Natalie Mosco first felt the impact of artist Georgia O’Keeffe at a Chicago art exhibit during a flight layover. In admiration, she wrote and starred Off-Broadway in “A Brush With Georgia O’Keeffe.” Now her play directed by Robert Kalfin makes its Washington debut at the Smithsonian American Arts Museum in conjunction with the exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities.”
“I was completely blown away by her paintings and realized there was a wonderful story behind this woman who ordered that her personal papers and letters be released in tantalizing dribbles after her death,” Mosco says. “She lived life on knife edge, realizing that she might fall off. She had an overwhelming need to express herself because there were so many things against her.
“My script covers the obstacles she had to surmount to become a survivor and heroine of women. As a child, she was abused. Her mother died of tuberculosis for lack of food money. She lost her hair to typhoid, suffered from eye strain and in the end went blind from macular degeneration.”
Mosco’s play expressing O’Keeffe’s emotional responses channeled through nature ties in perfectly with the exhibit. Each painting displayed on stage by integrated slide images is charged by her personal experiences. For instance, the thin white line in “Black Abstraction” represents the operating room skylight at her final moment of consciousness before the removal of a cancerous lump. An Ansel Adams photograph captures her earthiness as she tosses a taunting, come-hither look to dude wrangler Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona.
After making her theatrical debut as the dance captain in the original New York cast of “Hair,” Mosco toured the world choreographing various productions of the musical. She eventually settled in Australia where she wrote, choreographed and produced many shows, appeared regularly on Australian TV and founded Shakespeare Globe, Australia.
Upon returning to her native New York, she was in the all-star, Broadway-bound revival of “Follies” at the Paper Mill Playhouse before accepting a long-running and lucrative, albeit bizarre, acting role for a pharmaceutical company. Outfitted as a doctor, complete with bogus medical school diplomas on the walls of an office near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, she taught their sales reps how to persuade real doctors to prescribe the company’s products for patients.
Now that “A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe” has proved commercially successful and fulfilled Mosco’s dissertation requirements for a doctorate at the University of Sydney, she hopes it will be snapped up by regional and college theaters.
“This Smithsonian production is a simplified, but more arresting, version of the Broadway show.” she says. “I’m joined on stage by Davis Lloyd Walters as the men and Virginia Roncetti as the women who figured in Georgia’s life. We capture the impact of her paintings in words.”
If you go
Playwright/actress Natalie Mosco stars in the Washington premiere of “A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe,” a new play presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities,” at 3 p.m Saturday
* Venue: McEvoy Auditorium, Lower Level, Smithsonian American Arts Museum
* Tickets: $25 general admission and $20 Smithsonian Resident Associate Members
* More info: 202-633-8490; [email protected]
