My take

I wrote a long post over a year ago in response to an article in the Chicago Reader about sexual abuse in the theatre.  I abandoned it and left it unposted because I was worried about how I would come off in it -- if it would scare away producers from hiring me because it looked like I would be difficult.   Time went by, and I forgot about the post.  Then Harvey Weinstein happened, and the #metoo thing started on social media, and I was seeing posts by people with whom I've worked, talking about all the abuse they've faced in theatre.  I was seeing posts by actors about how they went to their stage managers to complain and their stage managers did nothing.  I find that reprehensible.  But as a stage manager myself, I don't always have an obvious person to go to if an actor is harassing me.  I thought of one particular actor on one particular show who harassed me.  He was also a producer on the show and a close friend of the director, and he stayed late one evening after rehearsal the first week and made me uncomfortable by asking numerous personal questions about myself, ending by inviting me to some event with him.  When I declined, he continued over the following weeks to harass me about hanging out with him.  He told me I wasn't "warm" enough because I didn't socialize with him outside rehearsal, told me part of my job was to make the actors comfortable, and that included socializing....  When I rebuffed him, he took his inappropriate behavior onstage -- first in fight-call (running the fight scenes before a show) and then into the show itself, even once glaring up at the booth during a performance after purposely doing something he shouldn't have onstage.  Eventually he sent me a long, inappropriate e-mail (asking me not to share the e-mail with anyone) about our "relationship," and when he didn't get the response he wanted from the e-mail, he even cornered me after a show one night when I left the theatre after everyone else, informing me he was purposely trying to "razz" me because he was failing to get a reaction from me and I wasn't being "warm" enough and my lack of warmth and friendliness towards him was making him struggle with his performance on stage.  I went to the (male) general manager, whom I remember chuckling and sighing as if the actor were an annoying child.  The GM said he'd do something if the show were running longer, but we were already set to close in a week or two by then, and the actor wasn't a member of Actors' Equity Association, so the union couldn't do anything even though I am a member.  I didn't push the issue, because I knew a lot of the work I get as a stage manager is because I'm so low-drama, and because I didn't consider the actor a serious physical threat as long as I was never alone with him.  However, I refused to interact with the actor in any way at all after that, so I figured I might as well join the GM in his attitude that we were close to closing.  I turned over running fight-call (which the actor was routinely turning into an opportunity to harass me) to my Assistant Stage Manager and stopped giving the notes that it's my job as a stage manager to give, since the actor was unable to take my notes without harassing me.  I interacted with the ladies in the show but completely avoided the men backstage.  I asked my ASM to wait for me every night so I would never have to leave the theatre and walk to the subway alone again, and I always had pepper spray in my hand as I left.

In the remaining time that the show ran and after the show closed, I told the story to friends as something to laugh over -- by laughing at the actor, I belittled him.  I shared with friends the e-mail he had sent me specifically because he had asked me not to, so it gave me a sense of power to expose him for the creep he is.  I remember passing my phone around, e-mail up on the screen, one night at a bar, enjoying that my friends were laughing at him and calling him names.  It gave me the power back and reduced him to a non-threatening laughingstock.

But both times after the show closed when he sent me e-mails about jobs, it didn't make me laugh -- it made me shudder and say "ick" when they popped up in my inbox, and I hoped he would stop e-mailing me.

So when I saw all the #metoos on Facebook and debated if I had a blog post about this subject in me, I searched my blog to see if I'd ever written about that actor and was unable to find anything... but there, sitting on my computer, was an abandoned post about the subject in general, along with notes about why I wasn't posting it and that it sounded like I was whining.  I'm still not posting it, because frankly it's not very well written and is way too long, and I couldn't even be bothered to finish rereading it myself, so I wouldn't expect anyone else to read it all the way through....   But I am posting this.  Because the problem isn't just big, powerful Harvey Weinstein.  It's the little people too. It's the little perverts; it's the people who think it doesn't matter because a show is closing soon; it's the directors who don't mind that their actors are gross people; it's the people who turn a blind eye; it's the fact that as a whole, the industry doesn't treat this profession as a job where people should treat their coworkers with the same respect with which they'd treat someone in an office.

When I first moved to New York after graduating college, I got a job as a Production Assistant on a show.  The Company Manager of that show made some vaguely inappropriate remarks to me backstage.  I don't remember what he said, only that he made me slightly uncomfortable.  One day, sitting in the lobby chatting to someone higher up on that show with whom I'd become friends, I told him about the comments -- I was talking as a friend, not as a PA complaining to someone more powerful -- and he immediately made a face and stood up, ready for a fight, asking if I wanted him to go say something for me.  I laughed and said no, it wasn't worth it.  It truly wasn't worth it -- the Company Manager was just a sad, middle-aged creepy guy trying to flirt with a 21-year-old girl, and in a perfect world guys wouldn't do that at work, but it seemed relatively harmless -- the man wasn't around more than once a week to hand out checks, and I'd experienced worse.  But my friend's response is the one I wish everyone would have.  He didn't laugh and brush it off, he didn't stop to think about the consequences of standing up for me, he didn't dismiss it as small and just business as usual, and he didn't just say, "oh, that sucks" and post his moral outrage on social media....  He knew it was wrong, and he was ready to put himself on the line for it.

We all need to be more like that.