Get Ugly

I earned my MA in Theater Arts from UC Santa Cruz in 2025 with emphases on directing and theater management. As part of that degree, I had to conduct research and write a thesis. I printed physical copies of my work and sold them, but I also wanted to offer a free option. Here is that free option!

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SANTA CRUZ

Get Ugly: Liberatory Mess and Decentering the Male Gaze in Theatrical Performance

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

THEATER ARTS

Izzy Pedego

June 2025

The Thesis of Izzy Pedego is approved:

Professor Marianne Weems, Chair

Michael M. Chemers, Ph.D

Patty Gallagher, Ph.D

Peter Biehl

Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies

Izzy Pedego

2025

Abstract:

How can playing a monster help actors of marginalized identities decenter the male gaze while performing?

Izzy Pedego

The rise of Ozempic, idolization of “heroin-chic” bodies, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade are all signs of a society that discourages women from taking up space. Literally, as in their physical appearances, and metaphorically, as in how frequently or with how much fervor they speak, women are rewarded for their ability to be small, still, and silent. Being an actor necessitates taking up space, moving freely, and making noise. For women pursuing theater, there is an obvious issue here.

I have noticed that actors of marginalized gender identities, particularly women, struggle with a desire to control their appearance on stage. Although my experience is primarily with young women in academic settings, this desire does not vanish once one graduates or becomes a professional actor. This often results in a hesitancy to make bold acting choices and take up physical and vocal space.

In order to experiment with directing actors to distance themselves from the temptation to be obedient objects of the male gaze, I decided to direct Ian Wooldridge's stage adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Animals played by humans fall neither completely under the realm of human nor animal, but rather as a sort of human-animal hybrid, making monster studies a useful methodology. I encouraged undergraduate actors at UC Santa Cruz to approach discomfort with curiosity as they navigated playing beasts.

By combining feminist studies, monster studies, and performance studies, I aim to investigate how playing monsters can help actors of marginalized gender identities decenter the male gaze while performing.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my sister Sophie, for being an artist who inspires me to create bold and weird art. I may be older than you, but I look up to you and cannot wait to see what you do in the world of dance.

Thank you to my parents, for being proud to have children pursuing the arts. I am forever grateful that you both taught me to take my work seriously. I could never do art as a “hobby”. This is what I love to do, and I get to do it with full support from you both.

Thank you to Patty Gallagher, my mentor and friend who has relentlessly uplifted and loved me while guiding me through school and the world of professional theater. I am forever indebted to you.

Thank you to David Cuthbert, who trusted me to lead Barnstorm Theatre Company during its twentieth anniversary. It was an honor to work on your last show and to include it in this thesis.

Thank you to Michael Chemers, Eric Mack, and Marianne Weems, who have served as enthusiastic confidantes and advisors throughout my directing and acting endeavors at UC Santa Cruz.

This thesis is for my younger self—specifically my 4th-grade self.

Introduction

Physically undesirable women are often used symbolically to portray morally undesirable characters. Why might the Wicked Witch of the West be green with a false chin? Why might Glinda look like a Hollywood starlet? An easy way for a production team to encourage an audience to side with a character is by designing them to appear sympathetic. This can include decreasing the appearance of a character’s age or making them fit into more conventionally attractive stereotypes. These stereotypes include whiteness, thinness, and able-bodiedness, just to name a few.

In her book Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology, author Jess Zimmerman says, “We’re still struggling to create or consume stories about valorous women unless they also display the feminine virtues” (Zimmerman 16).

These virtues include obedience, youth, beauty, silence, and smallness. Zimmerman writes about the history and cultural analysis of monsters, primarily those of Greek mythology. Women are punished for displaying anything other than those traits that are considered virtuous, or sometimes unvirtuous traits are forced upon them as a punishment for being too virtuous. Either way, the point is clear—there is no greater shame than being a woman who lacks the feminine virtues.

An awareness of how these virtues affect women is also unvirtuous. Julie Grossman, author of The Femme Fatale, says, “For women, displaying such cynicism breaks the conventional gender mold, threatening the cultural idolatry of mothers and virgins” (Grossman 3). Perhaps another feminine virtue to add to the list is naïveté. Women are expected to behave virtuously without claiming knowledge that this behavior is expected of them. A woman must not try to be virtuous. She simply must be virtuous naturally.

