I Can See My Father from Here

The political is intensely personal in Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone's 'Ghost Light'

By Robert Avila

Politics have always left California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone profoundly ambivalent. His name is enough to suggest why. As a teenager he lost his father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, to an act of political violence that dramatically altered the city's history as well as the lives of then 14-year-old Moscone and his family. Today, as a gay man leading a vibrant artistic career in the Bay Area, Jonathan Moscone has benefited from the trail blazed on behalf of equality for gay Americans by crusading progressive George Moscone, even as politics denied him a father in the crucial years of his own coming-of-age.

At the same time, the subsequent political apotheosis of openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk—the other man gunned down at City Hall that day in November 1978 by fellow politician Dan White, and an icon of the gay liberation struggle ever since—had the ironic effect of diminishing George Moscone's crucial role in that very struggle, as well as in a wider progressive agenda. The overshadowing of George Moscone's legacy of public service could only add to his son's basic distrust of the political realm.

Jonathan Moscone nevertheless remained publicly reserved on the subject until 2008. The release that year of Gus Van Sant's celebrated biopic Milk coincided with the now middle-aged artistic director's coming to terms with an absence that had long haunted him. It also prodded him into reclaiming his father from a political and cultural arena where he stood obscurely in the shadow of Milk's legend. The movie was perhaps a convenient excuse for solidifying a more personal reclamation, one that had long been coming but was now about to take shape in the language of theatre. This story, while inevitably colored by politics, would be essentially a personal one: about loss and grief, about what it means to become a man, about growing up emotionally arrested under a cloud of bereavement, violence and a tangled history of liberation.

But this was not something he could do alone. Moscone sought out a collaborator. What playwright could he entrust with so personal and painful a story?

The man he turned to was Berkeley Repertory Theatre's artistic director Tony Taccone. While a longtime friend and colleague, Taccone is not an obvious choice. He is not, in fact, a playwright, but a director—and an overtly political one at that. Indeed, he had helmed the premiere of Emily Mann's Execution of Justice. That 1985 production—which momentously involved the American stage in an act of public reclamation by recasting the notoriously skewed trial of Dan White—had been alienating to at least some members of the Moscone family, as Taccone later learned.

And although their relationship stretched back more than two decades, Moscone had never before opened up to the older Taccone about his father. Yet in this mutual venture into uncharted waters, Taccone—midway through an illustrious career—would step boldly into the unfamiliar role of playwright. Moscone, meanwhile, would have the even more bizarre task of directing a script based on his own life.

Indeed, as filial drama goes, the haunted life of Jonathan Moscone invited comparison to Hamlet. The thought was not lost on Taccone. Ghost Light emerged as a play about a fictional theatre director named Jon who, hired to stage Hamlet, becomes unaccountably obsessed with the Ghost—while, indeed, beset by ghosts. Eschewing strict naturalism, let alone docudrama, Ghost Light's dreamlike narrative and its existential-political themes inhabit a half-physical, half-mental landscape where past and present, as well as public and private, intersect. Written by Taccone and directed by its abstracted, semi-fictionalized subject, Jon Moscone, this unusual, unorthodox and, to say the least, intriguing production premieres July 2 as part of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's "American Revolutions" history cycle, before moving to Berkeley Rep in January 2012.

Grief is not something Jonathan Moscone wears on his sleeve. On the contrary, as a familiar and admired figure in the Bay Area's cultural landscape, the stubble-cheeked 46-year-old theatre director is a gregarious ball of energy, restless and creative, poised and articulate. A certain caffeine-fueled mien, too, suits the public scope of his principal gig since 2000—the year he took over and noticeably revitalized Cal Shakes's prestigious outdoor theatre in the hills of Orinda.

You could hardly call his work morose, either. As a director of Shakespeare and other canonical playwrights, he has distinguished his productions with bold strokes, playful choices and a sharp engagement with text, as well as a weakness for emotional exuberance—all of which has made him increasingly popular in and beyond the Bay Area. (He can be quite muscular with new material, too, as in his fine recent effort for American Conservatory Theater at the helm of Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park.)

