The #MeToo and Time's Up movements have drawn global attention to workplace exploitation, bullying, harassment and abuse. Notably, this activism had its inception in the acting industries, where there has been an outpouring of testimony highlighting such behaviour. While international media coverage of #MeToo has focused primarily on the film industry, the theatre profession has equally had to confront its own practices. In the UK, for example, the Old Vic's 2017 investigation of Kevin Spacey revealed twenty allegations of inappropriate behaviour during his tenure as artistic director.Footnote 2 In the same year, Max Stafford Clark left Out of Joint Theatre after a formal complaint of lewd behaviour, for which the director subsequently apologized.Footnote 3 Beyond high-profile cases, discussions have emerged in a variety of national and local settings, often traversing the intersecting industries of screen and stage. In 2018, American Theatre magazine published a special section in one of its issues entitled #TheatreToo, which examined systemic abuse, harassment and sexism in the US theatre profession and looked at how various theatres were addressing the issues.Footnote 4 In Australia, the main state theatres have adopted new policies to deal with bullying and harassment after a nationwide survey found significant problems with how complaints were dealt with.Footnote 5 In New Zealand, the Women in Theatre New Zealand group, founded shortly before the #MeToo revelations, has been active in supporting female practitioners and addressing the issues raised by #MeToo.
Through its emphasis on exposing ‘behind-closed-doors’ behaviours, #MeToo has inevitably brought a great deal of public attention to industry working practices, including those of acting, which is my focus here: I ask what the #MeToo movement reveals about how acting is understood at the present time, both in practice and by the public at large. The claim of one convicted abuser whose case I will discuss, New Zealand acting coach Rene Naufahu, was that his sexual offending in the classroom was simply preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’.Footnote 6 His defence postulates a narrative of pragmatism, which assumes that practices that require sexual and emotional discomfort on the part of female actors are simply part and parcel of what professional acting entails. Drawing from Elin Diamond's argument that dramatic realism does not simply reflect the real but in fact produces it, I examine how figures like Naufahu rely on promulgating certain notions of acting in order to produce a reality that legitimates abusive behaviour.Footnote 7
I pursue this through two interwoven arguments. The first is that the language and concepts of acting methodologies, particularly those of naturalistic acting, are often entangled in how exploitative behaviour is framed. For example: an actor is overtaken by the muse of the real, and therefore cannot be held fully responsible for his actions; that is, his abuses, or ‘mistakes’, are an unfortunate consequence of deep commitment to craft. The concepts of truth, the real and the natural hold particular sway in this framework, and I scrutinize how their deployment both within acting and in its depiction in the public sphere is used to justify abuse. My second argument is that such behaviour is not, as in the hypothetical situation above, misplaced impassioned performance, but a performance of acting itself – that is, the actor, director or coach, in a selectively self-reflexive manner, exploits their professional ‘role’ in order to exert power over their victim. As such, I suggest that it is helpful to use the very discourses of acting exploited in these scenarios to scrutinize the perpetration of abuse. The value in drawing from the language of acting to critically frame abuse that takes place in the performance context is that it allows us to see such behaviour for the ‘act’ that it is. In what follows, therefore, I examine both how acting is practised, with an emphasis on the pedagogical context, and how it is perceived. I pay particular attention to the relationship between practice and perception; that is, to the versions of reality being produced through the deployment of acting methodologies.
