BERKELEY REP
MY YEAR AT BY JONATHAN
MOSCONE
I met Sharon Ott in 1989. That’s what I remember. She recalls our meeting years before when she was producing Execution of Justice, a play about the trial of the man who assassinated my father George and Harvey Milk in 1978. I blocked that out. But I remember my year with Sharon, the first of many, and how it was the first major pivot of my creative life. I came to know Sharon when I was struggling with my future while working as Joe Papp’s assistant at the Public Theater/ NYSF. After three years of being at one of the centers of the American theatre, I felt like I was on the path of becoming a New York producer. And that was not the plan. I had seen so many shows on and Off-Broadway over my tenure at the Public, gathered a million opinions about everything I saw, and finally I came to the conclusion—put up or shut up. So I thought: try to be a director. I called Sharon from my office phone at 440 Lafayette Street and asked if I could volunteer as an assistant director. She directed me toward the intern page, I applied, and I got in as a directing intern at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. I packed up, said goodbye, endured Joe’s pleas not to leave, and moved back home-ish.
It was an incredible year. First up, I assisted Sharon in her second production (first done at Seattle Rep) of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, featuring Justine Bateman (yes, Mallory from Family Ties) in the title role. It was an altogether magnificent, eccentric, and beautifully designed production, one that marked my understanding of how Sharon worked. She had an eye, to be sure. No one could compose a picture like Sharon. And for her, the figure, the text, the image—all were parts of a portrait, an image that lasted well beyond the moment, enduring over years of memory. I can still see the end of the production’s first act, with Justine/Lulu ascending John Arnone’s spiral staircase in the middle of the stage, with Jennifer Tipton’s stark downlight, in a prophetic image of her impending power and ultimate doom, all in one.
“All of the past teaches us about the path to our future.” I also assisted Sharon at the end of my internship on a production of The Winter’s Tale, which was performed at the cavernous Calvin Simmons auditorium in downtown
Jonathan Moscone with Joseph Papp the day he left the Public Theater to intern for Sharon Ott
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Oakland. Shakespeare is a bit tougher than Wedekind to control through images, and it proved a rougher road of a process to connect the image to the word to the person to the extraordinary ambiguity and scale of Shakespeare’s emotions and thoughts.
So in there, I saw the valences of Sharon’s work—beautifully controlled on one end, and controlling on the other. Great and genuine all the way through, she succeeded and failed like all great directors do. And that was worth giving up weekly dinners at Hasaki in the East Village with Joe Papp, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and the like. Sharon was also one of the best artistic directors I’d ever known. She hired really, really well. Irene Lewis directed Shaw’s Man and Superman, and I learned my love for Shaw through Irene and how to stage the thought, how to land the joke, and how to keep the debate lively. Wow, what a great show. And I assisted Tony Taccone (my all-time favorite person in the American theatre) on Quincy Long’s The Virgin Molly. Tony was a great counterpart to Sharon (he was Associate Artistic Director at Berkeley Rep at the time). Tony cared far less for design than he did for dramaturgy and acting. He grounded me in the real work of directing: providing paths of forward movement through the sometimes gnarly but always beautiful process of
John Aylward + Justine Bateman in Lulu at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Sharon Ott PHOTO Ken Friedman ©1989, 2021