One afternoon in April, Moscone, an East Bay resident, arrives to discuss Ghost Light at the crowded upstairs section of a small café off Broadway in Oakland. Moscone stresses that the play is not, and could not be, a literal portrait. Although his father makes a brief appearance in the play, as does his mother Gina, both are essentially mute.

"That's one of the biggest risks in doing this," he says, "because everyone's so excited by this project—writers or subscribers or funders. The ones who know it the most, they've read it. They still think it's great. But I'm nervous about people who think this is going to be, you know, Moscone—like Milk was to Milk. It's not. Theatre is not a great docudrama medium."

None of Moscone's three older siblings appear in the play, and most of the principals are fictional—with the partial exception of one menacing figure stalking the character Jon's subconscious, a nemesis that Taccone devised from the scattered details of Moscone's wayward paternal grandfather.

"I was very clear with Tony that I don't want to write a movie," Moscone notes. "I don't want to write 'the story of.' I just wanted it to be a reflection on the loss of him, and the personal response to a very public event."

Still, the play includes details drawn from real life. The opening scene, for instance, in which a boy interacts with the disembodied voice of a psychiatrist, reflects the fact that young Jon Moscone was in therapy before November 1978 to deal with the fears he had that his father would be killed.

Moscone admits that he spent most of his life after the assassination distracting himself from his own grief, avoiding the feelings that are now at the center of this project. "You develop everything else about yourself," he explains. "You become an extremely critical individual. You can analyze everything that is going on in the world. It's over-honing a skill to the point where you don't have to look inside yourself."

His considerable acuity becomes blunted during this April conversation only whenever the subject turns toward his personal and familial tragedy. Even today, Moscone grows slightly anxious and hesitant at the mention of Execution of Justice. It seems to trigger a deep-seated emotional response that crowds any attempt at an intellectual or professional assessment. He still appears hard-pressed to accept the artistic license applied by outsiders so close to home.

"At the time, probably because I was at that age, it just seemed like a territorial...like an invasion," Moscone says of the 1985 production. "An invasion of a personal experience. I didn't particularly understand why somebody would make theatre out of that—when in fact it happened, so why theatricalize it? To what end?" He immediately adds, "That was before I got to know Emily Mann and people who actually did believe it was a very passionate response [to the assassinations and subsequent trial]." But he maintains this conciliatory note with a little difficulty. "I was asked on several occasions to come to rehearsal—I immediately refused. I said, 'I'm not here to share that.'"

"The wounds were really very raw," confirms Taccone when I meet him a few days later in Berkeley. "The Moscone family, as I've since learned, has had a fairly complicated relationship with the issues surrounding the assassination—everything ranging from privacy, to grieving, to feeling marginalized in some ways, and invaded. It's a complicated phenomenon. I didn't completely realize that. Jon has never wanted to go there."

Until recently, that is. And Taccone was willing to help. In fact, the youthful, 60-ish artistic director—who hails from Queens and is still all New York in his quick speech and manner, despite having by now spent most of his life in California—says it was time for him to take a personal turn as well. "If the story works, it will be relatable to people on a lot of different levels," he explains. "For me, it's as much about my own dad as it is about his dad."

Taccone adds that the play's humor—and there is a considerable amount, especially in the snappy repartee that animates much of the dialogue—fits his own experience as well. "The fact that [the character of Jon expresses his grief] through a lot of comedy is a lot like me," he says. "It's a survival technique that a lot of people have, and I have it."

Nonetheless, in achieving a larger perspective, Moscone and Taccone mine a deep vein of sorrow and confusion. "It's me as a child, as an adult, as a gay man, losing a father who was an extremely powerful male presence in my life and a very public figure," says Moscone, laying out his intimate investment in the material. "It's about a very abrupt, violent ending that happened at a certain age that arrested me. It's about having to grow up as a gay man without any flowing relationship with a strong male figure, and how to define myself as a man in relationship to that. That allowed Tony to include his relationship to the loss of his own father. There's a lot of Tony in there, which is good, because I don't think I really need to direct a doppelganger."

