About the Play:

Winner of the 1996 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award

The Faraway Nearby is a full-length comedic drama by John Murrell. Georgia O'Keeffe resigns herself to living alone on a sun-baked ranch, working on her stark, hypnotic paintings of flowers, cattle skulls, New Mexico desert and sky until she meets a stranger. The Faraway Nearby explores the relationship between the enigmatic American painter and feminist icon Georgia O'Keeffe and Juan Hamilton, the young man who became her friend and confidant late in her life.

The Faraway Nearby charts the relationship between the famous and famously reclusive artist Georgia O'Keefe and Juan Hamilton, who became her friend and soulmate in the 1970s, after the death of husband photographer Alfred Stieglitz, as she worked in the American Southwest. Georgia O'Keeffe flourished in the desert solitude where her creativity and vision thrived and was challenged by its dangerous energies, its desolate and hard beauty. But she resigns herself to an old age spent in the auburn and tawny light of her beloved Faraway mountains without the company of others until a stranger enters her life. Juan Hamilton, a young artist and handyman, befriends the elderly O'Keeffe, becoming the eyes for the almost-blind artist, and the cushion between her and the outside world. Hamilton remained O'Keeffe's companion for over a decade, and it is in the complexities of this friendship that John Murrell explores the uncompromising nature of the artist in this elegant and moving portrayal.

The Faraway Nearby began life as John Murrell's first original radio drama that aired on CBC in 1993. The stage version premiered in 1994 at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. It premiered in Canada in 1995 at The Belfry Theatre in Victoria and The Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and won Murrell his third Chalmers new play award in 1996.

Cast: 1 woman, 1 man

What people say:

"The writing is John Murrell at the top of his form, which is very high indeed. Tremendous stuff." — CBC Radio

"This is a beautiful play, richly imagined and surely the greatest achievement yet for Calgary author John Murrell. The Faraway Nearby ... is a feast of sensitive writing, eloquent without being dense or metaphorical and frequently reaching genuinely poetic levels." — The Toronto Star

About the Playwright:

John Murrell (1945-2019) is one of Canada's best known international playwrights. His dramas focus on real people and cultural icons. His plays have been translated into 15 languages and produced in more than 35 countries around the world. He headed the Banff Playwright's Colony and the Theatre Section of the Canada Council, was Associate Director of the Stratford Festival and Artistic Director of the Banff Centre for the Arts, and is a multiple Chalmers Award winner. For his enormous contributions to the arts in his adopted province and country, the Texas-born Murrell received the Alberta Order of Excellence and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.