Pedagogy, power and the naturalization of abusive behaviour
Rene Naufahu is best known in New Zealand for his performance in the 1990s as paramedic Sam Aleni in the long-running soap opera, Shortland Street. He subsequently carved out a significant place in the New Zealand entertainment industry, working as an actor, writer and director as well as acting teacher and coach, before he was charged in 2016 with multiple counts of sexual assault and sexual violation. While he initially characterized his accusers as vengeful liars acting in conspiratorial concert, he finally pleaded guilty to six charges of sexual assault, explaining that his actions were a result of his ‘professional passion for the art of acting’, rather than a deliberate abuse of power.Footnote 8 He was sentenced to one year of home detention. As noted above, Naufahu's justification for his actions was that he was preparing his students for the ‘real world of acting’. In an interview conducted before his admission of guilt, he remarked, ‘I was always committed to making all my students, male and female, better actors by trying to get them ready for actual roles in the industry. This included close contact and intimate scenes. That's acting in the real world’.Footnote 9
Naufahu's guilty plea meant that victims were not required to give evidence; however, some of those who made complaints gave anonymous interviews to the media, which describe aspects of his behaviour. One interviewee explained that ‘inappropriate touching started within group classes’, after which Naufahu selected certain students for one-on-one lessons, which is where the offending took place:
His assaults on Rose began with forcible kisses, and escalated to increasingly invasive touching and groping. ‘He would push it every time, until the point where I was just actually nauseated by what was happening, to the point where we weren't even doing the things you would do in a standard acting class, to the point where it was just: I'm here purely because I'm too scared to tell anyone’.Footnote 10
Another interviewee described a similar scenario:
The court heard that Naufahu would perform ‘let me in, let me out’ and ‘push me, pull me’ exercises with the actresses in an effort to ‘express their emotions’. The victim told the Herald Naufahu first assaulted her during one of these exercises. ‘He used his “pull” motion to kiss me on the mouth, after which I pushed him away and asked him what he was doing. The response was that this was a common acting coaching technique used to build confidence and help students in “the real world of acting”’.Footnote 11
The same student reported that Naufahu called her ‘a huge acting talent and was going to “go places” … [he] called her the next NZ Charlize Theron’.Footnote 12 Such flattery is not insignificant for it suggests that the student, if willing to follow the teacher's lead, is capable of moving into the industry, underscoring how much power is vested in the teacher's hands. As Linda Walsh Jenkins and Susan Ogden-Malouf argue, ‘The acting coach or director frequently serves as an all-knowing guru for whom the performer must be absolutely vulnerable (opening the way to both psychological and sexual exploitation)’.Footnote 13 Peta Tait similarly writes of the ‘authority accorded males in actor training’, and identifies the ‘imperative in this type of actor training … to meet a teacher's expectations for what is required for emotional expression’.Footnote 14 Naufahu clearly exploited his position as a teacher with considerable industry status by applying supposedly legitimate methodological principles to inexperienced students.
While many aspects of Naufahu's case were specific to the circumstances in which he operated, it is possible to identify problematic patterns of behaviour similar to those raised in numerous analyses of method acting, and highlighted by the fast-changing attitudes around the #MeToo movement. The vulnerability evident in the accounts of Naufahu's students, for example, is produced in part by the degree to which, as Rosemary Malague suggests, the very concepts of vulnerability and risk taking in acting discourses are differently inflected for women and men. Reflecting on her own training, she remarks, ‘Just as the women of the class were rewarded for their figures and fragility, so were the men rewarded for their muscles and masculinity’.Footnote 15 In this context, the ability or willingness on the part of female actors to be emotionally and sexually vulnerable is considered a part of professional practice – the ‘real world of acting’. Indeed, Elaine Aston, in a critique made in the 1990s, points out how ‘this “method” invites the actress to identify with the oppression of the female character to whom she has been assigned’.Footnote 16 Similarly, Sue-Ellen Case argues that the basis of method acting lies in Freud's ‘gender-specific notions of psychological development’.Footnote 17 As a consequence, female characters in plays influenced by this psychological approach, ‘when they do have a complex psychological base, are usually frustrated and unfulfilled … they wait for the male to take the subject position of action. Their desire is for him to act, they make no attempt to act for their own fulfilment’.Footnote 18 In repeatedly referring to the ‘real world of acting’ to explain and justify his behaviour – which included exercises that asked students to submit to his sexual advances – Naufahu obliquely gestured to this highly gendered set of practices, for it is only within such a framework that his behaviour could be considerate ‘natural’ or legitimate.
