Allegations change how we interpret theatre
Albert Schultz has resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment by four women. It’s a case of yet another man accused of abusing his position of power, this time one who has been admired and respected in Toronto’s theatre world for almost 20 years.
In November, I saw Schultz in Soulpepper’s recent production of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? I admired Schultz’s performance. Albee’s language was overblown and the play seemed to be trying too hard to be clever. But Schultz, as the successful architect who destroys his marriage and his career through his sexual love for a goat, Sylvia, was sympathetic.
Battered and saddened by his family’s anger and grief, he managed to also portray the joyous wonder of being swept away by love. His impassioned insistence that he still very much loved his wife and that he could not live without Sylvia was painful because we believed him so much.
As the play unfolded, I realized I’d seen it before. It must have been years ago, since I could not remember what was going to happen next. How could I have forgotten a play about a guy who has sex with a goat?
I think it is because the bestiality hadn’t really stood out for me. I had seen it as a tragedy about falling in love outside of societal norms. I had felt compassion for Martin, who is torn by his love for his family and his irresistible attraction to Sylvia.
He is a thoughtful, compelling and sensitive character. And I had liked him more than his aggrieved wife, who is portrayed as shrill and violent. She seems closeminded and incapable of listening to his explanations, or of understanding desire and passion.
Seeing it again, right as the Harvey Weinstein allegations emerged, I understood it so differently. This time it was a play about a powerful man risking his career and his personal life on a sexual impulse. It was a play about a man whose wife had shaped her life around his ambition, and who couldn’t believe how selfishly he threw it all away.
What shocked me the most was the scene in which he alludes to the sexual nature of his relationship with Sylvia. It was mutual. The goat would, he insists, make it clear that she wanted to have sex.
What hubris is this? The man imagines that the feelings he projects onto another being are reciprocated. He does not take into account the differential positions of power that they both inhabit. How does the goat, owned and kept by him, feel? He doesn’t know, he can only surmise by looking into her eyes, which, he says, see into his soul.
Albert Schultz is accused, by Diana Bentley, Hannah Miller, Kristin Booth and Patricia Fagan, of being a serial sexual predator. Booth has cogently described her belief that this was just the way the theatre world worked, and that the cycle of abuse and praise made her almost worship him. Maybe this complex mix of emotions came across to him as sexual willingness. Maybe he didn’t care whether they were willing or not.
In 2002, when Sylvia was written, it was an attack on the homophobia and normativity of a middle class. People were too quick to label certain desires as acceptable, and others as inappropriate. We needed to expand our ideas of what was normal sexuality. If a man truly loved a goat, why was it so certain that his life would be ruined?
But now the conversation has shifted in salutary ways. We are talking more about how power is inextricable from these allegations of sexual misconduct. Gone are the days in which we saw a workplace relationship between, say, an older man and a younger woman, as a personal preference.
We are beginning to ask hard questions about the differential positions of authority and privilege that shape our sexual encounters. We have less sympathy for the man who has transgressive desires, and more understanding of how someone may feel attraction and fear, may consent because she feels complicit, or may play along in the hopes of gaining status.
In November, I saw Albert Schultz in Soulpepper’s recent production of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?