7. Playing Is Not Consenting: Sexual Harassment in New York Theatre 1

Bleuwenn Lechaux

During an interview conducted in October 2017, a female playwright recounted an offer of assistantship made to her by an artistic director years earlier, when she was studying at the prestigious Juilliard School.2 After declining his invitation to dinner, she emphasised that she’d always wondered about the real reasons why she hadn’t gotten the job:

Were you only offered that role, that opportunity, because he wanted to sleep with you? So you can’t win for losing. Even if you’re right and he did it just to get sex, somebody can turn around and say you still don’t deserve that position. So, you don’t know where you stand. And you can’t move forward. (J.P., fifty-one years old, 2017)

Reflecting on this excerpt, and listening once more to the full interview with this playwright, it’s not just the residual psychological cost to survivors that stands out, but also the way in which skills, careers and professional content are structured by gender relations. In contrast to media content that reflects the unprecedented nature of the #MeToo movement but tends to extract or dissociate sexual violence from its context of production, in this chapter, I show how routine theatre practices are at the core of this type of violence and, as a consequence, represent obstacles to reporting and condemning wrongdoings. Some professional organisations and public authorities are nevertheless working to address these difficulties alongside the significant awareness-raising work that has been carried out—by women essentially—for many years.

Based on field research conducted in 2015 and 2017 among some twenty female New York theatre professionals, and before and during the reverberations of the ‘Weinstein affair’, I use a political-sociological lens to show that the sexual harassment that occurs in these art worlds is anchored in established ways of working. Indeed, the organisation and content of professional activities daily perpetuate practices of subordination. In keeping with the research conducted by Catharine A. MacKinnon (1979), sexual harassment is thus analysed here as being inscribed on a continuum of gender inequality.

Methodology

I went to New York in October 2017 as part of a decade-long investigation of activism among theatre professionals and, since 2015, an exploration of the trajectories and careers of women working in the theatre sector. It was during this time that the ‘Weinstein affair’ broke and female interviewees would often bring up the subject of sexual harassment unprompted. Though, this narrative profusion should not overshadow its prior mention, when, during my 2015 research stay, I spoke with several interviewees about the ‘scandal’ that had occurred within the Wooster group (addressed in the second part of this chapter). This was a delicate subject to broach because, as several people mentioned, the scandal was a sensitive issue that was ‘very complicated’ to discuss in the performing arts sector. Whereas this ‘affair’ received relatively limited media coverage and gave rise to only short accounts, cautious in their conclusions, the series of ‘scandals’ and ‘revelations’, notably in the theatre and film industries, unleashed outpourings in the interviews conducted in 2017. Indeed, my interlocuters were likely speaking publicly for the first time about things they had only previously addressed in the context of informal speak-outs. This because, they told me, everybody knew what was going on but nobody did anything about it. In an interview with a female director in 2017, she talked about a Facebook article she had read that very morning about a famous actor sexually harassing the seventeen-year-old sister of one of her friends, and then about another friend who had also been sexually harassed by this actor. She came to the conclusion that the ‘dam was bursting’ and that there wouldn’t be any ‘good men’ left after this deluge of revelations.

The fieldwork I conducted in 2015 and in 2017 over a total duration of seven weeks, together with several interviews carried out in 2020 (by videoconference, due to the COVID-19 pandemic), allow us to explore, through their life stories, the careers—and the discrimination that may have marked them—of twenty-eight New York theatre professionals.3 Beyond the Weinstein affair, the approach adopted, including repeat interviews with some of them over several years, encouraged the verbalisation of experiences of discriminatory practices. Lastly, far from being the result of an abstract theorisation, the interweaving of sexual harassment on the one hand and other forms of discrimination or, more broadly, professional inequalities specific to the theatre on the other, is the result of research informed by empirical findings. In this respect, the methodological framework developed over the course of previous investigations on the activism of female theatre professionals and the functioning of the related arts worlds—in particular the 126 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010 in Paris and New York as part of my doctoral thesis research—provide a useful foundation for analysing sexual harassment and understanding its structural foundations.