Elin Diamond's concept of ‘realism-without-truth’, which she posits in her feminist appraisal of dramatic realism, provides one way of beginning to unknit the interweaving of the language of naturalistic acting, including its gendered aspects, and the justification of abuse that we see deployed in Naufahu's case. What Diamond means in describing realism-without-truth is realism without the patriarchal truth claims that underlie it, and that construct and shape female subjectivity. As she writes, and as referred to above, ‘Realism is more than an interpretation of reality passing as reality; it produces “reality” by positioning its spectator to recognize and verify its truths’.Footnote 19 In the naturalistic acting context, therefore, methodology is not so much a means of giving as lifelike or truthful a representation of the ‘real world’ as possible, as it delimits and shapes that real according to the underlying values of those who practise and promote the methodology. One means of applying Diamond's concept to cases such as Naufahu's is, as suggested earlier, to scutinize how the language and principles of naturalistic acting are coopted in order produce certain iterations of the real.
The distinction made in film studies between acting as ‘impersonation’ and as ‘personification’ presents one such means of ‘denaturalizing’ Naufahu's behaviour. The contrasting designations account for both the legacy of theatrical acting methodology in screen performance and the impact of star persona. Film theorists understand impersonation as an act of skilled mimesis (method acting, for example), and ‘personification’ as a form of ‘non-acting’ where the camera captures ‘natural behaviour’.Footnote 20 Personification is often associated with star acting, where the power of the star persona eclipses the role that the actor plays – i.e. we talk about a ‘Tom Cruise’ movie.Footnote 21 Significantly, feminist film theorists argue that personification is more commonly applied to female acting as a way of emphasizing appearance over craft. For example, Karen Hollinger writes,
The acting abilities of female stars have traditionally been more naturalized than those of male stars, who are much more likely to be described as highly skilled and well-trained professionals whose success is the result of hard work and mastery of the craft of acting, rather than of their physical attractiveness and natural talent.Footnote 22
The terms ‘impersonation’ and ‘personification’ are useful in this context inasmuch as they offer a means of assessing the rhetorical and behavioural manoeuvring between modes of performance and non-performance of figures like Naufahu. I suggest that in cases of exploitation or abuse there is often a self-reflexive deployment of impersonation on the part of the abuser in order to naturalize their exploitative behaviour. That is, perpertrators impersonate the committed actor or acting coach in order to naturalize (i.e. legitimize) their behaviour. In turn, scutizining such behaviour as impersonation is one way of denaturalizing the arguments made in its defence.
Malague's critique of Stanislavski's student Richard Boleslavsky's publication on the System, Acting: The First Six Lessons, helps to illustrate how the concept of impersonation applies when inappropriate behaviour takes place in the naturalistic acting context. The book describes a fictionalized version of Boleslavsky taking a young female actor, simply known as ‘the creature’, under his tutelage. Part of his process takes place outside the acting lesson proper and involves driving the young actress to real tears – i.e. bullying her to the point of extreme distress. Malague notes, ‘Real tears, suffered because of the teacher's insults and machinations, become a sign of talent. The teacher makes the student cry and calls it a performance’.Footnote 23 J. Ellen Gainor cites historian David Garfield's description of similar attacks at Strasberg's studio, referring to the ‘“annual ingenue breakdown” that seemed to accompany his “shattering” “fault-finding assessments of their work.”’Footnote 24 Peta Tait also refers to numerous examples of Stanislavski manipulating the emotional states of his female actors in order to provoke the kind of performances that he believed were true to character. As Tait points out,
These instances of female actors being reduced to tears by the director confirm his interpretations of the female characters’ emotions. They imply that there is a difference in the female performer's interpretation of the emotional reactions but the director does not allow her version.Footnote 25
In each case, female actors are disempowered by the authoritarianism of the acting teacher. While the context of Naufahu's sexual abuse and the kind of psychological abuse or manipulation described in Boleslavsky's story differ, what they have in common is that the terms of the staging – the scene of the emotional or sexual breach – are not equally clear to each party. That is, Boleslavsky views the female student's real tears as an excellent performance, and at the same time is fully aware that she herself does not perceive that she is acting a scene at all. The acting teacher draws power from the self-reflexivity of the scene, a reflexivity that only he is able to perceive. Naufahu staged scenes for his own gratification, within which he ‘impersonated’ the roles of both actor and coach. While his students attempted to perform their given scene, there was another scene at play, another act that was being performed, in which the students were not equal players. Furthermore, as will be discussed below, Naufahu exploited his own reputation – that extent to which he was a significant industry persona – in order to fully assume this ‘role’.
