Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back playwright Rex McGregor of New Zealand. Known for the zany wit of his pieces in Birds and Space, McGregor turns toward drama in Audacity. 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.
Read Skull Against the Sky in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Rex McGregor is a New Zealand playwright. His short plays have been produced on four continents from New York and London to Sydney and Chennai. He has a Master of Arts (Honors) in Languages and Literature from the University of Auckland and is currently a senior collections librarian at Auckland Libraries.