Ria T. DiLullo and Gael Schaefer Photo by Evan Reed

The story that unfolds in this very well acted and effectively intimate production by The Skeleton Rep(resents), now playing at The Tank, where audience members are no more than three rows from the stage (all seats are general admission, priced on a sliding scale beginning at $23), is a familiar one. It's usually depicted as a passionate young woman obsessing over an emotionally distant male genius who feeds her just enough attention to keep her around.

But while reading the published 1941 through 1949 correspondence between the world famous artist Georgia O'Keeffe and the locally famous Native American arts advocate and rancher Maria Chabot, Gage saw in it a uniquely lesbian story about fighting against the erasure of being butch as a true identity.

"If the lesbian butch," she writes in the play's introduction, "were not so censored in history and in literature, Maria's experience with Georgia might be recognized as an archetypal dynamic of the lesbian butch who is rejected by a mother who cannot accommodate a gender-non-conforming daughter, and who finds herself compelled to seek out older women as romantic partners, mentors and surrogate mother figures."

History tells us that the pair were indeed introduced by anthropologist Wheelwright, a Boston upper cruster who relocated to the American Southwest and co-founded Santa Fe's Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, renamed The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian after her passing.

Chabot, in her mid-20s at the time of their meeting, managed Wheelwright's Los Luceros ranch, overseeing labor and supervising agriculture. O'Keeffe, in her early 50s, was a major player in the modern art scene and lived in Manhattan with her husband, photographer and exhibitor Alfred Stieglitz. Encouraged by Chabot, O'Keeffe started spending summers painting the beautiful New Mexico landscapes, often on camping trips arranged by the young woman who became, as she self-described, the handyman at her Ghost Ranch home.

Gage, who is billed as the piece's adaptor rather than playwright, has Wheelwright acting as our host and commentator for the venture, recognizing the older woman's subtle manipulations of her infatuated companion. Chabot and O'Keeffe are scripted by direct quotes from their correspondence while the latter would be spending winters back in New York putting together shows of her new work.

Director Andrew Coopman and Producing Artistic Director Ria T. DiLullo collaborate on a scenic design that nicely divides the small playing area into three sections for each character to occupy. Wheelwright, played with a lovely, relaxed charm by Haneen Arafat Murphy, spends much of the play lounging comfortably in a corner, sipping from her teacup as she observes Gael Schaefer's O'Keeffe, a model of prim aloofness primarily stationed upstage, standing behind her worktable, and DiLullo's sunny and open-hearted Chabot, whose home base is a stack of wooden crates.

The excellent character work by costume designer Hope Salvan has Wheelwright in a flowing pants and blouse combo accented by a long scarf and a sweater vest draped over her shoulders. Chabot is in unbuttoned flannel and work jeans, while O'Keeffe seems to have cocooned herself with a buttoned-up white collar.

There was never a financial agreement between them for Chabot's work, so the first time O'Keeffe sends her handyman a check, she responds, "I worked for you because I loved working for you. That's the only way I ever work at anything," adding, "I only hope you'll want me around you again sometime, somewhere, and that I can continue doing the inconsequential things I have done."

What the artist has her do, again without a formal compensation agreement, is organize the restoration of an adobe hacienda in Abiquiú, New Mexico for the artist's new residence–a landmark achievement which is now a historic part of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

While Gage never suggests that there was physical intimacy between the naïve young woman who reveled in the glory of nature and the older sophisticate who was more at home basking under urban limelight ("I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.), it becomes clear that Chabot feels comfortable expressing in her letters intimate feelings of rejection from her family and her own thoughts on self-identity.

Perhaps this was fine for O'Keeffe to read these thoughts in letters from across the country, or to hear them in person in the seclusion of rural New Mexico, but eventually the play approaches the issue of whether or not it goes beyond her comfort zone to carry on their relationship New York.

Early in the play, Wheelwright describes Chabot as, "Star-struck... Completely star-struck. That was a great weakness of hers. It kept her from seeing her own brilliance."

And maybe that's the lesson behind Georgia and the Butch, that the most tragic aspect of persisting with unrequited love is that it keeps those feelings from being lavished upon a more deserving lover–oneself.