08/21/2026
From the Albuquerque Journal -
https://www.abqjournal.com/.../new-play-explores.../3104525
A new play about artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, is coming to Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe on Friday, Aug. 28, through Sunday, Aug. 30. Co-written by and starring married creative partners Valerie and Kim Nuzzo, “The Deepest Yes: Stieglitz and O’Keeffe” also features original music by Finn Benham.
The story is told from the point of view of Stieglitz, whose sense of reality has been altered by his habitual use of barbiturates.
“He was addicted to a drug called Phanodorm that, at first, helped him sleep, and then didn’t,” Valerie Nuzzo said. “… So, we think of Georgia (O’Keeffe) in this play as his dreamtime Georgia. We’re in Alfred Stieglitz’s nightmare mind.”
By turning Stieglitz into an unreliable narrator, the Nuzzos were able to write with a greater sense of creative freedom, she said, and not simply present “a historical diorama.”
“There are a lot of people who are experts on Georgia. They know so much about her,” Valerie Nuzzo said. “But this is a poetic translation that comes through us, as artists, telling a kind of magical truth about our relationships with each other and how we love each other even though we’re messed up.”
The play contains frequent allusions to “Faust,” an early 19th century play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about a magician who makes a pact with the Devil.
“Alfred Stieglitz said often, ‘If you want to understand me, read “Faust.”’ So, we did,” Valerie Nuzzo said. “He really sold his soul for art and lost everything for it. So, we mushed them together. We smashed the ‘Faust’ story into the story of their love.”
Stieglitz and O’Keeffe had a passionate but often unhealthy relationship, she said, and “The Deepest Yes” does not shy away from exploring the dark side of that relationship.
“He was a very controlling person,” Nuzzo said. “… But, at the same time, Stieglitz was the thing that enabled O’Keeffe to continue making art and to see the worth in her art. In a way, it began her life (as an artist) as much as it was torturous for both of them to love each other.”
The Nuzzos spent over two years researching Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. Their research included reading over 20,000 of the couple’s letters.
“I have to be honest. About a year in, I said, ‘He’s horrible.
(Stieglitz) is a horrible person. What are we doing?’ But thank goodness (we kept going), because he’s not horrible. He’s just all too human,” she said.
A key to unlocking Stieglitz’s psychology was recognizing how much he was affected by being bullied as a child, Kim Nuzzo said.
“As a young boy of 9, he was sent off to boarding school, and he was there without protection. I don’t know if you know anything about boarding schools, but when you leave a group of younger boys alone with older boys, oftentimes it turns into a ‘Lord of the Flies’ story. Boys turn what may seem like initiation rites into torture,” Kim Nuzzo said. “… So, he’s reading ‘Faust’ at the age of 9 in German, and the story of ‘Faust,’ he said, gave him great comfort.”
“Faust” was one of the best known plays to emerge from the proto-romanticist Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe resonated with the Sturm und Drang notion that art should communicate strong emotions.
“They were all about feeling,” Valerie Nuzzo said. “It was like Sturm und Drang. (Stieglitz) said, ‘Can I photograph what I feel?’ And (O’Keeffe) asked, ‘Can I paint what I feel and do not understand?’ So, they had that in common.”
The Nuzzos have been writing about creative couples for over two decades, Valerie Nuzzo said, as part of their “Passionate Collaborators” series. A previous play in the series focused on the husband-and-wife comic duo of George Burns and Gracie Allen.
In “The Deepest Yes,” Valerie Nuzzo plays O’Keeffe and Kim Nuzzo plays Stieglitz. They both play other characters, as well, often with masks.
“I play six different characters, and Kim plays three, and we have, like, a festival of masks,” Valerie Nuzzo said. “I play the Deer Woman, and I use the deer head from one of (O’Keeffe’s) paintings. … And we have Faust and Mephistopholes. … It’s great fun to get to work with masks.”
Benham’s musical score for “The Deepest Yes” is contemporary and expressionistic but also references classical music, which was O’Keeffe’s favorite genre, and jazz, which Stieglitz loved.
“It’s not quite an electronic soundtrack, even though some of the sounds are associated with that,” Benham said. “I use a teeny-tiny pocket synthesizer, a Korg Ribbon synthesizer, that’s an analog synth. I also use a Roland Juno-DS for my main keyboard, so I have a huge library of sounds. … But the music itself explores jazz and classical territory … with some more harsh, almost industrial sounds paired with it.”
As troubled as O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s relationship was, Valerie Nuzzo said, the love the couple felt was real.
“We are all messed up in some way, and we love each other anyway,” she said. “(O’Keeffe) was completely devoted to (Stieglitz). At the end of our play, she quotes Goethe. She says, ‘A complete devotion and a sense of bliss must endure eternally.’ ‘Eternally,’ she says. ‘It would be despair if it were to end.’ So, it’s a deep love.”
Note: “The Deepest Yes” contains brief nudity and depictions of adult themes, including drug addiction, which may not be suitable for all audiences.
A new play explores the complicated, passionate relationship between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz — opening Aug. 28 at Teatro Paraguas, Santa Fe.
