It sounds like a fairytale, a magical dream along the lines of A Night at the Museum.
A little girl and her family live inside a library—a big, big library filled with rows and rows of books that go on for as far as the eye can see. Every evening after school, the little girl plays for hours and hours between the towering bookcases, sprawled out on the floor with any book she could ever want to read. She loves learning about all sorts of incredible things, and she loves immersing herself in all the fantastic stories on the shelves. But believe it or not, this fairytale actually happened in real life. At least it did to one little girl. And that little girl grew up to be a highly respected actress and playwright. Her name is Sharon Washington, and her fascinating childhood is the focus of When My Sleeping Dragon Woke, a documentary produced and directed by her husband, documentary filmmaker Chuck Schultz.
“I was doing one of my first professional shows out of drama school, and we were all sitting on stage during a break, telling stories about our families,” says Washington in the film. “I told my story, and everybody was, like, ‘Well, you have to tell that story. That’s an amazing story.'”
Feeding the Fire
As late as the 1970s, the buildings that housed the branches of the New York Public Library were still being heated by coal furnaces, each of which had to be maintained by an appointed custodian. Because the furnaces had to be kept running 24/7 in the colder months, each branch—there were over 30 of them around the city at the time—contained a hidden apartment where the custodian, and his family, if he had one, lived, to ensure that there was always someone on site to stoke and maintain the system.
Washington was born in 1959 and her father, a transplanted Southerner who was also the deacon at the family’s Pentecostal church (her mother worked as a secretary to the pastor, Sharon’s godfather), was the house custodian at the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side. This was where she spent her early childhood.
“I remember having my birthday parties in the library when I was three or four years old, and whenever I had a babysitter, they had an easy job—I couldn’t go outside, so they’d just let me run around in the library while they kept an eye on me,” Washington says. “Our apartment was up two flights above the main floor. Sometimes I’d go down to the library after hours and just walk around and look in all the display cases that were there. I remember there was a Ukrainian Easter egg in one of them. Where else would I have seen a Ukrainian Easter egg as a little girl in New York back then? I took [living in the library] for granted then because I didn’t know anything else. I thought it was cool, and when I was a little older and started having friends over so did they. But it wasn’t until I started visiting their homes that I really started to understand how different my home life was from theirs.”
Steeple to Stage
The actress credits church for sparking her interest in performing. “The Pentecostal church is very participatory,” she explains. “We’d go to church Tuesday through Sunday, and there’d always be lots of speeches and pageants. There was the chorus, and the minister would have his sermons. I think that gave me my love of storytelling, which was also an outgrowth of my love of reading. I’d read Shakespeare and when I saw his work performed, it made me go, ‘Wow, people actually do this—perform stories for a live audience.'” (In a poetically perfect path, she would later appear several times on the New York Shakespeare Festival stage, playing opposite Denzel Washington [no relation] in “Richard III” and Christopher Walken in “Coriolanus.”)
Washington attended the college-preparatory Dalton School, an experience that made her more aware of social class. “Other kids would have their birthday parties at the Paramount screening room, or their family would rent out [iconic toy store] FAO Schwarz for a night,” she recalls, adding that her time as a student of color in the school’s diverse, tight-knit community equipped her for myriad social situations. Before graduating, she had a box office job with the Manhattan Theatre Club, where she served for two years as the club’s managing director’s personal assistant before going on to earn a BA from Dartmouth and study international government and African-American studies at Yale, where she’d eventually earn an MFA in drama.
But despite her love of acting, she hadn’t seriously considered it as a career when she started college. “I thought I would join the foreign service and go work in Africa or overseas,” she says. “I didn’t think my parents would be too happy about struggling to put me through college and then me telling them I wanted to be an actor.” The buzz that came with her starring in the original production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” at Yale Repertory Theatre, however, changed things. “After that, I was all in,” Washington says.
