We All Stand on the Shoulders of Others

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!

Rose Pickering, Janni Brenn + Peggy Cowles in A Streetcar Named Desire at Milwaukee Rep, directed by Sharon Ott

PHOTO Mark Avery

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 and I co-directed a production of THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHUAN, cast Freda Norman in the leading role, and incorporated sign language fully into the entire production, to much good effect. That’s the thing with mentoring—often the real failures lead to something worthwhile down the road.

John and I also co-directed twice. The first was Tom Cole’s adaptation of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS, the second was Amlin Gray’s KINGDOM COME, an adaptation of O. E. Rolvaag’s GIANTS IN THE EARTH. Those two collaborations were among my favorite projects at MRT. I was proud of them both, and KINGDOM COME was the first play I directed when I became the Artistic Director of Berkeley Rep. Particularly with KINGDOM COME, John allowed us the time to develop the piece in much the same way I had worked at Theatre X. We had workshops where we tried as a group to figure out how to stage the snowstorm where one of the characters dies, or where we worked on how to convey a locust attack or travel by rail and paddlewheel steamer. I don’t remember how John and I divided up directing duties on these productions—I don’t think we did. I think we just trusted each other in a way ensemble members trust each other.

KINGDOM COME at Milwaukee Rep, co-directed by John Dillon + Sharon Ott

PHOTO Mark Avery

As I talk about these two productions, it is time to mention that John and Sara had assembled a remarkable team of creative individuals at MRT, and it’s hard to talk about John’s mentorship without mentioning the other people who were also mentors and collaborators (and who were all hired by John and Sara). Larry Shue was a company member and actor at MRT. He played the leading role in the aforementioned DEAD SOULS. John was also his mentor, recognizing Larry’s writing talents and giving him the space and time to write both THE NERD and THE FOREIGNER (and also premiering them). Amlin Gray was the playwright-in-residence, writing not only KINGDOM COME but also the Obie Award-winning HOW I GOT THAT STORY at MRT. John gave me the opportunity to direct the premiere of HOW I GOT THAT STORY. I know he loved the play and loved Amlin’s writing, but he gave me that opportunity. He also supported the development of my work with Amlin on his adaptation of Cyril Tourneur’s THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY (THE REVENGER, in Amlin’s version). The path that John began when he gave me my first directing assignments started to come to fruition in my collaborations with Amlin. I began to really love language, to understand how it truly works, and how actors can use it to fully express emotion. Without John believing that somewhere in that young director who knew how to create a bunch of wonderful stage pictures lay a director who could successfully direct a play as verbally dense as Shakespeare’s ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA (which I did in 2019 for American Shakespeare Center), my life as an artist would be fundamentally changed.

And then there was Japan. Both John and Sara had a deep interest in Japanese theatre and culture. Sara was the one who first mentioned to us at Theatre X that funding was available for a project related to Japan, and she helped us obtain a grant that supported our development and production of John Schneider’s A FIERCE LONGING, a play about the art, life, and death of Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima. MRT toured two productions I directed to Japan: the aforementioned A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and then Sam Shepard’s BURIED CHILD. The wonderful actress Ellen Lauren, an MRT company member at the time, played the role of Shelley. Of course, Ellen’s future was to involve a deep collaboration with Tadashi Suzuki, SITI Company, and Japanese theatre. John invited me twice to be part of the group that went to Toga-mura to see Suzuki’s company in action. Those trips profoundly affected me in ways that are hard to express. To see Suzuki’s THE TROJAN WOMEN in that marvelous theatre in Togamura made me understand deeply how a master director (Suzuki) can use space, time, duration, architecture (all those marvelous Viewpoints!) to create deep emotional effects. Those trips to Japan, all made possible by John and Sara, would also lead me to my interest in Japanese American culture and art, and culminate in my long partnership with Phillip Kan Gotanda at Berkeley and Seattle Repertory Theatres.

Frank Krejci, Sara O’Connor + John Dillon at Milwaukee Rep

Finally, John introduced me to Berkeley Rep (BRT), which was to become my artistic home for many years. He and the Artistic Director in Berkeley, Michael Liebert, co-produced AMERICAN BUFFALO, featuring Larry Shue and BRT company member Tony Amendola, with John directing. It was a fantastic production. John, with his typical generosity, told me that Berkeley might soon be looking for an artistic director and that I should apply. So not only did John give me a place to start as a director, but also he opened the door for me into the position that was to change my life as an artist. For that, and for everything he did for me that led up to that opportunity, I am eternally grateful.

In these COVID-19 times, when we aren’t able to direct, when it’s so hard to collaborate in the ways we are used to, it is so good to look back and remember the creative times in one’s life, when many talented people were all working together. One of those times for me was in Milwaukee, at Milwaukee Rep, and with the mentorship of John Dillon. We all stand on the shoulders of others.

Sharon Ott is the Chair and Artistic Director of the Department of Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University.