members root for the famous name here? “I do think people will see Georgia in a very different light,” says the playwright. “I’ve been out for 40 years, and my goal here was to write Maria back into history. I saw this as a story about the woman behind the woman. Their dynamic is a painful truth to many of us in the lesbian community. I don’t like when one gets written out of the picture. “
That picture may be getting more interesting. “Georgie and the Butch” which opened on Feb. 25 at The Tank, 312 W. 36th St., runs through March 13.