Few contemporary playwrights’ names provoke ire like that of David Mamet. His plays are renowned for their controversy: New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich wrote in his 1992 review of Mamet’s play Oleanna, in which a college student wrongfully pins on her male professor a string of increasingly damaging sexual abuse accusations, that it “is likely to provoke more arguments than any play this year.” When I noted on Facebook that I was reading Oleanna, a handful of theatre friends descended on my comments section to express both distaste for the play and author as well as a desire to leave Mamet and his work behind as a relic of the past.
But in the theatre world, Mamet is ultimately a rule, not an exception. Rather than being a smear on an otherwise progressive art form, he is a culminating product of a whole history of sexism in the industry. As Jesse Green acknowledges in his 2022 New York Times article, “Is It Finally Twilight for the Theater’s Sacred Monsters?”, many of America’s most celebrated theatre artists and educators were also notorious predators. Green calls attention to the verbal abuse, physical violence, and sexual harassment these “greats” committed, largely unchecked, in the name of creating their art. Though the fact is plain, the article wavers on its meaning: Green seems to hint that the issue is not individual but institutional, that theatre as an art form is inseparable from a culture of caustic abuse and sexual coercion. For example, he notes an “overwhelming correlation between the most acclaimed achievements of the American theater and the lordliness, the fury, and the cultlike subjugation that allowed [Sacred Monsters like] Robbins and Fosse and Kazan and Strasberg,” and writes that “without monstrousness, we do not have what we have been conditioned to think of as the theater itself.” Despite this, he ends the article with a plea to make contemporary theatre’s newest holders of the Sacred Monster mantle “the end of the line,” implying that the issue is individual after all, and will be resolved when no Sacred Monsters remain.
By the end of Green’s article, we find ourselves scratching our heads. Why exactly is Green pronouncing this era’s twilight? If the issue is institutional, then it’s far from being solved; if it is individual, then we know from the stories of abusive entertainment bigwigs breaking the front pages daily that the issue persists. Green himself doesn’t quite seem sure– he writes, “Our theatrical world may have softened around the edges, but… [it] is fundamentally as harsh as it was in its supposed glory days.” And, indeed, it is.
That’s not to diminish the strides that are undoubtedly being made, nor the victories hard-won by union organization and movements like #MeToo and TimesUp. Intimacy directors and choreographers are slowly becoming standard amid heightened attention to consent on stage and screen. Perhaps more than anything else, the tone of the conversation is shifting: theatre is increasingly branding itself as an inclusive “safe space.” But to what extent does the depth of practical reform in the industry match the rigor of these tonal platitudes? The result may be something of a blind spot: generalized assertions that theatre is a safe space run the risk of ignoring the reality that American theatre has rarely been safe for most people, for most of its lifetime. Even if the “Sacred Monsters” are dying out, their shadows remain.
Green may have equivocated, but his pronouncement that American theatre is synonymous with monstrosity is one that resonates. Theatre has been far from a safe space for a long time, and the issue is not one of individual immorality. As Green rightfully identified, the problem is baked into our industry— codified into the art of acting, and of acting pedagogy, through a century of teachings by many of our most famous and beloved monsters.
To understand how this problem became synonymous with contemporary theatre, it’s necessary to start with one man who revolutionized it.
Konstantin Stanislavsky so thoroughly reconfigured our understanding of acting that his ideas effectively mark the beginning of the modern epoch of theatre. In his book The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods, Richard Brestoff positions Stanislavsky as the first key acting teacher in theatre history after an only cursory mention of the ancient Greeks, a brief nod to Roman rhetorician Quintilian, and a short introduction to Delsarte. Having covered some two thousand years of theatre history in a few succinct pages, Brestoff spends the next hundred or so exclusively discussing Stanislavsky and his most loyal students.
It may seem unlikely, but the monstrosity Jesse Green believes is inextricable from the art of theatre may also begin with this great teacher. In “Willful Actors: Valuing Resistance in American Actor Training,” Kari Barclay explores the psychological and theoretical roots of certain elements of Stanislavsky’s system of actor preparation, and the implications these hold for actor consent. This system aimed at developing (among other things) a highly naturalistic style of acting, derived from a focus on emotional experience and a desire to create an empathetic link between the audience and the actor. In the book Great Directors at Work, David Richard Jones cites a central preoccupation with “truth” in Stanislavsky’s creative process: If the actors did their job by acting with “emotional authenticity,” the audience would believe their struggles, feel empathy for them, and be moved by the production. This was a critical tenet of Stanislavsky’s system: seeking a reliable, calculated way to coach actors towards this esoteric goal. As Jones puts it, he spent much of his life’s work attempting to “methodize the finding of truth” (32).