Another aim, perhaps more indirect but basic—and one Moscone becomes especially passionate about—concerns the half-forgotten political legacy of his father. That focus is inherent and inescapable, as surely as politics were inexorable to the grieving, introverted Hamlet.

Taccone acknowledges the power of the real history folded into the play, even while insisting that the character of George Moscone (who makes only a cursory appearance as a ghost) functions as a universal idea of the father or parent. The political story is never far away. "One of the fascinating things," he says, "is that George Moscone has essentially become a footnote in the career of Harvey Milk."

"My father actually had more effect, more power. He just wasn't gay. I don't expect people to lionize my father," adds Moscone, again trying to let go of a certain fraught defensiveness around the public nature of his father's memory. "Every movement needs a leader, and that's Harvey. But because of that, it's almost become essential that my father's participation is forgotten or obliterated, because it dilutes the message. The play is about how that has affected me."

"What I did take from Jon's experience was his ambivalence about politics," says Taccone, "his feeling that his dad was in some ways part of Camelot and Camelot is over. I don't think he's ever been able to fully engage or believe in that kind of progress. He has a lot of passionate beliefs, but he also spins off into a feeling of chaos, a feeling of cynicism—certainly about San Francisco politics—since his father passed away. So there are various foils in the play that argue with him about that—and give me an opportunity to work out some political arguments that I found really interesting."

This constructive tension between Taccone's larger political vision and Moscone's more personal one dovetails effortlessly at times, especially in the play's telling regard for the public qualities and accomplishments of the San Francisco mayor. In fact, Moscone admits he probably chose Taccone as his collaborator, in part, for his political astuteness.

"It's an interesting marriage in that regard," agrees Taccone. "As dire as things are, I still believe that giving up is not really an option. We can be dismissive and cynical, but there are still powerful forces at work having an affect on our lives. And, of course, the irony is that the guy who Jon admires the most is his father, who was one of the most politically engaged people in the history of San Francisco."

The mayor of San Francisco from January 1976 until his death in November 1978, George Moscone had a political career stretching back to the early 1960s. From the beginning, he was a politician of a fearlessly progressive stripe. He grew up as the working-class child of a single mother in the then Italian-American enclave of San Francisco's Marina District. His own father, a onetime prison guard at nearby San Quentin, was an alcoholic expelled from the home by his mother when George was a young child. Moscone was popular and confident. He excelled at basketball in both high school and college (and as mayor was even known to join a pick-up game or two). As a young lawyer he volunteered in Mississippi in the historic campaign to register black voters in the South. In the early '60s, after leaping successfully into a grassroots campaign to defeat a proposed freeway plan that would have cut the city in two, Moscone caught the attention of Congressman Phillip Burton, brother of good friend John Burton, who began grooming him for a political career.

Elected to the Board of Supervisors at 33 in 1963, Moscone won election to the California state senate three years later. There his colleagues very soon elected him majority leader, an impressive suggestion itself of the exceptional qualities in Moscone the politician.

Indeed, it is something of a surprise to glance back at George Moscone's role in the fight for gay rights. The effort was bold, in a manner hard to imagine by the tepid standards of today's "centrist" politics. During his time as majority leader in the California senate, Moscone introduced and shepherded into law a bill overturning the state's anti-sodomy law, which had effectively criminalized gay life. Knowing it would come down to an even split for and against, Moscone brought it to the floor and, amid vituperative debate, physically locked the senators in the chamber and sent the Highway Patrol to fetch Lieutenant Governor Mervyn M. Dymally to cast the deciding vote. The new law's impact was momentous. Immediately perceived as a national yardstick, it prompted other states to propose similar legislation.

In 1975, Moscone turned back to his home city with an eye to becoming its mayor. Once in office, he initiated and oversaw a wide-ranging progressive agenda that was cut short by an assassin's gun, but still permanently changed the nature of city government and politics. "One thousand days or so isn't much time to create a legacy as mayor," wrote former press secretary and friend Corey Busch in a 2008 San Francisco Chronicle editorial, "but Moscone did."