Roll Camera
Chuck Schultz grew up in the Montclair/West Orange, New Jersey, area. After moving west on his own to catch the tail end of the hippie scene in San Francisco in 1974, he found himself increasingly interested in learning about filmmaking. “I was dating a woman there who was a conceptual artist, so by being around her I started seeing a lot of experimental and underground films and films by directors like Herzog and Kurosawa,” he says. “That got me thinking, ‘Wow, I want to do this.'”
He produced a low-budget 1977 documentary about beekeepers before heading back east to New York and taking a job with director and music video producer Bob Giraldi, a stint that included the making of the landmark video for Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit “Beat It” and the infamous 1984 Pepsi commercial that saw the singer’s hair catch fire during the shooting. By the next decade he’d returned to producing his own films, starting with 1992’s One Day at a Time, about the lives of twin sisters with cerebral palsy; subsequent titles would include 2003’s The Rural Studio (about the work of architect Samuel Mockbee and Auburn University’s Rural Studio), 2007’s Five Days in July (about the 1967 Newark riots), and 2016’s The Last Crop (about the struggles of aging-out farmers in California’s Central Valley).
The couple met in 1996 through a close mutual friend who’d attended Yale when Washington was there. “He got our friend to invite me to what I thought was a script meeting,” says Washington, with a laugh. “And things just kind of took off from there.”
Acting Up
One thing that had certainly taken off by the time the two began seeing each other, and continues to blossom, has been Washington’s stage and screen work. Her 30-years-and-counting career has seen her nominated for a 2023 Tony Award as the cowriter of the Broadway musical “New York, New York.” On Broadway, she also starred in “The Scottsboro Boys,” while her off-Broadway turns include “Dot” at the Vineyard Theatre; “Wild with Happy” and “Caucasian Chalk Circle” at the Public Theater; “While I Yet Live” and “String of Pearls” at Primary Stages; and many others. Her television credits list is packed with parts on “The Blacklist,” “One Life to Live,” “Bull,” “Blue Bloods,” “Madam Secretary,” “Law & Order” and its spinoffs, and other shows as well as voiceover spots for Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and PBS-TV. Washington’s many movie appearances include roles in Joker, Diehard with a Vengeance, Malcolm X, School of Rock, Michael Clayton, Birdwatching, Down with the King, On the Basis of Sex, and, most recently, Sing Sing and Joker: Folie a Deux. The latest play she’s written, “A Colored Mirror,” was selected for residencies at the New Harmony Project and SPACE on Ryder Farm.
“Achieving certain heights and transforming from a stage actor to a film and television actor to a celebrated playwright, I think that is what makes Sharon’s personal story so special,” says her Sing Sing costar Colman Domingo. “Chuck is very interested in very human stories, and I’m really happy that he took to examining his own wife as a subject and her work as an artist. He knows where her imagination lies and knows where her imagination flies.”
When My Sleeping Dragon Woke‘s storyline is meta in feel. Besides telling the tale of Washington’s unusual upbringing, it follows her work in writing, producing, and starring in “Feeding the Dragon,” a one-woman stage adaptation of the story, which is also planned as the subject of a Scholastic picture book version titled The Little Girl Who Lived in the Library. Drama occurs in the documentary and play iterations of the tale when Washington comes to terms with her late father’s alcoholism, something that she hadn’t previously confronted as it was never spoken of when she was a child.
She and Schultz left their 39th-floor Hell’s Kitchen walkup behind for a home in Millbrook in 2018 and Sleeping Dragon was completed not long after, premiering locally in September 2023. Perhaps the most poignant moment associated with the release of the film thus far came when it was shown at Dartmouth College.
“After the screening, I was observing this young Black woman from the audience,” says Schultz. “She came up to Sharon and said, ‘You’re me, I’m you.’ That was pretty moving for me.”
“We all have stories to tell,” says Washington. “And they’re all important.”
Chronogram readers can stream When My Sleeping Dragon Woke for the discount rate of $7 per viewing at https://watch.eventive.org/sleeping-dragon-woke-chronogram/play/672a46b173ba88003ab814bb.
This article appears in December 2024.