Of course, defining “emotional authenticity” isn’t a precise nor an easy task, and what a “truthful” performance entails is inevitably subjective. Nonetheless, Stanislavsky chased what Brestoff calls a “drive to codify a method to achieve truth” (28). This quest was taken up and, as Barclay argues, perverted in execution by interpreters and acting educators who followed in Stanislavsky’s footsteps. In an effort to develop truthful performances “free from inhibitions,” Stanislavskian disciples Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and other American “Method” teachers imparted their own subjective and sexism-drenched influence on their students. Barclay points out a preoccupation with gendered expectations of “free will” (inspired in part by patriarchal overtones of 19th-Century American Transcendentalist settler masculinity) among these teachers (130). Male actors expressed this patriarchal will as subjects, claiming stalwart freedom to express and follow through on desire. Conversely, female actors were taught to express this will as objects, performing emotional and especially sexual vulnerability. Any hesitation on an actor’s part to perform in a way that upheld these patriarchal scripts was pathologized as an insufficiency of craft which would hold performers back from “true,” “uninhibited” acting.
This isn’t to say that Stanislavsky’s intention was to devise a system which purposefully objectified women, nor that Stanislavsky’s system— or even Strasberg’s Method— is inherently sexist. The methods themselves can transcend this sexist messaging, and teachers like Uta Hagen and Stella Adler made it their lives’ work to prove it. In such intensely hierarchical settings such as 20th-century theatre, however, where acclaimed teachers like Strasberg unimpeachably ruled, the privilege of mediating and enforcing something as mystical as “emotional authenticity” granted easily-abused authority.
Strasberg wasn’t alone. Sanford Meisner, creator of the eponymous Meisner technique, also used “spontaneity” and “believability” in similar ways:
To demonstrate the principle of action and reaction… [Meisner] pinches the arm of one of his male students, who gives an “ouch” and pulls away. Then he turns to a female student and puts his hand down the front of her blouse to touch her breasts. When she giggles and exclaims, “Sandy!” Meisner asks the class if that was an honest reaction. They nod yes. (Barclay 123)
Barclay notes a “mixing [of] eroticism with pedagogy” that occurs in midcentury theatre history. This mandatory performance of sexuality for the male gaze reflects a number of facets of discrimination’s storied history on Broadway and in the theatre industry at large. If an appeal to a discriminatory white male gaze was required to succeed in the industry, then female actors must perform certain elements of conventional femininity. Ryan Donovan’s 2023 book Broadway Bodies explores the physical conformity this engendered, creating a Broadway that was and remains overwhelmingly white, thin, non-disabled, and conventionally attractive. And, as the book explores, the problem hasn’t necessarily gotten better with time: in some ways, the average “broadway body” has become more homogenous than ever before, due in part to economic demands placed on performers to be not just able but “hyper-abled” and prepared to do it all (Donovan 53).
The way these methods are abused by individual unscrupulous people are critical to examine, but perhaps even more critical is an understanding of how these systems open the door to abuse. Wielded with hierarchical authority by various Sacred Monsters over the last century, the privilege of moderating “truth” has been used to uphold a hostile hegemony. It can continue to be used, both intentionally and accidentally, to do so, unless the art form as we know it changes. Discarding the contributions Stanislavsky or Strasberg made to the acting canon would be both impossible and misguided. However, recognizing the ways their entrenched methodologies empower the unquestionable director to police patriarchal supremacy can help us understand how to make the theatre process more ethical for all.
Theatre is regularly hailed as a “progressive” and “liberal” space, but the industry is as dominated by outdated trappings of bigotry and patriarchal dominion as any other. The modern expressions of these issues in theatre may not be as easy to spot as the examples Green raises when pointing to the behavior of the Sacred Monsters. Bigotry has not vanished from theatre, however the implicit influence it has on the industry has become frustratingly diffuse. The result is a culture of quiet coercion which can be difficult to identify, let alone discuss– or, even more critically, address. In episode 10 of the Find Your Light podcast, theatrical intimacy professional Chelsea Pace explains one manifestation of this coercive environment:
…We’re told all throughout our training… [that] the first rule of theatre is “yes, and”… you know, “you’re always auditioning”… We get all these messages about how we have to be easy to work with. …[Actors] start to feel like being easy to work with means saying “yes” to everything, and by saying “no” or “hold on a second,” we’re being hard to work with. (22:06)
Pace illustrates one way actors are implicitly— almost invisibly— dissuaded from asserting their boundaries. Actors are not explicitly told they cannot say “no,” but an industry culture in which “no” is quietly discouraged reigns. As Pace goes on to discuss, the problem is compounded by fierce industry competition. If saying “no” in an audition to an action which goes against an actor’s boundaries may prevent them from being cast, an actor is forced to choose between compromising their boundaries or compromising a chance at employment. Much as actors in Strasberg’s studio might be discouraged from saying “no,” thereby allowing their inhibitions to get in the way of their “authentic” acting, modern actors are discouraged from saying “no” even though the industry presents it as an option.