‘Passion sometimes confuses boundaries’: exploiting the pretext of being ‘in character’
The movement between states of performance and non-performance is frequently characterized in cases such as Naufahu's as effecting a kind of blurring or confusion of behavioural boundary lines. When this occurs, transgression is explained as not so much a fault on the part of the abuser as a consequence of the fundamentally unstable divide that separates acting from the ‘real world’. Naufahu's public statement of apology, excerpted below, illustrates how the kind of impersonation described above relies on deliberately confusing ‘ordinary’ behaviour and that which is undertaken ‘in character’:
Like others, I have committed my time and resources to [promoting the profession]. I have been passionate, clearly too passionate. Passion sometimes confuses boundaries and emotions. I see that now. I accept that … I have let my personal feelings and issues enter my professional life as an acting coach. I accept that rather than just being passionate and challenging, my approach was also at times inappropriate and offensive to some. That rather than just helping students, my passion for the craft has confused relationships that were dear to me and that I have as a result acted in a way that it is inappropriate and correctly questioned. At the time, I did not see this or think this, but I do now. If I have hurt these students and let them down, I regret that. That was never my intention.Footnote 26
The statement evokes the trope of the commited artist, using the term ‘passion’ to qualify the abusive behaviour: ‘being passionate and challenging’, ‘my passion for the craft’, ‘passion sometimes confuses boundaries’. One anonymous victim remarked after the publication of Naufahu's statement that his ‘description of his actions as an “over-display of passion” was “ridiculous”’. She further remarked, ‘I believe whole-heartedly that I was a victim of a carefully considered, well-practiced grooming routine. I was chosen specifically, for my vulnerability and eagerness to act. It was not a mistake or unintentional’.Footnote 27 Notably, Naufahu's elision between ‘passion’ as professional committment and sexual passion associates actorly skill with sexual drive.
Allegations made against Hollywood actor James Franco in his capacity as acting teacher, similarly to Naufahu, suggest an equation of sexual frankness with skilled performance. The first masterclass Franco offered at his film school, Studio 4, was entitled ‘Sex Scenes’. In documentary footage shot during the class, the actor encourages his students, ‘Let's cross some lines, know what I mean, and then see how you deal with it. Either you like it or you don't, or something comes out of it. But I would definitely cross some lines’.Footnote 28 The language of artistic investigation – crossing boundaries in order to stretch the imagination and develop artistic impulse – is intertwined with sexual suggestion in a way that makes students susceptible to exploitation. In 2018, the Los Angeles Times published an investigative article based on interviews with four former students of Franco's film school who made various claims (described as ‘not accurate’ by Franco) of sexually inappropriate or exploitative behaviour. The claims related to acting opportunities offered to students on the actor's personal projects, many of which, as reported by the Times, included nudity and depictions of sexual behaviour (student Sarah Tither-Kaplan related that she ‘signed nudity agreements for each of the films she made with Franco’).Footnote 29 What students’ accounts of working with the actor suggest is that artistic license simply provided a pretext for unacceptable behaviour:
But one day on set [of feature film The Long Home] in May 2015, a producer approached her and other women to ask if they wanted to film a ‘bonus scene’ of an orgy. In it, Tither-Kaplan appeared fully nude, she said. A handful of other women were selected to appear with Franco, who simulated performing oral sex on each of them, Tither-Kaplan said. But in each case, she said he removed a clear plastic guard that covered their vaginas – and continued to simulate the sex act with no protection.Footnote 30
The accusation vividly and disturbingly renders the so-called ‘real world of acting’. In both Naufahu's case and in the allegations against Franco we see an exploitation of acting pedagogy (and students) that takes advantage of the public profile of the teachers and their ‘authority’ in relation to acting practices. The exploitation and abuse (alleged in Franco's case, admitted in Naufahu's) were justified on the grounds of preparing students for the ‘reality’ of the acting industry but in fact compounded the very abuses that have been exposed by #MeToo as endemic to it.
