National Post (National Edition)
‘Soulpepper ... is not a safe environment’ IT IS TIME TO REVEAL THE DIRTY SECRETS OF SHOW BUSINESS
Even many Torontonians who don’t attend live theatre would recognize Albert Schultz. At galas, fundraisers and charity auctions, the Soulpepper Theatre founding director has been a fixture for years. I’ve never met him, but often have had the chance to regard him at a distance while he was fussed over and cooed at by the high culturati.
Schultz tends to be taller and better dressed than the starving artists who populate these functions. And there is something about his appearance and manner — Seth Rogen meets Kelsey Grammer — that makes him seem friendly and cerebral in equal parts. He is always smiling in a sincere-seeming way, and has become known as an outstanding fundraiser. Until this week, in fact, the only significant, publicly expressed concern about Schultz’s leadership at Soulpepper was that he’d made himself too essential. “There’s only one potential problem looming on the horizon for Soulpepper as an institution,” a critic wrote. “What if Albert Schultz gets hit by a bus?"
Well, splat. This week, four former Soulpepper actresses went public with claims that Schultz had (variously) demeaned, fondled or propositioned them during their time with the company.
The allegations have not been proven and Schultz resigned from Soulpepper on Thursday night. In total, the quartet alleges 30 individual acts of abuse or harassment. And in the current climate, the legal process comes almost as an afterthought. The University of British Columbia, remember, fired (and gratuitously shamed) Creative Writing chair Steven Galloway on no basis except that he had a consensual affair with a single student. Minnesota Public Radio excommunicated legendary broadcaster Garrison Keillor after a woman complained that — by his account, which is the only one we have — he touched her bare back. Canadian legal star Sujit Choudhry was pushed out of his deanship at UC Berkeley School of Law on controverted claims that he hugged and cheek-kissed an administrative aide. All it takes is one bus to knock an alpha male off the road. And Schultz just got hit by a four-bus convoy.
Even in less enlightened times, there was a certain kind of man who usually couldn’t get away with flagrantly harassing female colleagues — the middling white-collar worker who was too senior to be ignored, while being too junior to be regarded as indispensable. Our important, generational project of creating a humane, safe and fair environment for women will mean extending a culture of accountability both up and down the workplace food chain. But that’s proving to be a weirdly asymmetrical process: While sexism has become deeply stigmatized among society’s elites, working-class sexists often are permitted to wear their chauvinism openly.
As it happens, when I first saw the news about Schultz, I was getting my hair cut at a storefront barber shop with an exclusively male clientele. This is one of those stubbornly retrograde places that puts out porn magazines for men to enjoy while they wait to be served. During all my visits, I have never once seen anyone actually reading the stuff. (Indeed, I doubt anyone’s even been tempted, since the only two possible results from public porn consumption are boredom and frustration.) But that’s beside the point — because the porn isn’t there to be looked at. Like the topless calendars and posters one still sometimes sees on the walls of low-end mechanic shops and construction sites, or the trucker bumper stickers that proclaim “Gas, Ass or Grass. Nobody rides for free,” they exist primarily as crude markers of a male domain. “Be at ease, my lad,” the message goes. “The feminists can’t hurt you here.”
This particular barber shop happens to exist in the retail heart of one of Toronto’s fanciest neighbourhoods. And the clientele includes all sorts of well-known academics and business leaders who, in their ordinary lives, are expected to enforce the most progressive state-ofthe-art social norms within their own organizations. But thanks to unspoken classbased prejudices, the rules that govern law firms and universities are relaxed in some blue-collar environments — because ordinary working people have comparatively little influence on the marketplace of ideas. Since they don’t write for magazines, direct theatre troupes, or teach courses in liberal arts, the gala crowd doesn’t care so much if Albert Scissorhands contaminates his workplace with filth.
On the other, Schultzian, end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the problem of workplace abuse and harassment presents in an opposite, more cynical form: The very same elites who publicly rend their garments over #MeToo and #BelieveTheVictim often bestride professional and social milieus in which the sins of lecherous alpha males are the subject of long-standing gossip and even dark humour. The case of Harvey Weinstein — who himself presented as a typical liberal on every issue under the sun — is the most obvious. But the same is also true of Jian Ghomeshi, freshly ousted New York City ballet chief Peter Martins, and literary guru Leon Wieseltier.
It was not so long ago that male creative geniuses were not only permitted to act like pigs — such behaviour was almost expected. Their sexual aggressiveness often was seen as emanating, in some metaphorical way, from their full-to-bursting creative dynamo. To hem such men in with the stifling conventions of bourgeois morality would be to risk plugging the font of their brilliance. If the allegations against Schultz are true, this pattern fits him well. In a fawning, seemingly endless 2014 Walrus profile of Schultz, the man is described as “improvisationally dictatorial, “seductive,” “a force of nature,” and a mythmaker who exists in a world where “neither modesty nor immodesty seem relevant.” We also learn that Schultz is “a general who, once committed to a charge, goes at full gallop, sabre brandished,” and that the mere act of conversing with Schultz is akin to experiencing the art of Chekhov. In the author’s telling, Soulpepper itself is a sort of quasi-sacred artistic collective whose whole mission it to help one man — Schultz — return his national-treasure soul to the small-town Eden of his childhood.
Even by the sycophantic standards that once guided the way Canadian cultural elites gushed about one another in print, the piece reads like satire. And yet, from what I can tell, this hagiography really does reflect the way Albert Schultz was feted publicly on Rosedale’s Veuve Clicquot circuit — right up until Wednesday.
In light of recent events, perhaps the most memorable line from that Walrus profile is this: “The Albert Schultz tour of Soulpepper’s headquarters reveals an organization in which the role of everyone — from carpenter, to star, to seamstress, to director of finance, to board chair, to the youngest member of the Soulpepper Academy — is honoured as an essential part of the whole.” As we now know, that isn’t true. It’s hard to experience “honour” when you feel you’ve been sexually abused by your boss.
But the larger question to be asked is how many other people, especially at the level of management and board, knew about these alleged acts. Go down the list of Soulpepper grandees, and you find some impressive people who’ve invested a lot of time and money in the Soulpepper brand — which, until this week’s bus accident, was also the Albert Schultz brand. These are dinner-party masters and mavens who’d never dream of letting the wrong kind of magazine be seen on their expensive coffee tables. But if a few women get their asses slapped during a playful rehearsal session by a horny boss in the heady throes of the creative process, well, hey, that’s just how art gets made, right?
Or maybe not. At the time, Schultz’s four accusers say, “there was no point in speaking out” because “they risked their careers at Soulpepper, and possibly beyond.” But the climate has changed a lot since the fall of Ghomeshi and Weinstein. On Thursday, four current Soulpepper members announced they were resigning from the company in light of the scandal. Indeed, it’s now open to question whether Soulpepper itself will remain a going concern under its current name. Not so long ago, board members might have wondered whether they could afford to discipline a star who was accused of sexual impropriety. Now the question has been stood on its head: If we don’t do something about this sickness — and about the people who abetted it — will our company even survive?
In coming days, I suspect, we’ll learn a lot more about Schultz. But what’s equally important is learning about his enablers — and a world in which dirty laundry gets hung behind a thick stage curtain.