Before exploring how sexual harassment is embedded in New York theatre, I first discuss both the working conditions and gender inequalities that structure New York theatre, as well as outline the legal framework governing sexual harassment in the United States. The second part of this contribution looks at theatrical activity as a crucible of gender-based violence in professions whose hierarchies only sharpen the inequalities they already perpetuate. Within an ‘embodied job’,4 the exposure and denunciation of sexual harassment are all the more hindered by the fact that the body is not only a work tool, but also the medium of interactions that involve gender relations in their physical intimacy. There are a range of strategies in place to deal with these practices, targeting both the emergence of sexual harassment and the fabric of its underlying power relations. Some of these tools can be applied outside the performing arts sector, whereas others—the focus of the third part of the chapter—have been designed with the specific characteristics of the performing arts in mind.

New York Theatre Worlds and the Framing of Sexual Harassment in the US

In New York, the difference between Broadway, off- and off-off-Broadway refers to geographical zones, aesthetic movements, the number of seats in theatres (respectively 500, between 100 and 499, and less than 100 seats), and to a hierarchy of professional recognition, objectified by salary grids, differentiated legal frameworks and levels of consecration (Broadway being the most prestigious space). In terms of working conditions, Brídín Clements Cotton and Natalie Robin (2024) highlight this sector’s generally precarious employment conditions. Namely, consisting of ‘a prevalence of extremely underpaid work in the [US] theatrical production field. Many theatrical production employers pay workers, especially designers and assistants, as independent contractors on a fee-based structure that allows them to avoid minimum wage requirements. Workers are not encouraged to track their hours (or at times even encouraged not to) and are often expected to be available for last-minute engagements such as unscheduled meetings or additional rehearsals’ (Cotton & Robin, 2024, p. 96).

As this chapter analyses the ways in which power relations form the crucible of sexual harassment, it is important to provide some data on sex ratios in the artistic direction of performances. To this regard, the ‘Historical Perspectives’ project, led by Derek Miller and covering the period from 1920 to the present, gathers information about Broadway. It shows that while there has been a general trend towards greater feminisation of directing from the 1990s onwards, parity remains elusive. Indeed, this steady observed rise resulted in only a quarter of plays or musicals being directed by women by 2020. In an effort to remedy the lack of data on the theatre worlds (statistics being mostly devoted to the functioning of Broadway), ‘Women Count’ reports look at trends in recruitment in off- and off-off-Broadway theatres since 2014. According to the Women Count VI report, the rate of playwrights identified as female or non-binary has oscillated around parity for produced plays: 43% in 2019/20 and close to 60% in 2021/22. The number of female directors in both study seasons (with no non-binary playwrights among the studied productions) rose from 44% in 2019/20 to 54% in 2021/22. Thus, as also noted by Cotton and Robin (2024, p. 95) relative to a 1998 study on women directors and playwrights commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts stating that the off-off-Broadway participation of women had increased over time, ‘it [is] not a lack of women directors and playwrights but a lack of access to the most notable and high-paying jobs’.

A full understanding of the context framing sexual harassment in the United States then requires an examination of its specific legal jurisdiction. As Abigail Saguy (2003, p. 10) shows, within a common-law system such as that underlying the US legal system, and without any specific federal law governing sexual harassment, ‘American feminists and lawyers have had to make a legal case in U.S. courtrooms that sexual harassment violates an existing statute. For strategic and intellectual reasons, they chose to build sexual harassment jurisprudence on Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]’, defining it as a form of employment discrimination on the basis of sex. ‘This, in turn, has compelled them to stress certain aspects of the harm of sexual harassment, such as group-based discrimination and employment consequences, and downplay others, such as sexual violence and behavior outside of the workplace’ (Saguy, 2003, p. 10).