This concept appears in modern discussions of how women wear makeup. It’s easy for someone to say the most beautiful women are those who don’t wear makeup—those who embrace their natural beauty. However, the women that are frequently held up as examples of “naturally beautiful” are those who have flawless skin, easily manageable hair, and straight teeth. If a woman doesn’t naturally have these traits, she is expected to wear makeup, tame her hair, and get braces to fix these undesirable traits. This analysis is an example of the cynicism that Grossman describes.

This concept is addressed in journalist Anne Helen Peterson’s book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. She says, “The difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman’s skin, who she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity” (Peterson 21).

Mess

I was given a note when I was in a musical at my community college that completely changed the way I approach acting.

I can tell you’re thinking about the way you look, and it’s making you suck.

It hurt to hear, but it was true. I tried my best to forget how I looked and focus on the truth of whatever character I was playing, but this was challenging. I developed a term for this habit of mine—pretty acting. This kind of acting wasn’t focused on the fun of making choices. Rather, it distracted me from making more extreme, disruptive choices because all of my energy was being spent on posing, essentially.

When I watch young women perform, I often notice that they hold back more than their young men counterparts. They don’t attack a character with fervor the way men do, for the most part at least. When a woman does approach a character with a bite, it stands out boldly. Viola Davis in the film adaptation of Fences comes to mind. She sobs with snot running down her nose and doesn’t pause to wipe her tears. She is not afraid to put her vanity to the side to fully commit to what her character is living through.

I’ve heard different directors use different phrases for this concept. When discussing it with Erik Stein from the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts, he called it “mess.” He also works with many college-age students who are afraid to embrace their mess when they are performing. Why is it that so many young women hold their mess back? Women are expected to perform not only when they are acting, but every second of their lives. This constant performance takes up so much of one’s capacity that intentional performance in a theatrical setting becomes an extension of their performance of being a woman. Rather than the performance starting when the scene starts, the performance of oneself blurs into the performance of a character. Casual daily performance of being a girl or a woman includes, but is not limited to, being expected to wear makeup every day, meet a standard of cleanliness to which men are not held, and being polite and agreeable, especially when in conversation with men. This daily performance can be understood through film theorist Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze—a feminist film theory term describing how visual arts and literature depict women from a patriarchal point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. The concept explores why women are compelled to perform femininity in specific ways both on and off stage.

The term male gaze was coined in 1973 by Mulvey in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (Mulvey 808)

It’s important for me to establish that I am not some sage expert on not caring about my appearance. In fact, I care a lot. This is an ongoing process that I am still engaging with every single day. It has become easier over time simply because I have given language to my feelings and experiences which allows me to feel and articulate them more clearly.

An actor’s job is to be the object of paying patrons’ gaze. That doesn’t sound very romantic, so I typically say my job is to tell stories or transform into someone else. However you toss it, my job is to be looked at. I needed to find a way to make that idea not terrifying, but rather liberating.

Let’s go back to that lightbulb moment I had in community college—that note I received.

I can tell you’re thinking about the way you look, and it’s making you suck.

The hardest part about that note was I truly believed the character I was playing would care about how she looked. She also spoke directly to the audience and was fully aware that there was a crowd of people in front of her. Isn’t it actually a realistic depiction if the character cares too? What a relief it was to find a justification for constantly sucking in my gut on stage and finding a reason that every character I played needed to wear winged eyeliner and jawline contour.

Well, not exactly. I cared about what this director thought of me a lot. She scared me, and I wanted her to like me so badly, so I decided to fully commit to not caring about how I looked. I took notice every time I found myself sucking in my stomach out of habit. I asked her if I could not wear shapewear under my dress. (This felt particularly revolutionary as a plus-size woman playing an ingénue.) I let my jaw relax. At first, it took a lot of intentional effort to not think about my appearance. My internal monologue was something like this:

Don’t suck in your stomach. Relax your jaw. That’s my cue line. My diction was weird. Suck in your stomach. WAIT! Don’t do that. Is the audience seeing my side profile right now? How can I subtly turn my head so they can’t see my chin from the side. LET THEM SEE IT!