Autumn of 2008 in San Francisco saw a bitter anniversary marked by some rousing remembrances. On Oct. 28, Gus Van Sant's long-awaited biopic Milk opened at the Castro Theatre. In the heart of the city's famous gay neighborhood, the movie palace stands sleek and stylish just up the street from the former Castro Camera storefront, Harvey Milk's old haunt and headquarters. Both landmarks are featured as location shots in the film. With red-carpet appearances by the film's star, Sean Penn, and other worthies, the world premiere screening had the ebullient feel of a celebration, just a month ahead of the 30th anniversary of the dual assassinations of Nov. 27, 1978.

If the evening signaled all that had been accomplished since Milk became the first openly gay elected official in the state, the complexities of history were also in the air that night. Right outside the theatre, bobbing up and down, were signs urging a "no" vote on Prop. 8, the heatedly contested state proposition to ban same-sex marriage. One week later Californians would vote it into law anyway, sending the whole matter (back) into the courts and affirming that history carries forward at least as much as it overturns from the struggles of the past.

Also in 2008, but well out of the spotlight, in the convivial bubble of a barroom tete-a-tete, Jonathan Moscone broached an unexpected subject to Tony Taccone. "He basically confided in me that he wanted to do a piece about his dad, and I was really surprised and interested," Taccone recalls. The director–turned-playwright is perched on a tall chair at the subterranean Jazzschool café on Addison Street next door to Berkeley Rep, where he had arrived in 1988 after resigning as artistic director of San Francisco's storied Eureka Theatre. "I was very honored that he would share that level of intimacy. But honestly, I didn't think much was going to come of it after I walked out of the bar."

But they agreed to keep meeting, despite having only a vague notion of what might take shape. Eventually the process took a quasi-therapeutic form, with Moscone visiting Taccone in the latter's loft, reclining on his couch and telling stories of his experience. "I took a lot of notes," relates Taccone. "And that's all they were, a bunch of notes."

Then Moscone met Oregon Shakespeare Festival's artistic director Bill Rauch for a meal and learned about "American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle." "[Moscone] called me, very excited, and said Ashland had agreed to offer us a commission," Taccone remembers with a sense of wonder. "I said, 'Are you kidding me? What are they, insane? For what?' He said, 'I don't know, we'll do something.'" Taccone began to look over his notes in earnest. He starting riffing, creating dialogue, scenes, characters and a triple-narrative structure that involved not only Hamlet but a boy guarding his father's coffin and a trip through the unconscious.

Taccone e-mailed a first draft to Moscone, but for days on end he heard nothing back. "I turned into a writer—within a week I'd gone through every primal emotion in life: betrayal, anger, fear, desperate insecurity, the whole thing. Finally I called him up, and said, 'So!?' He said, 'I haven't read it. I'm terrified.' And I realized, yes. That makes perfect sense."

One late afternoon in early May, less than a week before rehearsals are set to begin in Ashland, Jonathan Moscone sits in the café on Addison Street, doing his best to ignore a chatty group of music students assembling nearby, one of whom is idly striking a pair of claves. "It's like being on the set of Fame," quips Moscone sotto voce. He is feeling relaxed and talkative, but at the same time admits he has not yet fully immersed himself in the subject at hand.

"It's just too much to think about...except when I'm home alone at night," Moscone ventures, referring to the play. "When I go to sleep I think about it. There are things in my head—images and ideas, a tone. How to keep it from being sentimental, letting the mundane and the punch-in-the-face work together."

The show's fine line between the public and the private works itself out as well in the scenic design of the production, by Todd Rosenthal (August: Osage County). "We started to build up a very complicated landscape, and it just felt immediately wrong," Moscone said. "So we did sort of the opposite. The space is tactile, it's City Hall and the life of Jon all combined into one—porous and concrete at the same time. It has permeability, but it's also inescapable—I think it's the right move. There's a simplicity in the space that [ensures] the emotional life will be more direct."

This emotional directness is, of course, essential. "When you're in the sorrow waters," says Moscone, "you almost feel like they go on forever. You start to feel there is no shore. You get more terrified of it as you get older because you keep sweeping it under the carpet, and there's more there, there's more there."