The problem is broad, impacting actors at all levels of the industry. In an article for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes writes, “Whole generations of actors have been trained to believe that the only acceptable answer to a performance challenge… is yes. Drawing a red line is not an option.” She quotes Broadway intimacy director Claire Warden: “We are having to, at a fundamental level, subvert the conditioning that all actors are put through — right from like, high school acting — which is that… if I say no — to anything — I’m being the diva. Or I’m not dedicated enough. Or I don’t want it enough.”
The coercive patriarchal hegemony enforced by Strasberg, Meisner, and many of their male colleagues did not vanish with the end of the 20th century. While these Sacred Monsters may no longer be around, plenty of new ones have arisen. Worse yet, the Sacred Monsters themselves are not requisites for coercion to occur— all it takes is a lifetime of conditioning in “the way theatre is,” as Warden indicates.
In some ways, these monstrous ideas are all the more universal and ingrained now that these Sacred Monsters are gone. Rather than their influence waning, many of these acting teachers have become household names whose ideas have been disseminated in books and classes to acting teachers worldwide. As their ideologies proliferated, they became semi-synonymous with the very arts of acting and theatre. Meisner technique and Method acting are ubiquitous. Several decades’ worth of actors now hold these strategies— and the philosophies behind them, with all their roses and thorns— as a sort of “common sense,” even if they don’t necessarily know who or where those ideas came from, or what biases their originators may have held. Because these ideas have become so widely propagated in American theater, actors who are not aware of the history and ideology behind these methodologies might assume that they are crucial to the art. And as they are increasingly fed narratives that “theater is a safe space,” they may begin to believe that these lingering shadows of sexism and predatory behavior are the way the art is supposed to be. Left unquestioned, the taking for granted of these practices makes actors vulnerable to abuse— in fact, they explicitly encourage this vulnerability, raising a lack of personal boundaries as a matter of craft that must not be tampered with.
Essentially, the implications for actor consent that Stanislavsky inadvertently made a central feature of his system, which were then used in more explicitly coercive ways by some of his predecessors (such as Strasberg), have been dispersed in a more covert, but no less impactful, form to actors worldwide. And these ideas are not limited to professional actors or high-level students training for professional careers: these ideas are, as Warden points out, present in every level of actor training, trickling down in insidious, nigh-invisible rivulets to the level of hobbyist teens and pre-teens participating in their school musicals. While Green celebrates a safer new progressive era in the industry, closely assessing the ways these messages operate under the radar will be necessary to create an industry– and overarching theatrical culture— which is truly safe.
This is very much the kind of thinking that David Mamet critiques in Oleanna. The play is rather hostile to the nuances of sexual coercion, presenting a scenario which is outlandish in exactly how clear-cut it is, and presenting a main antagonist, Carol, whose complaints are absurd in their transparency. This is not a world in which sexual violence is something complicated, the roots of which are spread through an stealthy network of implicit messaging— this is a world in which sexual violence is a blatant falsehood.
Mamet situates college student Carol as a sort of feckless anti-intellectual, existentially confused and looking for easy answers. She is hopelessly lost in John’s class; even though she is “doing what [she’s] told” by taking notes and following the lecture, she finds it impossible to parse anything from the course material to the very reason she’s in school (Mamet 4). She complains that John’s use of language is obfuscatory: “What are you talking about? What is everyone talking about? I don’t understand. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what it means to be here” (36). John’s attempts in kind to elucidate her are taken by Carol as flirting, and she files an official complaint with the university. These complaints are unfounded: Carol has read sexual meaning into words where none exists, and Mamet makes Carol’s position as the antagonist abundantly clear by having her continuously change her story. By the end of the play, she is insisting that John raped her, twisting the language (as she had previously accused John of doing) of the law to suit her purpose: “You tried to rape me. I was leaving this office, you ‘pressed’ yourself into me. …under the statute. I am told. It was battery. And attempted rape.” (78).