I still wasn’t ready to give up being pretty. I grew up an awkward, chubby, and shy kid who wanted nothing more than to be pretty. Every time my mom would hold an eyelash in front of me and tell me to make a wish, I wished that I would be skinny. Every birthday cake candle, every Christmas, every shooting star was used for a wish to be thin. I never became thin, but as I grew older, I did figure out how to do my hair and makeup in a way that made me feel alright. I found a way to dress myself in a way that made me smile when people looked at me. I built up armor that made me feel safe. I was finally comfortable with being the object of someone’s gaze, and I wasn’t going to give it up easily.

During my senior year at UC Santa Cruz, I played Eurydice in Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl. Eurydice is a modern take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It centers Eurydice as she marries her lover, Orpheus, only to die on her wedding night. She is sent to the underworld, where she has no access to language or any of her memories. She is, for all intents and purposes, a baby in an adult body.

One of the many tragedies of this play is that the audience witnesses an independent and intelligent woman turn into a confused and nearly helpless child, and yet, she is the object of infatuation for several characters in the play. Ruhl writes:

CHILD. You’re pretty.

EURYDICE. I’m dead.

CHILD. You’re pretty.

EURYDICE. You’re little.

…

EURYDICE. Please, don’t.

CHILD. Oooh—say that again. It’s nice.

EURYDICE. Please, don’t.

CHILD. Say it in my ear.

EURYDICE. Please, don’t.

CHILD. I like that. (Scene 14)

Eurydice is coveted because of her beauty, not only in spite of her childlike naïveté, but partially because of it. This concept is explored in a video essay called Born Sexy Yesterday, made by Jonathan McIntosh. He shows several examples of female characters who have, “the mind of a naive yet highly skilled child, but in the body of a mature, sexualized woman” (McIntosh 1:37-1:42). This trope allows sexual fantasies of characteristics often associated with children—helplessness, wonder, and bashfulness—to be projected onto the body of an adult woman.

Playing Eurydice and thinking about that note I got in community college made me angry. It made me hate the idea of playing her as pretty. My Eurydice was an angry child who wanted to be barefoot and crawl on the floor. That’s what children do, after all—but I didn’t want that infantilizing behavior, when performed by my adult body, to fall into the Born Sexy Yesterday trap. This greatly informed how I created my version of Eurydice—She was easily excitable, yet firm in her disagreements. She was confused, flirtatious, and maybe even selfish at times. She was messy.

I could never go back to being pretty after Eurydice. The characters I played deserved more than that. I deserved more than that. This was a realization that radicalized me and made me fall in love with messy performances, specifically from women.

The show where I received that fateful note in community college was The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I wanted to explore that show again—this time as a director. I applied to direct for Barnstorm Theatre Company, and was given the green light, a rehearsal space, and a small budget. I cast nine actors for the show and focused on making a show that was interesting and ugly—anything but pretty. I was sick of pretty theater. That’s what I coined it. Those types of shows where you leave the theater thinking… That was nice. And then you never think of them again. They don’t leave much of an emotional impression or cause the audience to relate the work to their own lives. In comparison, I vowed to create theater that was brave and ugly—theater that embraces mess.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which I will refer to as Spelling Bee from this point forward, is a musical about six middle school students who enter in a spelling bee and are led by three adults. A humorous aspect of the show is that all of the child contestants are played by adults who deliver mature (and often sexually implicit) material. This spectacle creates great opportunities for adult actors to let loose and lean into the zany awkwardness that goes hand-in-hand with being twelve years old. However, I find that in many interpretations of this script, there is one character who doesn’t seem to have the same freedom that the other contestants have—Olive Ostrovsky.

I took special care of Olive while directing the show. Olive, one of the female leads, is almost always portrayed as a thin white girl who is conventionally attractive in every way. She usually dons a cute pair of overalls and neatly styled hair. Simply by looking at these character designs, would you ever guess that this is a child who is essentially raising herself? Is this someone you would never want to be friends with? Me neither. It’s, in my opinion, a weak design choice, and it’s recreated in nearly every production of this show I’ve ever seen.

You could argue that she learned how to dress herself and do her own hair, and that’s why she looks so neat and tidy. Sure, but why would we do that? How does that further the storytelling? I believe that Olive is typically given neat hair for the same reason that Eurydice is typically pretty—because people find it difficult to root for women they find unattractive.