He relates an epiphany he had while living in Dallas in the 1990s, a quietly startling experience that has found its way into the play. "I used to take step class four times a week—I was a step-class fanatic. It was at this big fancy gay gym. And I remember some...maybe the word 'apotheosis' is right here. You're looking at a full wall mirror. There are about 40 or 50 guys. I remember doing some big complicated routine, and I had this moment, looking in the mirror, sweating and exhausted. I was doing perhaps the gayest thing I'd ever done, and—it's not this literal—but I actually saw my father. I said, 'Oh, my God. I am my father.' It struck me as the strangest thing in the world. I've given speeches at City Hall—I don't feel like my dad when I do that. I feel like a pale imitation of him. But when I did this...I've never quite recaptured that feeling. I don't know what to make of it, but I told Tony that story and he put it in the play."

"My own father basically had no father in his life," marvels Moscone. "And my father became the man of all men—a real three-dimensional guy, who was sexy, masculine, witty, charming, and totally liberal. So how did he do that? I have no idea—but in my thirties, I looked for a lot of male mentors. And I finally realized: No male mentor had done what I could when I became my own mentor. It sounds very crunchy to say that, but it's true."

Up in Ashland, at the completion of week two in a seven-week rehearsal schedule, Moscone the director and Moscone the subject are finding each other on stage.

"Yesterday I was working on the scene where the ghost of George comes on," says Moscone by phone one Friday afternoon. "It started to become a more interesting scene than just the image of him—it became about him and his son. Stuff that I had figured out in my head about my father, I put into the scene and it started to make the scene come alive in a way that was unexpected for me. I'm not sure it's right; I'm not sure what Tony will say when he sees it. But it's one of those wonderful moments of really connecting, really plugging it in, directly from my story to the play. Those moments keep feeding the development, so the play feels like it's still building and growing."

Having been there for the first few days, Taccone is due to come back the following week and will make at least one more appearance before previews began in June. But this is Moscone's play to direct, and Taccone is giving him his space.

In a sense, of course, Taccone and Moscone are mirroring each other, each having to let go of authorship, and each reasserting it at the same time. The collaboration between these two, each used to being in charge, has been unlikely at best, yet seems to be working. "It has put us to the test in a lot of ways, Tony and me," Moscone reflects. "It has brought up our best selves, and it has challenged us to work through a lot of the things that we need to work through about letting go, about trusting each other, about letting authorship happen elsewhere. It's not about being artistic directors, it's about being, you know, just artists. Working together. And that's hard. It's great, but it's hard. I'd rather be going through that with him than anybody else."

Taccone, on the other hand, knows full well that he will be facing skepticism from a public and a critical establishment that have thought of him for years as a director. "People want to put you in that box. You know how that is: 'I don't want to hear your poetry!' So it's a risk for the both of us."

The creative dialectic between Moscone and Taccone—registered in the very structure of the play itself as well as in production—allows the personal battles, transformations and dilemmas inherent in the project to have their proper political dimension. There is no doubt something universal in that as well. A larger will is at work in a play made up of collective experiences and viewpoints—it acts to bring the past more thoroughly and meaningfully into the present, where, in a sense, it has been all along. As Taccone stresses, we carry our histories, whether or not we're conscious of it, in different parts of ourselves. Ghost Light is thus the attempt of a son to reconcile himself to a parent's disappearance, and in doing so to give birth to his own mature self. And it's also an attempt to register a moment 33 years ago when progressive politics challenged the status quo and acted as midwife to necessary social change.

Whether in personal or political terms, the past not only helps to make sense of the present, but provides an alternative to its otherwise dismal logic. In the end, the subject of Ghost Light is simply change itself. If that change comes refracted here through an unstable, splintered, haunted identity, that too seems right. Individually and collectively, we inherit both the burden and the promise of history, and bear witness, in our best moments, to its volatile mix of cause and consequence.

Robert Avila is a recipient of American Theatre's Bay Area Commissioning Fund grant, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and is the senior theatre critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

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