The legal framework for sexual harassment as workplace discrimination is especially evident in the role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the filing of charges (the EEOC is the federal agency responsible for the enforcement of laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace).5 Specifically, charges can either be filed directly with the employer (who is then responsible for investigating what happened), or with the EEOC in the absence of any reporting/investigating procedure at the place of employment or when the employer is the harasser. Once a complaint has been filed with the EEOC, the latter informs the employer and conducts an investigation that has several possible outcomes. In the first instance, mediation can be used to try to resolve a dispute. If a solution cannot be found between the two parties and the charge has been filed against a private sector employer, then the EEOC can bring the case before the federal court. The EEOC can also decide to dismiss the charge, but the option of going to court remains available and a right to sue letter can be obtained even before the Commission has completed its investigation.

Two types of sexual harassment are defined: (i) quid pro quo (something that is offered in exchange for something else, such as sexual favours for professional opportunities), and (ii) unwelcome verbal and physical sexual conduct in the workplace that creates a ‘hostile or offensive working environment’.6 The latter formulation is of particular scientific interest to the present contribution. Indeed, this specific framework for sexual harassment poses certain challenges where the performing arts are concerned. Not only does this sector lack a strict definition of ‘workplace’ since rehearsals take place both inside and outside performance spaces, but professional stakes remain high in places that prima facie appear ‘non-professional’, such as cafés, restaurants or private spaces in which professional networks are created. Furthermore, the classification of discrimination under Title VII is determined by company size (over fifteen employees).7

Sexual Harassment as a Product
of Professional Practices

John D. Skrentny’s research on the entertainment industry points to the existence of practices that are legally sanctionable, but not sanctioned. Skrentny (2013, pp. 200–201) writes of ‘acceptable discrimination’, a ‘cultural allowance for discrimination’: ‘The culture may say “yes” even when the law says “no”’. The specific features of theatre practices and related artistic content may hinder people from speaking out against and reporting psychological and physical violence. Particularly so in these professions, characterised by hierarchies that sharpen the gender asymmetry already contained therein (see also Chapter 6 in this book).

To begin, an emotional intensity characterises physical proximity in relations onstage. In interviews, the lexical field of touch permeates the accounts of female respondents, or as one female actor put it: ‘we all touch each other, hug each other’ (female actor, H.G., seventy years old, 2015). In some theatre pieces, intimacy is increased by the subject matter of the scenes, as underlined by a female stage director:

The subject of what we are working on is deeply emotional and deeply physical and deeply sexual [laughter] […]. We’re dealing with human emotions and people, actors have to strip down to their underpants and get onstage and kiss each other when they don’t really know each other. (female stage director, K.R., forty-eight years old, 2017)

At the very minimum, actors are implicitly required to use their ‘real’ emotions for theatrical purposes. As a female artistic director of a theatre institution underlined, ‘the private is really present on the stage because you use your emotions’ (M.C., fifty years old, 2015). As a result, as a female stage director put it, ‘it’s not too surprising that we come up against these problems. I think we are expected to be vulnerable to each other. In the workplace.’ In interviews, this emphasis on the emotional is also evoked as that which drew somebody to a career in the arts: an early tapping into the essence of the theatrical project and thriving off a role. There is also admiration, even a fascination with charismatic directors (usually interpreted as male) who are seen as immensely talented, as reflected in an interview with a female playwright: ‘That’s the idea we have, that of the young male genius who is obsessed with his work’ (J.P., 2017). The theatrical project gradually becomes the most important thing in the person’s life, as they devote themselves to their passion, give themselves over to it. Once the sacrifice has been embraced, the theatrical project becomes all-consuming and takes over everything.