It is significant in Franco's case that he was documenting his work as an acting teacher, a role that both enhances his artistic status in the public eye and also promulgates certain ideas about acting, artistry and industry. The classroom-based footage is similarly oriented to other programmes that offer audiences a glimpse inside the acting process, such as the television series Inside the Actors Studio, which features interviews with prominent actors about elements of their craft. This interrelation of the publicization of the craft of acting and the promotion of star actors is long-established. Reporting on the American method acting technique was integral to the ‘myth making’ of the new breed of stars associated with the Actors Studio in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 31 Since then, acting processes have continued to be publicized as a way of enhancing the perceptions and therefore valuation of particular actors and projects as well as to promote star acting in general. Anjelica Jade Bastién suggests that method acting ‘is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique’.Footnote 32 As such, non-specialist discourses of acting practice, for example very broad notions of what comprises ‘the method’, serve to frame for the public what acting entails. Notably, such discourses are often associated with, and privilege, male acting. Hollinger writes, ‘The Method's initial effect of strongly connecting good acting with male actors has indisputably denigrated the actress as an artist and exacerbated what feminist critics have since characterized as The Method's “inherently patriarchal and misogynist characteristics”’.Footnote 33 That is, the biases present within acting methodologies are reiterated through how the entertainment industry and media communicate what constitutes ‘good’ acting to the public.
When acting is framed by such broad tropes, if an actor or coach is ‘carried away’, it may be explained as the result of intense committment to an artistic goal. Consequently, the professionalism of the actor is valourized and responsibility for their behaviour deferred. Accusations against actor Darryl Cox of Profiles Theatre in Chicago provide additional illustration of such ‘confusion’ of boundaries. In a long-form feature article published in the Chicago Reader, a number of actors and crew described a sustained history of Cox blurring ‘the boundaries between the world of the play and the world Cox actually lived in’.Footnote 34 The Reader article pays particular attention to Profiles's 2016 production of Tracy Letts's Killer Joe:
In the play, members of the Smith family think they're paying Killer Joe to do a job – to kill Ansel Smith's first wife so they can collect the insurance money – but it quickly becomes clear that Joe is running the show. And, as Profiles's production of Killer Joe progressed, it began to seem to members of the cast and crew that the man who played Killer Joe was doing the same, breaking down all the systems that were intended to keep the play and reality separate.Footnote 35
Those quoted in the article describe instances of both physical violence and inappropriate sexual behaviour onstage – all carried out under the pretext of Cox being in character (it must be noted that Cox himself has denied any abusive intent). Profiles's long-standing motto was ‘whatever the truth requires’.Footnote 36 In the case of Cox's behaviour, it would seem that this ethos, which is closely associated with naturalistic acting, served to justify his abusive behaviour. Killer Joe cast member Somer Benson remarked, ‘you think of the work you're doing, “This is what it requires. This is whatever the truth requires. This is what is required of me to do this”’.Footnote 37 Benson's comments illustrates the power of the concept of truthful behaviour in the acting context. As Malague writes, ‘In Stanislavskian theory, the end is also the means: “truthfulness” in the theatrical production is achieved through “truthfulness” in the acting process. The believable actor is one who believes’.Footnote 38 Furthermore, the notion of truthfulness also affects how audiences perceive performance. The Reader article notes, for example, the positive critical appraisal of the ‘reality’ of the violence in Killer Joe: ‘“At one point, a female cast member is being brutally choked, then forced to give a makeshift blow job,” wrote the Chicago theater blogger the Fourth Walsh. “It's vicious and real!”’Footnote 39
