Skull Against the Sky
a short play about Georgia O'Keeffe in 1933
After suffering a nervous breakdown, Georgia O’Keeffe hasn’t done any painting in over a year. While recuperating at her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s family home at Lake George, she finds love and laughter in the company of an old friend, Jean Toomer. But is this enough for her?
CHARACTERS
Female
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, artist, aged 46
Male
JEAN TOOMER, writer, mixed race, aged 38
ALFRED STIEGLITZ, photographer and art promoter, aged 69
SETTING
Oaklawn, Lake George, New York
TIME
Saturday night, December 23, 1933
CHARACTERS
Female
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, artist, aged 46
Male
JEAN TOOMER, writer, mixed race, aged 38
ALFRED STIEGLITZ, photographer and art promoter, aged 69
SETTING
Oaklawn, Lake George, New York
TIME
Saturday night, December 23, 1933
Published in Synkroniciti, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 2026: Audacity
Review by Katherine McDaniel
"Skull Against the Sky examines Georgia O’Keeffe’s recovery from a mental and creative collapse following her abandonment of a major commission for Radio City Music Hall. For more than a year she set down her brushes.Her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who had long acted as a gatekeeper and manager of her work, openly began an affair with one of his admirers. He also encouraged O’Keeffe’s liaison with family friend and writer Jean Toomer—a gesture that appears permissive on the surface but reveals deeper complications beneath. McGregor imagines a private conversation among the three at the Stieglitz family home in upstate New York, a setting charged with creative electricity and uneasy intimacy.
“JEAN: She’s never mentioned her breakdown. Must have been horrible for her.
ALFRED: I saw it coming. Did everything in my power to stop it.
JEAN: Did you now?
ALFRED: I’ve never felt so helpless. There was absolutely nothing I could do.
JEAN: Did you consider giving up Dorothy?”
What unfolds is a study in personal and creative autonomy—for artists, for women, and for people of mixed race like Toomer, whose position neither O’Keeffe nor Stieglitz fully grasps. Stieglitz’s motives are layered: part genuine concern, part self‑interest, part patriarchal entitlement. He recognizes the earning potential of O’Keeffe’s work and the prestige her genius confers upon his name. O’Keeffe struggles to reclaim her artistic voice and agency. Toomer stands at the intersection of admiration, marginalization, and self‑protection, his identity misunderstood by his friends.
No one in this triangle is innocent. McGregor’s drama exposes the messy, unvarnished truth: creative brilliance often coexists with ego, desire, blindness, and need. Skull Against the Sky invites us to witness the audacity required not only to create, but to reclaim one’s creative life from those who would shape it for personal gain."
(online reading)
P.A.G.E.S.
New York, NY
June 21, 2022
Cast: Miriam Kulick (Georgia), Martin Pfefferkorn (Alfred), Michael Blizzard (Jean)
P.A.G.E.S.
New York, NY
June 21, 2022
Cast: Miriam Kulick (Georgia), Martin Pfefferkorn (Alfred), Michael Blizzard (Jean)
Michael Blizzard (Jean), Miriam Kulick (Georgia) and Martin Pfefferkorn (Alfred)
New Play Festival
Jersey City Theater Center
Jersey City, New Jersey
May 20, 2021
Cast: Marguerite Stimpson (Georgia), Sturgis Warner (Alfred), Ruffin Prentiss III (Jean)
Directed by Mark Cirnigliaro
Jersey City Theater Center
Jersey City, New Jersey
May 20, 2021
Cast: Marguerite Stimpson (Georgia), Sturgis Warner (Alfred), Ruffin Prentiss III (Jean)
Directed by Mark Cirnigliaro
Thyson Halley (sign language interpreter), Ruffin Prentiss III (Jean), Sturgis Warner (Alfred) and Marguerite Stimpson (Georgia)