Then, both the temporal and spatial concentration and extension of professional practice thwart the attempt to qualify behaviours as sexual harassment. First, rehearsals and shows intensify the closeness between people working on the same project, and it is implied that this physical complicity between two people enhances artistic performance. The crossover between the personal and the private is even more pronounced when on tour. A female actor described this aspect in the following words:

When you’re in a play, the company becomes your family, at least for a time, taking emotional primacy over anything else, because it’s where you spend all your time, and often the drama in the play works out in real life. (H.G., seventy years old, 2015)

Next, what happens offstage in ‘society’ events, rehearsal spaces or aftershow parties plays a crucial role in careers, professional practices and the creation of networks. Although these offstage spaces may be considered to be professional places, or if not professional, then at least of professional interest, their extensive boundaries make it all the more complicated to define the spatial scope of the second form of sexual harassment outlined above, that of employer (here, mainly a theatre owner or a producer) liability for a ‘hostile working environment’:

Because, if it didn’t happen in the context of a rehearsal or a performance, then it seems that it’s a personal matter, something that has to do with the police […]. There are things that a theatre union can protect you from, and that doesn’t extend to your apartment. (female actor, L.P., fifty-eight years old, 2015)

Another obstacle to sexual harassment becoming a professional issue lies in the value placed on physical beauty, which translates into a stereotyped conception of physical attractiveness that is defined as a ‘skill’. This is not exclusive to the stage, but something that the industry values paroxysmally. Several ‘scandals’ (including Miss Saigon in 1991 on Broadway) have revealed the potential incompatibility between the struggle against discrimination (and the possible existence of discrimination in hiring prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) and the preservation of ‘artistic freedom’ protected by the First Amendment to the American Constitution, opening the way to the legal endorsement of exceptions to discrimination. Several of my female interlocutors spoke of bad experiences as actors when they were given roles that reflected the director’s vision of physical attributes that were supposedly ‘necessary’ for a character. The perpetuation of these stereotypes is also rooted in assumed audience expectations, which are continually being fed.

How the construction of artistic desire is shaped professionally and, more broadly, socially, thus begs further reflection. Far from responding to a deliberate individual choice, the ability to ‘create theatrical desire’ is considered to be a major professional asset in getting parts and, consequently, establishing a reputation as an artist. ‘Playing the game’ means wanting to be wanted. A female director emphasised what is expected of female actors in the following words:

Sexuality. Because they look sexy, because they seem sexy onstage. These are legitimate reasons to hire people. (K.R., forty-eight years old, 2017)

The criteria guiding professional choices are indexed to the forms of identity essentialism they help to reproduce: people seek in women the naturalist bias that is projected onto them, thus helping to reproduce or even reinforce the gender order.

That women are expected to produce what is expected of them is more broadly rooted in professional practices. For example, female playwrights are encouraged to write easily accessible scripts that supposedly reflect ‘women’s tastes’. One female playwright highlighted the effects of this social expectation of aesthetic conformity:

That old classic, this whole thing when they go chick lit and all the serious writers are males. You can say two things. You can say, ‘You perceive our work to be frivolous’, but you can also say ‘You’ve been specifically looking to publish women who’ve written women’s novels’. (J.P., fifty-one years old, 2017)

Professional practices are thus doubly biased. First, in an awareness that narrative complexity is not what is mostly expected from their writing and second, in a perpetuation of female stereotypes that they are required to portray. Both ultimately justify a discrimination that is highly damaging to their professional careers. At play here is the paroxysmal mechanism of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and an ensemble of individual discriminations that all feed into one another.

Moreover, insofar as hypersexualised behaviours are quasi-normalised and have become integrated into an ordinary work reality (on this question, see also Chapter 2 and Chapter 4 in this book), the question of what defines appropriate conduct arises once again. In an article in the New York Times in 2015, Artie Gaffin, a stage manager with thirty years of experience on Broadway wrote (Healy, 2015):

I work on a highly sexualised musical, ‘Cabaret’, where there has always been a certain amount of offstage ass-slapping and nipple-tweaking; Most people have thick skin or they know it’s all in fun, not personal.