As a director, I wondered how far I could push Olive’s appearance away from conventional attractiveness before the audience stopped sympathizing with her. As evidenced by most pieces of visual media in the canon of American cinema and theater, the female protagonist must be attractive. Her beauty is what makes her tragic story tragic. In Spelling Bee, I believe there is just as much evidence that Logainne, one of Olive’s competitors, experiences significant hardship and stress. Logainne is loud, talks with a lisp, and unlike Olive, is cast and costumed with less of a concern about portraying delicate femininity. Therefore, the sympathy that Olive garners from an audience is rarely garnered by Logainne.

Eurydice and Spelling Bee have something in common; They both feature adults who play children, leading to the Born Sexy Yesterday trope and other symbols of feminine virtuosity easily sliding into performances.

Many scholars and writers discuss elements of prettiness, performance, and gaze as they pertain to theater in addition to other writers exploring how women are connected to monsters, but there is less research that addresses the intersection of all three of these topics: feminist studies, performance studies, and monster studies. Through my investigation of monster studies in theatrical contexts, I aim to develop directing techniques that empower actors of marginalized genders to become more fearless performers.

In her book Monstrous Imagination, author and Princeton University Affiliate Professor Marie-Helene Huet says:

It is no wonder women passionately desire that which both seduces and horrifies them, since it is in the very nature of women to join within themselves seduction and repulsion, life and disease, contamination and abjection. What women hide, what women are, is monstrosity itself. (Huet 59)

I wanted to find a show that would be nearly impossible to make sexy or pretty, so I directed the least pretty play I could find: Animal Farm. I wanted to see if I could get actors to lean into the true ugliness, messiness, and monstrosity of a character, if they could have that same lightbulb moment that I did. When forming my research question, I wanted to make sure I was asking something I could actually answer. This question prompts many other questions that I had to answer first:

What is a monster?
Who qualifies as an actor of a marginalized gender identity?
What does it mean to be pretty?
What is the male gaze?
What does it mean to decenter something? To center something?
What does it mean to perform?

What is a monster?

As a graduate student director, I wanted to work with a cast of primarily young women and nonmen to see if I could find a way to help them unleash their “mess” in the safety of a scripted theatrical world. I thought back to when I felt most uninhibited, and I was brought back to when I was on my high school’s improv team. I often chose to play animals or other creatures—crawling on all fours, snarling, panting. Something about inhabiting a wild animal’s mannerisms in my very gendered human girl body allowed me to free myself from the need to be beautiful that I felt in every other role I played in the theater. If I could cast a group of young women as animals, maybe they could feel that same freedom that I felt in my high school improv days.

I met with Dr. Michael Chemers, chair of the UCSC Department of Performance, Play, and Design and founder of the Center for Monster Studies. He introduced me to the work of author and Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, which outlines, “a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender” (Cohen). “Monster Culture” will serve as a fundamental text for this thesis.

One of the main identifiers of monsterhood, according to Cohen, is that monsters do not fit into widely understood binary categories. Chemers asked me if the actors in my version of Animal Farm were playing the animals as fully animal or if there was some human-animal hybrid characterization. My directorial vision aligned more with the latter, therefore the actors of Animal Farm were neither human, nor animal. This denial of binary categories turned them into monsters.

In “Thesis 1: The Monster Body is a Cultural Body”, Cohen says:

The monster body is born (...) as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (...), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. (...) The monster signifies something other than itself. (Cohen 4)

What might the Wicked Witch of the West’s body signify? Witches in general? They are women, often not accompanied by men, who are dressed with long prosthetic noses and crooked teeth. Of what might these characteristics be symbolic? My point is—monsters don’t exist out of nowhere. They exist for a reason: We fear monsters because they represent something present and feared in our culture.

Cohen’s third thesis, “The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis” explores how we rely on categories, and when those categories are disrupted, we fear who or whatever doesn’t fit into them:

The refusal to participate in the classifactory ‘order of things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systemic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions. (Cohen 6)

People like to have clear categories in which they can place things. For example, as soon as I was born, I was taught that I was a girl. This put me into the category of gentle, well-behaved, quiet people. My cousin who was born a month before me was taught that he was a boy. This put him into the category of aggressive, loud, and adventurous people. Even as babies with only a month separating us in age, we were expected to behave very differently.

Most people were taught to operate under the assumption that people are either men or women. When more folks began coming out as nonbinary, this alerted people with a category crisis. How could someone be neither a man nor a woman? What category do I place this person in? Thus, nonbinary people were made out to be monsters in the eyes of traditionalists.

