A "Ghost Light" is the single light left burning on stage when the rest of the theater is dark. Stage lore has it that the light wards off dark spirits roaming amid the gloom.
Alas, there's no way to keep the ghosts at bay if your name is Jonathan Moscone and you have been haunted by the death of your father since you were 14. Decades after Dan White gunned down San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the son feels the ache of the loss.
In "Ghost Light," Moscone and his old friend Tony Taccone summon up the memory of the 1978 assassinations to explore the elusive links between past and present, father and son. Moscone sits in the director's chair, Taccone wrote the text and the combination of Moscone's bracing candor, Taccone's lacerating wit and San Francisco's legendary history imbues the play with a deeply cathartic sense of the tragicomedy of existence.
This heart-melting history play has changed subtly but significantly since its debut at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland last year. Taccone has made all of the intricately plotted puzzle pieces fit together more neatly so that the arc of the play is much clearer. If some of the suspense of the opening scenes has been lost in the bargain, the play still fuses the personal and the political with explosive results. From cheeky inside jokes about the theatuh to penetrating insights about the nature of grief, "Ghost Light" is radiant indeed in its world premiere co-production at Berkeley Rep.
The narrative spins around a stage director named Jon (Christopher Liam Moore), who is either being an absolute genius on stage, drowning in his cups or ranting about the nature of life and art and the inability of the former to live up to the grandeur of the latter. Usually a prodigiously creative fellow, who quotes SpongeBob as readily as Foucault, he finds himself unable to stage the ghost in "Hamlet." Instead, he pickles himself in hooch, watches "Golden Girls" reruns and has long, torrid love affairs in cyberspace.
From there, the cosmic floodgates open, and he's awash in messengers from the great beyond, including a psychotic homophobic prison guard (Bill Geisslinger), a buff boy toy (Danforth Comins), a spectral police officer (Peter Macon) and images of himself as a boy (Tyler James Myers). Try as he might to distract himself with the Bard, the spirits hunt him down.
These nightmarish visions of things past storm the ramparts of his sanity until Jon can't tell what is real and what is make-believe. His inordinate capacity for willing the ineffable into existence, generally a boon in his line of work, has suddenly become his undoing.
Even chugging grappa and trading barbs with his best friend Louise (the wonderfully acerbic Robynn Rodriguez) can't help beat back the demons that come calling.
Moore is simply riveting as Jon, a tormented man clinging to despair like a lover. The actor's unflinching emotional honesty grounds the action as it leaps around in time and space from the day of the slain mayor's funeral to a snarky theater dream sequence involving a mime and a giant shadow puppet.
Taccone lightens the mood with playful audience interaction bits that also invite us to reflect on the universality of the themes. The play bubbles over with insights into the way the death of a loved one can spiral into an inconsolable sense of loss, how our memories shape our identity and how vulnerable children are to the fickle hand of fate.
All of this unfolds on a set dominated by the august facade of San Francisco City Hall (design by Todd Rosenthal), which is fitting, because it's the weight of history that gives "Ghost Light" its intensity.
Moscone's fear that his father has been lost in the tide of history, eclipsed by the myth of Harvey Milk, drives many of the play's most memorable passages. Tales of the mayor's courageous fight for human rights are woven throughout the work, as are many juicy swipes at the pulse of postmodern life, from Facebook and frappucinos to the fear that the Mayan calendar may well be on target.
The battle between Jon and the narcissistic film director (a tart turn by Peter Frechette) over the relative merits of Milk and Moscone as cultural icons is beautifully written. While parts of the story remain ambiguous, such as why Jon's mother appears only as a silent symbolic figure, the thrust of the play is undeniably powerful. "Ghost Light" burns with the need to burnish a father's legacy.
Conceived and developed
by Jonathan Moscone and
Through: Feb. 19
Where: Berkeley Rep,
2025 Addison St.
Running time: 2 hours,
30 minutes (one intermission)
Tickets: $14.50-$73 (subject to change), 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org