On the subject of their own or others’ intimate relationships, some interviewees exercised caution when expressing their opinion about a clear threshold not to be crossed and the line between consent and harassment. In this regard, a female stage director commented:

This idea of a casting couch has been around for a long time and we have intimate relationships in the theatre. I mean, the person that was my colleague with whom I started the theatre company, is now my husband. So [laughter], this… the moment of transition from being friends to being boyfriend and girlfriend, it could have been a moment where I reported sexual harassment. I suppose. But it wasn’t, because we actually liked each other and wanted to be boyfriend and girlfriend. (female stage director, K.R., forty-eight years old, 2017)

As seen, in organisational terms, responsibility for sexual harassment lies with the employer, and the characterisation of discrimination under Title VII applies only to companies of over fifteen employees. However, many theatre institutions are smaller than this, and the interviewees often lacked knowledge about the law and the relevant authority to contact for this type of discrimination. Moreover, even if those sexually harassed were well informed about the law, it would not be enough to put a stop to it in the performing arts sector. To understand how sexual harassment happens in these worlds, the artistic content associated with it must be embedded in professional power relations. It is through this cognitive process that sexual violence can be understood as the result of an instrumentalisation of artistic practices for domination purposes.

Beyond the legal integration of sexual harassment into a broader set of discriminations, my study, conducted in 2017 while the Weinstein affair was unfolding, also highlights the issue of sexual harassment as violence integrated into a continuum of occupational discriminations, themselves shaped by the gender order. Broadly, sexual harassment reflects a structurally asymmetrical situation that replicates pre-existing relationships of domination. Given the gendered relationships of domination within the theatre, it is not surprising that occupational content and occupational functioning become detrimental to women. This is reflected in the words of one female director:

Sexual harassment is another stage of misogyny, where in the case of… I shouldn’t say misogyny, but of power dynamics. It’s just another step of one person exerting power over another person. Because of their gender. Or because of their sexuality. Or their age. Or whatever. (K.R., forty-eight years old, 2017)

The emergence of violence depends on gender-structured professional hierarchies and positions of prestige (e.g., male directors/female actors; male employers/female employees; see also Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 in this book). Aware of these inequalities, a Black playwright and director recounts his own moral dilemma when, in 2001, he interviewed several times to become a film producer’s assistant at a major film and television production and distribution company. His comments reflect both the professional opportunity he perceived and his desire not to contribute to the sexual violence that the company was actively covering up:

At the end of my fourth interview, the young woman said: ‘OK, last question before you meet X [the film producer]: are you willing to do absolutely anything to become a Y’s [major film and television production and distribution company’s] executive?’ And I was like twenty-five, and I said, ‘no’. And for years, I kept thinking, ‘If I’d said yes, I would have gotten the job’, but now I know I’m very lucky I didn’t get the job. (F.T., forty years old, 2015)

Sexual harassment is thus part of a career-shaping system of power that can be both a boost through the promise of integration into professional networks, or a hindrance through the possibility of harming a reputation. The subordination that this professional order contains is accentuated by a principle that guides the inner workings of art worlds: subjective choice (hiring or not hiring a female actor, for example), which makes for relatively arbitrary recruitment. Since the primary criterion for hiring is ‘to serve a character’, obtaining sexual favours can become a bargaining chip. With no safety nets and in a highly competitive market, the implicit or explicit threat of unemployment can function as a professional regulation tool. It should moreover be added that dual positioning in a career (beginning/end of career), often correlated with statutory position (job insecurity/security), and in a professional sub-space (fringe/mainstream theatre), makes reporting possible to various degrees: it can encourage people to speak out publicly or, on the contrary, jeopardise the very possibility of identifying the issue and the likelihood of a complaint being successful. 8

Taken together, these relationships of domination represent a barrier to reporting possible manipulations of theatre standards as actual domination, as documented in an interview with the female artistic director of a professional theatre organisation:

I had a friend, this was a long time ago, she was in a show with a very, it was a very well-known director. And so she was new in the field, and he was demonstrating something, and he slapped her across the face to demonstrate. She lost… like it was... he knocked her off her feet. And she was like, ‘What do I do? I’m gonna get fired. Who are they gonna believe?’ He’s, it was... horrible. And he did it in the name of ‘I’m going to demonstrate something’, and he slapped her across the face, like threw her off balance, it was hard, everybody heard it, but she had no power in that room. None at all. (M.C., fifty years old, 2015)

Notably, the fictitious alibi can be used as a defence strategy. Indeed, when Ben Vereen was accused of sexual misconduct, he explained that he wanted to create an environment that replicated the themes addressed in ‘Hair’, a 1969 musical that includes full-frontal nudity (Puente, 2018).

Moreover, the progressiveness supposedly inherent in ‘open’ sexuality, which takes the form of an injunction, is reminiscent of that of the gendered cost of sexual liberation observed in France (Lechaux & Sommier, 2018). An activist from the Guerrilla Girls On Tour collective stated in an interview I conducted with her in 2017:

And in the arts, people feel that they always have these certain liberties, like ‘We can approach women, we can do plays with sexuality and we have to be very open’.

Being open can, however, be tantamount to getting pushed around. From this point of view, a culinary metaphor, which came up several times in an interview with a female actor, equates to a disembodiment, allowing the person who is assaulted to be considered a consumable commodity:

In all of these reports of these cases of sexual harassment, the person who’s doing it absolutely does not recognise the other person as a person […]. That’s not a human interaction, that’s hunger. That’s what you do at midnight in your refrigerator. When you can’t stand it anymore and you eat three quarts of ice cream. The ice cream, those women are the ice cream. (female actor, H.G., seventy-two years old, 2017)

Gender dissymmetry, and in particular confining female characteristics to outdated stereotypes—which then need to be adhered to in order to ‘succeed’—is so embedded in the rules of the game that not being wanted ends up meaning not being competent. The actor continued:

And the idea that somehow women are dangerous, untrustworthy and ask for it. That’s the great defense. ‘Well, she was wearing a short skirt’. So then what you’re saying to me is that men are incapable of controlling themselves, that besides everything else, we have to look out for them, we have to protect them from themselves, which is what that argument is. So that all of the responsibility is ours.

Women are then faced with a double constraint: the fact of having to anticipate how much seduction is required professionally (by playing the game) means that they also bear the social responsibility for an assault.9

Fighting Sexual Harassment

To fight sexual harassment, theatre professionals use both informal methods and more formalised tools, some of which aim to change the very content of theatrical activities and prevent the occurrence of unconsented remarks or gestures.

At first, the struggle is low-key: women tell their stories and bear witness in speak-outs or consciousness-raising groups, which are often ‘single-sex’. The speech that circulates there, and which can consist of ‘rumors’ (see Chapter 8 in this book), is a political action in its own right (Delage, 2017) insofar as it acts on the gender system. These instances give credit to women’s voices and help to circulate information on ‘reputations’ for preventive purposes, as underlined by a female playwright:

And honestly, that’s what we’ve always been doing by whispering to each other, ‘That guy’s a sleaze, don’t go there’. ‘If you say no to him he’ll be rude, but just say no, you won’t lose your job’. Or ‘If you say no you will lose your job’. That information has always been passed around. (J.P., fifty-one years old, 2017)

Support groups can then become more formalised, fulfilling the purpose of healing survivors’ wounds, notably through the intervention of psychologists. The legitimacy of speaking out as a collective action has been strengthened with the emergence of the #MeToo movement—even if we know that women talk long before they are listened to.