Werewolves are neither wolf nor human. Mummies are neither alive nor dead. In author and literary theorist Peter Stallybass’s chapter in Macbeth and Witches, he writes, “Lady Macbeth is both an unnatural mother and sterile. This links her to the unholy family of witches” (Stallybrass 6). Well, which is it? Is she a mother or is she sterile? How can one possibly be both? Category crisis! She is a monster. Is Olive Ostrovsky a child or an adult? Is Eurydice a child or an adult? Category crisis! They are both monsters. This is that common thread that I was looking for.

Who qualifies as an actor of a marginalized gender identity?

There are a panoply of fields of thought on gender identity that I could use to frame my work. For the sake of my thesis, I am defining anyone who is not a cisgender man as an actor of a marginalized gender identity. My initial research focus was women in theater, but because the cast of Animal Farm also included nonbinary actors, I chose the term “marginalized gender identity” to encompass those actors as well.

My focus on actors who are not cisgender men does not mean cisgender men are immune to the effects of the male gaze. They are simply affected differently by it. I will touch on these effects later, but they are not the primary focus of this thesis.

Cohen established that refusal or inability to fit into binary categories can turn someone into a monster. The category of “woman” is a specific and picky one:

[I]f the expectations are too narrow, nearly anything can become monstrous. If you are only allowed to be tiny, it is grotesque to be medium. If you are only allowed to be quiet, it is freakish to be loud. The more you are circumscribed, the easier it is to deviate, and the more deviation comes to seem outlandish or even dangerous. For women, the boundaries of acceptability are strict, and they are many. (Zimmerman 24-25)

While it is possible for men to deviate from their societal expectations and become monstrous, there are arguably many more potential spaces and identities for men to occupy. In an article for Medium written by Angela Carlton titled “Why men become silver foxes and women become spinsters,” she explores how men are able to be young, middle-aged, and old honorably, while it is much more challenging for women to abide by societal expectations of them at any age. Men are allowed to grow old and still become sex symbols. (Think James Bond.) Women grow old and are designated to, as Carlton puts it, kindly matrons, formidable spinsters, or witchy ladies.

What does it mean to be pretty?

Prettiness, in California, where I live, often refers to blonde surfer girls who are thin, white, and chill. They take up very little space, both literally and figuratively. “Pretty" refers to daintiness, obedience, and smallness, just like Zimmerman’s idea of feminine virtuosity. Women are praised for being physically pretty, yes, but this also refers to how loud they speak, how they move their bodies, and how much attention they command.

In her article titled “Toward a definition of Ugly Studies,” Robin Hardwick says:“Ugly,” is a term that evokes both emotional and visceral reaction[s]. Ugly can refer to aesthetics, emotions, atrocities, sickness, deformity, and uncleanliness. Ugly is what is not beautiful or normal. Ugly is something to be hidden away or eradicated. (Hardwick)

My concept of pretty theater has nothing to do with whether or not an audience thinks an actor is pretty. That is far too subjective (and likely based in racism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice) for anyone to objectively analyze. I want to clarify that my goal for writing about prettiness is not to share my own personal opinion on what is pretty or not. Rather, my goal is to comment on how the concept of prettiness can be interpreted as an oppressive tool to prevent women from achieving their full potential, and furthermore, how prettiness can hold actors of marginalized gender identities back from embodying characters truthfully. It also prevents theater directors, producers, and casting directors from selecting actors and shows that might be off-putting to their audiences.

For example, in the 1961 film West Side Story, the protagonist Maria was played by Natalie Wood. Wood was Russian and Ukranian, but Maria is Puerto Rican. In order for Wood to play the role, she famously donned brownface makeup and used an accent when she spoke. With all the effort placed on having Wood play Maria, you’d think she must have been the perfect fit for the role, but actually, she didn’t even sing Maria’s songs. Despite not being chosen due to her voice and not being Puerto Rican (which is vital to the plot of West Side Story), Wood was selected to play the sympathetic lead. Access to Puerto Rican actors was not a problem. Rita Moreno, who is Puerto Rican, played Anita in the film. But Maria is where the audience’s sympathy needs to lie in order for the film’s message to be effective. Because of her race, Wood was perceived as prettier than Moreno and therefore more palatable. Being produced in 1961 North America, a white actor had to take the lead.