Part of the power behind the narrative of acting practice that Naufahu, Cox and others exploit is the idea that acting techniques that strive for emotional truth somehow transcend acting; that is, they transcend the act of ‘impersonation’. Within this paradigm, performers are not impersonating the emotion that they are conveying – they are living and breathing it as a reality. This reality, in turn, is accorded a special status because of its nature as art. That this attitude is widely recognized is apparent from the send-up it receives in Alejandro Gonzalez Iniarittu's Oscar-winning film Birdman, where committed method actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) excuses his onstage sexual transgressions by explaining, ‘I don't pretend out there, I told you. I pretend just about everywhere else, but not out there’.Footnote 40 What we see in these instances is a strategic melding of discourses of, on the one hand, the highly skilled act of impersonation and, on the other, the radical self-effacement of acting altogether in the sense meant by Virginia Wright Wexman when she describes ‘the Method's version of itself as so realistic that the term acting cannot properly be applied to it’.Footnote 41 The effect is that such behaviour is ‘naturalized’ within the industry context in which it takes place. Whether calculatedly or out of a misplaced sense of artistic legitimacy, Naufahu very much ‘played the part’ of the passionate actor in order to facilitate his abuse of his students – that is, he was engaged in an act of impersonation, but at the same time he drew on the power of personification – his star persona – in order to normalize his actions. In this way, personification served to ‘naturalize’ the act of impersonation. That is, just as the ‘personification’ mode of acting is understood to capture so-called natural behaviour, so too can it be marshalled in service of making invisible the machinations of exploitation. Mimesis is strategically deployed in these instances to produce a malleable reality where acts carried out while ‘in character’, even as they are justified as a means of preparing actors for the reality of the industry, are framed as of a different order of reality than if they were carried out in the real world.
Moreover, in the same way that the concept of personification in film suggests that personal aura may be as powerful as acting technique, so too may a forceful persona be granted a kind of special status in the working environment. The accusations against the long-standing artistic director of Alley Theatre in Houston, Gregory Boyd, for example, suggest that the strong personality of the director, coupled with his industry prestige, cultivated a climate that enabled abusive behaviour to continue over a long period.Footnote 42 American Theatre reported that ‘a number of former employees accused Boyd of ‘“creat[ing] a toxic work environment at the city's most renowned theatre”, calling him someone “who frequently singled out young actresses for verbal abuse”’.Footnote 43 This kind of behaviour, in turn, may draw on tenets of acting methodology – committment to truth, for example – in order to mask itself – i.e. naturalize itself. As Diamond writes of what she calls ‘realism's mystifications’, the ‘hackneyed “mirror of life” conceit erases agency and ideology – the point of view in the angle of the mirror, in the holder of it, and in the life it reflects’.Footnote 44 When this happens, victims of abuse tend to be silenced in much the same way that the skill of female actors in the film context is effaced by a discourse of naturalization; that is, when abusive behaviour is naturalized or normalized, the voices of complainants remain unheard. The manipulation of notions of truth and the real has the effect of casting doubt on the veracity of the claims of complainants as well as calling their professionalism into question. This undermines the reality of their experiences and precludes them from shaping the real-world conditions of their working environment.