Frank Rich, a Broadway icon in his own right for his long tenure as theatre critic for the New York Times, wrote that the play “rightly condemns” a certain “intellectual conformity,” acting as “an argument against fanatics… who warp the crusade against sexism, or any other worthy cause, into a reckless new McCarthyism that abridges freedom of speech and silences dissent.” In this play, the woman speaking up about harassment is the villain, and the man who has been accused is the true victim— the twisted power dynamic, and the elastic turns this dynamic takes through the course of the plot, are what set the play apart.
The grim irony of such a play presented on Broadway is that the upper echelons of the performing arts world so notoriously grapple with the opposite power dynamic. In her book Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier explores this problem in the adjacent world of opera performance. She opens the book by noting that, “in the opera industry, singers can be particularly vulnerable to predation and abuse by their superiors and mentors given the stark power differential in rehearsal rooms and teachers’ studios” (3). However, real-world abuse isn’t Cormier’s focus— instead, she dissects the prevalence of sexual violence within the narratives that make up the classical opera canon. The book is about fictional violence, but Cormier finds it necessary to point out that while real violence isn’t at the center of her study, it is undoubtedly related: “engagement with the experiences and points of view of more opera practitioners will no doubt enrich the continuing work on the politics of operatic production” (3). Cormier spends the rest of the book assessing the intricacies of fictional depictions of violence across a number of opera productions, highlighting the real-world “rape myths” the productions either disturb or reinforce with their unique presentations of the characters and situations.
If interpreting the text of Oleanna this same way, the play appears almost prophetic to a rising #MeToo movement speaking against harassment in the entertainment world. Mamet positions (as does Frank Rich) the wrongfully accused John as a sort of reversed Sacred Monster— a man who simply attempts to help a student discover truth. He has no ulterior motive, his words mean only what he says and nothing more. This is what Carol points to when she says of the complaints she has lodged with the university, “You think you can deny that these things happened… that they meant what you said they meant… we don’t say what we mean. Don’t we?… But we do say what we mean. And you say that ‘I don’t understand you…’” (Mamet 49). Some of the comments John makes to Carol are slightly off-color— and Carol certainly interprets them as such— but John did not mean them that way. There is, patently, nothing at all monstrous here. And the play explicitly exonerates John; It’s clear that he did not really commit the crime Carol accuses him of committing, since we have seen the interactions which she alleges were inappropriate and it is abundantly clear to the audience that they were not. (Even Rich notes that the play “might be a meatier work if its female antagonist had more dimensions.”) By the play’s end, John’s only crime comes on the final page, when he snaps and beats Carol. Mamet sets this up as a sort of natural consequence of the last three acts: Carol acknowledges the beating with a meek, “Yes, that’s right” (80).
By making Carol’s position so flagrantly false, Mamet defends the thinking that makes the Sacred Monsters so unassailable. Sure, perhaps John says a few things he shouldn’t, but he is not a predator. Carol’s insistence that he is automatically aligns viewers against her. The power dynamic never quite shifts so that Carol is superior: even when she is unquestionably calling the shots in the script, the fact that she has falsely accused John makes her platform impossible to take seriously. Mamet establishes an accuser-as-liar narrative (a narrative that is popularly spread in the real world, too) which, by its utter falsehood, grants Carol our contempt and John our sympathies, so that any misgivings we may have about him are forcibly discarded. One could draw a connection here between John and, say, Lee Strasberg— if it can’t be proven that Strasberg meant to sexually harass his students, did he really do so? Strasberg, like John, is a seeker of truth and knowledge, and to mischaracterize that search for truth as Carol does is a grave sin. In this lens, is Strasberg a villain, or are the real villains those who would read indecent intent into his teaching? Any act which cannot be fully clarified as intentional and openly abusive can be dismissed as a failure of the accuser— did they simply fail to understand the truth of the situation? Strasberg and John are both positioned as those who mediate truth, their accusers facing an impossible uphill battle.
Drawing comparisons between Mamet’s play and real-world cases of sexual harassment isn’t far-fetched, as publicity surrounding the play’s debut often centered the connection between it and the then-timely sexual harassment trial between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. Though Mamet insists he wrote the play before the trial took place and that it did not directly inspire any element of the play, Rich writes in his review that it is “an impassioned response to the Thomas hearings… As if ripped right from the typewriter… it could not be more direct in its technique or more incendiary in its ambitions.” Media coverage pointed to two things: how it bore striking similarity to the still-fresh court trial, and to how it asked audiences to “make up their own mind” about harassment. One feature asked, “who is harassing whom in this two-character drama at the Orpheum?” and presented opinions from six theatre-going respondents, debating the guilty party in the play.
