Ghost Light & Bringing History to Life
I just got back from a lovely few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Among the highlights were a superb Measure for Measure , a very fun, exuberant Pirates of Penzance , and a brilliant new play called Ghost Light . Ghost Light was conceived and developed by Jonathan Moscone (Artistic Director of the California Shakespeare Theater ) and Tony Taccone (Artistic Director of Berkeley Rep ), written by Taccone and directed by Moscone. It explores the 1978 assassinations of Moscone’s father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and Supervisor Harvey Milk by Supervisor Dan White. But rather than being a docudrama that recreates historical events, Ghost Light focuses on Jonathan Moscone’s response to the loss of his father, both as a fourteen-year-old boy and as an adult man, struggling to direct a production of Hamlet . The story that emerges is rooted in historical events (events that I remember vividly, as a twelve-year-old at the time of the assassinations) yet...