Toward a ‘different mimesis’
Even with continuing claims, charges and convictions resultant from #MeToo, there remains a persistent diminishment of the reality of complainants’ experiences. This is clear, for example, in Naufahu's public statement, which was criticized by the sentencing judge as ‘minimising the offending’.Footnote 45 This minimization was further demonstrated in his use of various media to try and control the narrative of the case. For example, the weekend his name-suppression order was lifted, an interview was published in a leading national broadsheet where he defended his actions. Around the same time he was baptized by a support group for professional sportspeople, actors and singers, who posted pictures of the event on Instagram. After charges were laid but before his guilty plea he performed at a slam poetry event, where he continued to suggest that he was a victim of unjust persecution.Footnote 46 His denial of guilt before later public admission is significant in the sense that the initial pretence of innocence may be reasonably described as an ‘act’ in itself. Indeed, as reported in the New Zealand Herald, the Crown prosecutor questioned ‘the authenticity of Naufahu's remorse after he changed his plea’ and contended that ‘there was a level of victim blaming from Naufahu as his students came forward with their allegations’.Footnote 47
Franco's response to his accusers also deflected responsibility. Responding to the Los Angeles Times story, he remarked,
Like I said, there are stories that need to get out. There are people that need to be heard. I have my own side of this story, but I believe in these people that have been underrepresented getting their stories out enough that I will hold back things that I could say just because I believe in it that much … If I have to take a knock because I'm not going to try and actively refute things, then I will.Footnote 48
The statement was described by one critic as a ‘non-denial denial’: ‘By not telling his side of the story, or acknowledging the women's allegations in any real way, he's effectively shifting the conversation from him to the moment at hand, wielding the movement as a shield. Franco cast himself not just as an ally, but as a martyr’.Footnote 49 Furthermore, the phrase ‘not accurate’ was repeatedly used by the actor and in statements made on his behalf. This is deliberately obfuscating language – to say that something is not accurate is not to deny that it happened – that asserts the actor as arbiter of accuracy, as arbiter of the real. Defending his behaviour, Darryl Cox stated, ‘Acting and directing are very intimate jobs and ones where a person's intentions can be easily misread or misinterpreted’.Footnote 50 The statement suggests that the fault lies not in the behaviour itself, but in the mistaken judgement of those who ‘misread’ it. Intriguingly, after the Chicago Reader’s article was published, further allegations against Cox were made, this time relating to use of pseudonyms to credit fictitious artistic collaborators, ‘including crediting productions to female directors who did not exist’. The Reader notes, ‘Many of these aliases were cover for the theater's coartistic director Darrell W. Cox’. Cox admitted to this falsification of credits, explaining that when starting out he wanted the theatre to seem a more significant operation than it was.Footnote 51
Each of the cases discussed demonstrates the connection between the abuses and exploitation revealed by the #MeToo movement and methodologies of acting that privilege and protect the exercise of power through blurring the distinctions between the real and the performed. This blurring is not a form of misunderstanding – of mistakenly getting it wrong – but rather an ethical, moral and legal malleability built into the very infrastructures of the entertainment industry, which the ‘coming to light’ of Naufahu's and others’ behaviour simply exposes. Within this framework, the discourse of acting is coopted as a means of legitimating exploitative behaviour. The ability of women to be emotionally and sexually vulnerable is framed as an essential aspect of professional practice, while deception proper – the acting teacher performing his role as guru for self-gratification – impersonates the real. Furthermore, when exposed, perpetrators rely on publicly received notions of what acting is to defend this behaviour, as can be seen in appeals to broad tropes of acting practice by Naufahu and Cox.
#MeToo has challenged precisely the ‘real-world’ conditions of the stage and screen industries. In citing this reality as a defence, Naufahu, as I have argued, in fact draws attention to the very biases that prejudice the practice of acting, shoring up privilege and exploiting power differentials. It is perhaps unsurprising that a figure like Roman Polanski, who fled the US in 1978 in order to escape sentencing for a charge of statutory rape, would label the movement ‘mass hysteria’.Footnote 52 The accusation stems from being presented with a set of truths that threaten this privilege. The term ‘hysteria’, of course, is a particularly gendered one. Indeed, Diamond has argued that the historical development of theatrical realism was intimately tied to the figure of the female hysteric.Footnote 53 Her concept of realism-without-truth therefore prompts us to consider what the emotional realism that naturalistic acting aims towards might look like if the so-called truths of the ‘real world’ that underpin it were challenged: how might what she calls ‘a different mimesis’ produce new realities?Footnote 54 The refusal of female actors to participate within the given realities of workplaces and classrooms where they are forced to performatively reinscribe their own sexual vulnerability issues one such challenge. Redeploying the critical terminology of acting as a means of critiquing abuses that take place in acting contexts is another way of contesting real-world practices that rely on hegemonic assumptions of what acting is or should be. Such analysis strategically denaturalizes this behaviour, clearly revealing it as a performance of power. By framing such behaviour as impersonation, the aura of personification that protects those who abuse their power dissipates. At the same time the methodologies that perpetrators exploit may be reset towards refusing the legibility of the so-called real in favour of other truths, of other realities.