Exploring the mythologic narrative of false sexual harassment and rape accusations, Cormier writes, “When women accuse powerful men… we hear again and again that they are doing it for attention or out of spite,” pointing out that “this kind of false allegation is exceptionally rare in reality, but dominant in the kind of stories we tell about rape” (26). Mamet presents one more, adding to the vast pile of stories of this kind, painting an image of sexual violence in broad, messy strokes which obscure nuance. The complexities of real-world harassment and assault are smoothed over. The result is a depiction that is largely unlike reality, but that claims to represent and comment on the real world as if it did so accurately. While Rich presents this as a sort of intellectual exercise of free speech, Cormier points out that such stories come at a cost: conventional rape myths put “real-life victims… in the position of having their own stories doubted based on their resemblance to [fictional stereotype]” (18).
While it is an author’s prerogative to write the stories they wish— as Mamet and Rich so ardently defend— fictional narratives have the power to shape and direct real-world opinion. Oleanna presents a narrative which openly scoffs at and invites skepticism over sexual harassment allegations, eschewing fine shades of complexity in favor of caricature. In many ways, Oleanna represents exactly why it is so hard to discuss the implicitly coercive messages the theatre industry struggles with: whereas many express an eagerness to leave the Sacred Monsters in the past, and to step into a more inclusive future, they are unwilling to observe the more covert ways monstrosity continues to color the art of theatre. The men who threw things at actors in vengeful rages and operated busy casting couches— the most obvious monsters dominating the industry— are, perhaps, becoming a relic of the past. But maybe in our rush to kick these monsters to the curb, we’ve failed to spot the less obvious ones, as well as the narratives they’ve weaved, clinging stubbornly to the industry. Only when we are willing to appreciate the nuances of hegemony woven into the fabric of the art will we be able to begin the work of undoing that influence.
As Jesse Green implies, the issue of abuse in theatre, then, could be viewed as inherent to theatre as we know it. The emergence of the director as the arbiter of what is “true” in acting created an environment in which directors were given unilateral power to extract a performance they deemed “truthful” from actors at any cost. As these directors were primarily white men, this often meant that “truth” reflected certain elements of white male hegemony. Any performer who acted in a manner incongruous to this sexist standard was therefore acting incorrectly, which is a problem the director is both obligated and entitled to correct. These ideas are understood now as something closer to common sense than codified acting technique. Stanislavsky’s quest for truth is now the blueprint, for better and for worse.
It’s easy to forget that this quest is a very recent development: only about a century old. The Stanislavskian approach to acting isn’t going anywhere, nor necessarily should it— but it is important to remember that these precepts we accept as second nature to theatre are not timeless truth, but rather fluid, changeable practice.
Theatre’s sexual harassment problem is both individual and institutional. It was explicit in the methodologies of and the cults of personality surrounding our most famous acting teachers. It remains implicit in these systems and in the hierarchical structure we are still struggling to imagine theatre without. In Great Directors at Work, Jones acknowledges both the newness of this model and the way it has rewritten theatre as we know it: “…the historical fact [is] that directors have become central to modern theatre… and modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change” (12). When he goes on to write, “When we need a new system, we will certainly create it,” he is expressing the sentiment dismissively, it’s practically an aside as he transitions into discussing the intricacies of that system and those who formalized it— but what he unwittingly acknowledges in saying this is the reality that theatre can change, and one day we will be the arbiters of that change, whether we can imagine a better alternative at present or not.
While celebrating the end of the Sacred Monsters may be premature— perhaps even detrimentally so— Green was nonetheless right to note that theatre is in the midst of an evolution. As movements like #MeToo change the ways American society as a whole thinks about harassment, theatre practitioners are increasingly seeking ways to make theatre safer for all. These conversations must account for bigotry’s uncanny ability to hide in plain sight. Like Green implies, it’s not good enough to half-heartedly “cancel” our monstrous forefathers— they are no longer the problem. The problem now persists in our own work. Understanding the roots of our theatrical practices is necessary. Closely assessing our methods to dismantle the hegemonic, hierarchical, and ultimately harmful influences we have been fed is critical to ensuring they are not thoughtlessly passed on.
Theatre’s consent problem may be inherent to the art at present. However, it does not have to be. The industry is far from being out of the woods, but with care and an eye for complexity, it can begin to free itself from the shadow of the monsters who made it.
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