In a New York Times Article, Rhonda Garelick interviewed Moshtari Hilal, author of Ugliness, which explores her personal experiences feeling ugly and also the concept of ugliness at large. Hilal writes about her experience of claiming war against her own body, which she felt was viewed as ugly. Garelick writes:

Ms. Hilal argues that personal aesthetic judgements are neither personal nor ‘aesthetic.’ Instead, our perceptions of human beauty (or its lack) derive from politics, and are determined by wide-ranging, international factors such as war, imperialism, colonial conquest, power hierarchies and economics. In other words, that ‘war’ she declared on her own body is but a microcosm — and a descendant — of the actual wars that, historically, have determined who gets to be considered beautiful. (Hint: It’s always the victors, the powerful and the rich). (Garelick)

One’s behavior can also contribute to one’s prettiness. One example comes from the 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The onslaught of insults directed at Clinton (from people of all genders and political affiliations) was not only due to the fact that she was a woman, but because she was a woman who dared to claim she was qualified to be the president of the United States. There is nothing dainty, obedient, or small about that claim. This led to accusations of vanity and overconfidence, something laughable when her opponent was Trump. This is a major historical event which demonstrates the difference in expectations between the behavior of men and women.

This idea of potential aesthetic judgements heavily influencing how we behave is only more acutely developed for actors, specifically actors of marginalized gender identities. To intentionally put oneself in front of an audience is to claim space in a room and to command attention. This is an act that takes courage for anyone to do, but especially for folks who do not align with modern standards of beauty. To be looked at is terrifying, especially when the judgement of others is not only something to be worried about, but is almost guaranteed.

Kathryn Hunter performed in Kafka’s Monkey by Colin Teevan at the Baryshnikov Center in New York in 2013. The character she played was a chimpanzee, and her behavior was anything but pretty. It’s not that Hunter is “ugly”. In fact, I’d argue she is not “ugly” at all. What she’s employing as a performer is a sense of ferocity—a bite that “polite” women don’t employ. This bite can be counterintuitively beneficial for actors. By defying the social contract that demands women be calm, soft, and silent, Hunter delivers a performance that sparks deep sympathy. In a review for Let’s Talk Off Broadway, author and art historian Yvonne Korshak writes:

Kathryn Hunter’s portrayal of two natures in a single being, and her delivery of his speech in which he narrates the details of his capture, his gruesome shipboard journey, and his brilliant ‘humanizing’ adaptation is among the most memorable performances in theater. (Korshak)

Pretty acting, in comparison to Hunter’s performance, is essentially posing. By saying one’s lines without authentically embodying the experience of the character, an actor is essentially just reciting someone else’s text in a costume. If an actor is restraining their physical or vocal expression for the sake of maintaining a tight grip on their prettiness, they are not embodying their character to their fullest ability. People behave in ugly ways, and to strip a character of that human ugliness is to create something inauthentic. I understand the impulse to be stiff and beautiful though.

Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live… Ugliness is always yours. (Zimmerman 58-59)

Zimmerman underscores the idea that a woman cannot simply be pretty. She can only be given prettiness by men, and it can be revoked at any time. This begs the question for actors—Will you treat carefully and preserve your prettiness, or will you dive into embodying a character authentically? Playing an ugly character can be challenging for women because we are trained to keep people comfortable. If I perform in a way that makes audiences uncomfortable, I immediately feel the need to apologize. My job as a woman is to maintain the emotional equilibrium in the room, and if I (either by negligence or intention) offset that equilibrium, I certainly am not meeting the expectations of womanhood set by modern etiquette standards.

In fictional media and in the real world, men are allowed to be unlikeable—and maybe that’s what this is all about. Walter White of Breaking Bad and Tony Soprano of The Sopranos are two iconic fictional men who commit heinous acts of violence, and yet, nobody on their respective television shows got more criticism than their wives. Both of these women, Skyler White and Carmela Soprano, were portrayed by conventionally attractive, thin, white, blonde women, but their attitude didn’t meet the standard of subservient likeability set by the expectations of the male gaze.

In order to combat prettiness in theater, I must name what I do want to see: mess. Messiness is a generative and expansive way of being. It expands the possibilities of aesthetics and behavior, and it should be embraced by artists who seek to connect with audiences. Audiences, however, is a vague term that can encompass both people in the physical space of a theater, but also the self and the subconscious application of the male gaze.