Furthermore, the use of digital tools such as Callisto, an application launched in 2015 for reporting sexual assault and that matches presumed victims, is seen as a way of overcoming a threefold difficulty. This digital tool aims, first off, to break victims’ isolation, whose fragmentation is exacerbated by the multitude of professional structures that employ them and short employment contracts, leading to the decollectivisation of forms of combatting sexual harassment. Secondly, the application avoids a situation in which any one person bears the financial and psychological costs and consequences of reporting an assault. Lastly, it allows for ‘strength in numbers’, thereby making a person’s report more credible and robust, and increasing the likelihood that they will be believed and not suspected of lying about a practice denounced as discriminatory. This technology is mainly used in universities, but in March 2018, playwright Julia Jordan, among others, organised a meeting to see if it could be transposed to the theatre industry. In practice, the victim writes an account of the assault and the application keeps a record of it over a long period of time, such that when another victim names the same aggressor, a Callisto agent can offer to put them in contact to discuss how they might wish to follow up on their respective experiences (file a complaint, contact the press, sue).

This discreet matching also aims to give more weight and credibility to the action and, as such, mitigates the potentially harmful effects on an artist’s reputation after speaking out. In addition, the keeping of a digital record and the repetition of reports help to diminish, at least in the university setting, the risk of the identity of a harasser being concealed behind the generational renewal of student cohorts, erasing traces of aggression and consequently leading to their reoccurrence:

So to be able to say it, ‘There’re thirty other women who said it’, ‘Oh yes, you know what, when we were doing the fight scene’, or ‘When we were doing that love scene, he actually put his hand inside my panties’. And all of a sudden, there are twenty people who say, ‘You know, during that scene, he was grabbing my breast’, and he’s like, ‘That was an accident, I just brushed her’. You know, all of a sudden, it paints a different picture […]. You can change people to do the right thing. Shame is a powerful human thing. (J. P., fifty-one years old, 2017)

Other tools aim to mitigate the risks involved in performing arts practices by offering a guarantee of preserving emotional safety through learning what we might call “stage consent.” One such example is Intimacy Directors International, a non-profit organisation providing training on safe rehearsal and performance practices during scenes of intimacy. They have five pillars: context, consent, communication, choreography and closure. Based on these pillars, each scene of intimacy is discussed beforehand between the parties involved in order to reach a mutual understanding and agreement about its development and exclude any improvised gesture that might surprise or offend one of the parties. Martial analogies permeate several of the interviews conducted, notably used to emphasise the unacceptable nature of violence of any kind. In the words of one playwright, the fictional alibi should no more apply to a fight scene than to a sex scene:

If an actor on stage is playing a fight scene, and he’s supposed to be acting out a strangulation, and someone is actually strangled and hurt, then nobody’s going to say ‘I was too much in character’, they’d think you’re crazy and you can’t act anymore because you’re crazy. It’s the same with sex. (R.B., fifty years old, 2017)

During the interview, she mentioned having recently become aware of this training, and expressed her interest in using it, much like choreography for fight scenes, in order ‘to create an atmosphere in rehearsal that allows everyone to feel safe to do these very vulnerable things’.

As much as my research highlights the process of ‘cumulative disadvantage’ (Blau & Otis, 1967) that activates and perpetuates discrimination against women, it also reveals the actions aimed at fighting both the occurrence of such discrimination and the inequalities that underpin it. Acknowledging that there is an overlap between different forms of gender discrimination, some initiatives focus on fighting the glass ceiling as a means of preventing sexual assault. Unions have also stepped up their efforts to fight sexual harassment. In February 2018, Actors’ Equity Executive Director Mary McColl published a column in Variety magazine recommending that employers seeking to reduce harassment hire women in leadership positions. Often then, the struggle against sexual harassment is not waged in isolation from the continuum of inequalities on which it lies. For instance, the above-mentioned playwright, Julia Jordan, is not only among the founders of the Lilly Awards,10 but also one of the leaders of the Count,11 helped draft the Statement of Principles on Harassment,12 and is the originator of the study conducted by Emily Sands at Princeton.13 In an interview conducted in 2017, she mentioned how difficult it was, before 2017, to get unions to address the issue of sexual harassment. By contrast, the Weinstein scandal has led to the implementation of many of the conditions she had previously proposed to union leaders.

