Photo by Rich Maciejewski, Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Mary Nohl Art Environment (site view, exterior, 2021), Fox Point, WI, c. 1960–2001
Mary Nohl Art Environment (site view, exterior, 2021), Fox Point, WI, c. 1960–2001
Everyone called it the “Witch’s House,” a name that signified suspicion and incomprehension. The Fox Point home on a shady byway was surrounded by the art created by its owner, Mary Nohl. She covered the grounds with concrete Easter Island faces and hung the trees with carved wooden heads. Driving by to gawk was a rite of passage for Milwaukee high school kids. The more malicious among them prompted Nohl to surround her property with chain link topped by barbed wire coils.
After Nohl’s death in 2001, the beach front Witch’s House was preserved by the Kohler Foundation and Sheboygan’s John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Nohl remains the subject of curiosity and legend. The play inspired by her, Maybe We’ll Fly, composed over a 12-year span by Milwaukee’s Marie Kohler (Boswell), finally debuts this month at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.
“I did meet her in the ‘90s,” Kohler recalls. “She was very old, bright-eyed and curious about who we were.” Nohl presented her visitors with handmade vases. She was an artist working in large and small forms, a ceramicist and painter as well as a sculptor. No surprise: Kohler’s visit in the ‘90s wasn’t the first time she saw the Witch’s House. She had driven past more than once with her daughters on family excursions to see Nohl’s beautifully idiosyncratic yard.
Maybe We’ll Fly evolved significantly after Kohler workshopped it at the Milwaukee Rep in 2016. Earlier iterations concentrated on Nohl as an artist in conflict with her community. The neighbors were upset over the car traffic drawn by the Witch’s House and efforts were afoot to force her to move. Then came the vandals, young and callow, who found sport in tearing the arm from a statue or stealing a souvenir from Nohl’s yard. The large cast Kohler imagined for earlier versions of the play was peeled back to four. “It’s a one-woman play with four females,” Kohler says, hesitant to issue any spoilers.
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Reimagining Nohl’s Life
Photo Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Mary Nohl at her lake cottage environment (site view, exterior, 1997), Fox Point, WI, c. 1960–2001
Mary Nohl at her lake cottage environment (site view, exterior, 1997), Fox Point, WI, c. 1960–2001
Kohler explains that in Maybe We’ll Fly, Nohl “is examining her life at its end. The perspective is on what she’s accomplished as a human being and an artist. She’s frustrated and doesn’t know if her work will survive her. It’s a fictional reimagining, not a documentary.”
Maybe We’ll Fly took form in collaboration with Tony-nominated composer Josh Schmidt. Along with a sound design that endows the production with the aural dimension of Nohl’s property, the lake lapping at the shore and the wind through the branches and chimes, Schmidt added songs. “Josh has a strong perspective on this being a play with music as opposed to a musical,” Kohler says, “The songs don’t directly derive from the dialogue but are an emotional reflection.” A cellist will solo during some moments.
Nohl’s life was remarkable, marked by her upbringing in an affluent but parsimonious family. “Her father didn’t waste anything. Mary inherited that,” Kohler says. During the final decades of her life, Nohl lived in and transformed the Fox Point cottage she inherited, the place where her family retreated in summer from the heat of the big city. “She never bought anything she could make,” Kohler continues. “She didn’t buy new clothes for decades.” Nohl made art from driftwood and stones. She even made paintbrushes from her own hair.
Outsider Artist?
Nohl graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and traveled widely in younger years before settling into hermitude. “Everywhere she went she made sketches,” that inspired her art, Kohler says. While studying in Chicago, she made many trips to the city’s Field Museum of Natural History to study the collection of non-Western art. She also expressed an affinity with the absurdism of Dada and the dreamscapes of Surrealism. Although her education might preclude her from the ranks of outsider artists, Kohler argues, “She was such an outlier, such an outsider. She worked outside the art market and was completely non-commercial. She had no interest in selling art. And no one else made stuff that looked like hers.”
Maybe We’ll Fly will be directed by Chicago’s Elizabeth Margolius, familiar to Milwaukee theatergoers from her work at Renaissance Theaterworks. Kohler calls her “brilliant,” adding that she “will help embody this reflection on [Nohl’s] life’s work and life’s end—quite a journey.”
Who was Mary Nohl? Why a play about her? “What drew me to her was her intense commitment to living and making what she wanted. She had a strong impulse against conformity. She would not be pushed around,” Kohler explains. “I’ve weaved biographical facts into a story with greater resonance. We all have issues with our families, and as time passes, we all have to think about what we did with our lives.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Maybe We’ll Fly, Sept.18-Oct. 11 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, visit https://www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org/
