AN ADDITION OF ONE to Make Maine Debut at Pascal Hall With Jamie Wyeth Q&A

Jamie Wyeth was all too familiar with public rejection when he turned down an official commission in 1966, at age 20, to paint a posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy. Two of Wyeth's recent portraits had been spurned by their high-profile subjects, and his first solo show in Manhattan was panned by a New York Times critic. Despite a growing sense that his work unsettled people, or because of that, Wyeth chose to paint JFK on his own terms. As writer and journalist Shannon A. Mullen reveals in her new play, An Addition of One, Wyeth created 'a memory of having met the president for about a half hour.'

Wyeth's intimate and unusual portrait was scorned by members of the Kennedy family who'd supported his work, and the painting drew hate mail from around the country when it was published in LOOK Magazine in 1968. It is now widely considered an iconic masterpiece, along with another portrait featured in the play - his 1963 commission of pioneering cardiologist Helen Taussig, a striking image vilified in its day but now regarded as visionary.

Mullen's play conjures Wyeth's memory of having met President Kennedy in the form of an informal conversation between the two men, based on many personal conversations with the artist, and the historical record. An Addition of One underscores parallels between the 1960s and our own fraught era of social and geopolitical upheaval. The play's timeless narrative centers on the power of art, and of unflinching artists, to remind us that human nature can be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.

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