Moreover, reinforcement of state and municipal laws (New York State and City) is expected to accompany the aforementioned professional provisions. The New York State budget bill for 2019 requires employers to take a series of measures to address and prevent sexual harassment. On April 11, 2018, the New York City Council passed the Stop Sexual Harassment in NYC Act, explicitly stating that protections against sexual harassment extend to all employees. Here, the application is broader than that provided under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, at least concerning the specific discrimination of sexual harassment, and thus also applies to small theatre collectives. On June 27, 2018, in the wake of #MeToo and ahead of the formal obligation to comply with state and municipal legislation, the Broadway League (the national trade association of Broadway) proposed a training course in partnership with the Actors Fund ‘specifically related to and focused upon employer responsibilities’. In January 2018, the Off-Broadway League trade association formed a sexual harassment task force and began working towards adopting an anti-harassment policy and code of conduct for its members, in addition to plans to hold training in the months that followed.

However, legal measures alone are not enough to put a stop to conduct that is embedded in the gender order described above. The use of tools aimed at countering sexual harassment comes up against the same obstacles that determined the latter’s emergence. That is, a gender-structured job market and strong personalisation of hiring power—linked to the subjectivity that guides artistic choices—where the fragile definition of rules framing interactions seems to depend on individual willingness. Collectively undetermined, the delimitation of boundaries of what is acceptable and what is condemned then hinges on how the leader of an artistic project perceives their professional role:

When I’m working on very physical work, I will often just check in with people. Like, ‘Does that feel okay? Do you feel...’ Because part of [the work] is about being physically safe and that’s something that I have to be really on top of. […]. Actors will not complain. They will not stop things because they don’t want to cause problems. So I feel like I’m very aware of needing to just tell them over and over again, ‘Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel safe, stop things if you don’t feel safe’. You have to let people know that there’s space for that. (R.M., fifty years old, 2017)

The relationship of trust forged within an artistic collective can nevertheless give rise to conflicts of loyalty when accusations of violence arise. This was the case in what became a major scandal involving the Wooster Group theatre company, reported in a New York Times article entitled ‘Sex and Violence, Beyond the Script’ (Healy, 2015), about actor Scott Shepherd’s physical assaults of his then-partner, actor Marin Ireland, during the London rehearsals of the play Troilus and Cressida. Though highly sensitive, the public scandal did lead to a collaboration between lawyers and theatre professionals, one result of which was the drawing up of ‘statements of harassment’. After a meeting on December 4, 2017 in the Public Theater in New York City to discuss tools for combatting sexual harassment ‘post-#MeToo’, Marin Ireland and civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel launched the Human Resources for the Arts project on January 16, 2018, the aim being to create a pro bono mediation system (with a mediator not working in the theatre worlds), in particular for microaggressions.

Conclusion

Making an issue visible does not automatically mean that it will be addressed. Though, the exposure of criminal offences has pushed the issue of sexual harassment to the top of the public agenda, accelerating the implementation of measures to stop it. While procedures for fighting sexual harassment have been formalised (the Callisto project and tool, intimacy direction through choreographic techniques, pro bono mediation), legal measures nevertheless seem to be of little help in worlds where hiring practices remain governed by the uncertainty and arbitrariness of subjective artistic choices. From this point of view, and within the limits of the law in the fight against discrimination in theatre (as also highlighted elsewhere, see Lechaux, 2021), sexual harassment is no exception.

Faced with the continuum of gender-based inequalities, the struggle against sexual harassment must be accompanied by actions targeting all the professional practices that perpetuate endemic violence daily (Saguy, 2018). This arises as early as the training period for apprentices in artistic workplaces, where the ‘constraints of the vocation’ prevail and the necessary endorsement of the master already sets up a professional interest in subordination (Trachman, 2018, p. 139). Gender-based violence is also deeply embedded in local contexts, upon which the possibilities and modalities of denunciation depend (see Chapter 8 in this book).

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