WE ALL STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF OTHERS
Frank Krejci, Sara O’Connor + John Dillon at Milwaukee Rep
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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING/SUMMER 2021
BY SHARON
OTT
As an educator for the past 13 years, I think about mentorship all the time. I tell my students that once they take a class with me, or I direct them in a student production, I am their “mentor for life,” and I mean it. Probably the most rewarding thing about being a professor is receiving that email out of the blue where a former student thanks you for something you did many years before. I received one of those last year—a grad student who had taken my class at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and who had struggled mightily with Shakespeare, told me that he had been accepted into an MFA program in classical acting and that Shakespeare had become his passion. So when SDC Journal approached me about writing something about my mentors, I leapt at the opportunity. I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sometime in my mid-twenties (at my age, exact years become a little hazy). The company I had formed in Los Angeles, Aleph, was hired by then-Dean Robert Corrigan to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Looking back on it, this was nothing short of amazing, as none of us had advanced degrees, but this opportunity led me to several further opportunities that changed the course of my life. The first of those was the opportunity to meet, work with, and eventually direct productions for the ensemble Theatre X. I owe Theatre X, and my colleagues in that ensemble (John Schneider, Flora Coker, Deb Clifton, John Kishline, Victor DeLorenzo, and Willem Dafoe) so much in terms of my development as an artist and a director. It was through my work with Theatre X that I met John Dillon and Sara O’Connor, the Artistic Director and Managing Director of Milwaukee Repertory Theater (MRT). Sara joined the Board of Directors of Theatre X and showed me how to be a strong leader. She was the first woman I had known in the theatre who wielded real power and strength. But it was John Dillon who gave me that first important job at MRT, and it was John who served as my mentor in so many ways for the next eight years I spent in Milwaukee. My work at Theatre X had been highly visual and what we would now call devised theatre. By putting me on a strict diet of plays from the canon of American realism, John taught me
how to appreciate structure and language. He also trusted me enough to have me direct on MRT’s mainstage. The first production I directed there was Of Mice and Men, the second one (I think) was A Streetcar Named Desire. I don’t think either one represented my best work, but they were passable, and John always gave me constructive feedback and encouragement. There are some amusing stories about that production of Streetcar. I had known John Malkovich from the early Steppenwolf days, as Theatre X toured to Chicago when he and Gary Sinise were doing their early work. I’d asked John if he wanted to play Stanley Kowalski, and I’ll never forget his “audition,” sitting in the Steppenwolf bar with Gary, me, and a beer, and John deconstructing Stanley as we read through a scene. We decided at the end that he really didn’t want to play Stanley—although I’ve often thought we would have come up with a more interesting production of the play had he done so. My production of Streetcar also toured to Japan (more on that later). John Dillon, as Artistic Director, of course came with us to Japan. It makes me seem ancient, I think, but at the time, it was highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Japan to have a full crew of women on our design team, plus a woman stage manager (credit John for this as well). I’ll never forget John, cool as a cucumber, in the production meetings, acting as the “gobetween.” I would say something to John, he would say it to the translator, who would then say it to the Japanese person for whom it was intended, and then back through the same channels to me. The meetings seemed to go on forever! John also, to his great credit, said yes to much more ambitious projects. I directed Brecht’s Mother Courage at MRT when I was way too immature as a director to do so. That production was a bit of a disaster, as somehow the turntable/wagon combination didn’t work, and we had to spend two days of tech dismantling the darn thing (with a full IATSE crew) and reengineering. I actually couldn’t believe John and Sara didn’t fire me on the spot! However, even with all of its issues, this production led to something later in my career. I went to see many performances of Mother Courage to try to figure out why I didn’t think it was working in the way Brecht intended. One of those performances was a matinee that was signed in ASL. Suddenly, with the presence of the woman using sign language performing alongside Rose Pickering, the MRT actress playing the title role, the play came alive for me. Many years later, when I was Artistic Director at Berkeley Rep, Timothy Near