What is the male gaze?

“The male gaze” has become a sort of buzzword used by young people on the internet to accuse one another of dressing or performing for men. Although the phrase has been discussed since the early 1970s, there has been a recent wave of video essayists and writers who seem to fundamentally misunderstand it. It has come to mean inauthentic or phony in the lexicon of TikTok and Twitter. The phrase essentially means nothing to most people, as it is overly and improperly used.

It may be easier to understand the concept of the male gaze by beginning with the concept of self-surveillance. In Ways of Seeing, art critic and novelist John Berger says:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. (Berger 46)

From his point of view, women do not simply exist or walk or cry, but rather, they imagine themselves existing and walking and crying. The idea of being an object of gaze is magnified when we take it into the world of theater. An actor is volunteering to be gazed at by mass audiences, and the job of the actor is often to pretend that the audience isn’t there. There are certainly exceptions, like interactive theater where there is no fourth wall, but for a standard classical play, the goal is for the audience to be let into the private lives of people who are not aware of their viewers.

The male gaze does not always mean intentionally performing for the pleasure or comfort of men. Rather, centering the male gaze can manifest itself in a casual manner that can fly under the radar, such as making statements one knows to be true with “I think” or phrasing facts as a question. These are little ways that people, commonly women, can unintentionally undermine their own knowledge for the sake of keeping other people comfortable. These “other people” are typically men. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t have a story of a man challenging her knowledge on a topic about which she objectively knows more. Men are not expected to phrase facts as questions or preface their knowledge with “I think”s.

In the foreword of Anna Bogutskaya’s Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate, writer Terri White says, “Because to me, likeability means palatability. And specifically, how palatable these characters are to a patriarchal world that in many cases still likes its women—both fictional and otherwise—to be supine and silent” (White x).

The choice of White to employ the word supine struck me. The word literally and metaphorically means lying belly-up. It can mean lying with one’s face upward, and it can also mean, “failing to act or protest as a result of weakness” (Oxford). Using Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, which prioritizes exhibitionism, combined with Berger’s further exploration of constant performance, I aim to explore how actors of marginalized identities can benefit from a knowledge and intentional rejection of the male gaze as a performer.

What does it mean to decenter something? To center something?

Centering and decentering are elements of social scripts which inform how we navigate the world. Literally, centering means to put something in the center, either by moving that thing or by moving everything else so they are all around that thing. In the context of centering the male gaze, women often adjust themselves to make sure men stay central. This is not always intentional; it is ingrained so deeply that it can’t be identified from whom or where the habit was learned.

Many theater directors say they want to “center the story” of the play. I believe this is a great way to begin crafting a production. Let’s take a famous play like Romeo and Juliet, for example. If the actor playing Juliet decides that she wants to make a choice to not fall in love with Romeo, it is fully within the right of a director to disallow that choice. The story of Romeo and Juliet is all about the titular characters falling in love. To make a choice that she is not in love with Romeo completely changes the story and doesn’t align with the textual evidence in the script.

I believe the reason directors claim they want to center the story is that the art of theatre making is often viewed as a selfish endeavor. To voluntarily get on a stage in front of a paying audience and demand to be looked at can very easily be viewed as self-centering. This doesn’t have to be the case for actors. Those who are passionate about the craft of theater and performance dedicate their lives to learning about how other people live and trying to embody those experiences authentically. However, I do see plenty of self-centering performance in the sphere of academic theater, the sphere with which I am most familiar.

Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian theater practitioner and actor, said in his book My Life In Art, “One must love art, and not one’s self in art” (Stanislavsky 298). Stanislavsky cautioned against vanity in performance in several ways. He advocated for actors using their own feelings to inform the way their characters behaved and finding deep emotional justification for any choices made on stage. His teachings prioritize honesty and creativity, both which do not exist when anything other than the story is centered.

Centering the male gaze often equates to centering physical beauty. Beauty, when it comes to young women, is often the pursuit of youth—removing any signs of life including but not limited to fatness from eating food and wrinkles from being expressive. When actors are asked to work on their projection, this can feel threatening because outside of the theater, they are punished for being loud.

You cannot be a good actor without being willing to show signs of life. This directly pits theatrical performance against the standards of beauty set by the male gaze.

Is centering the male gaze a choice? Is it inherent or learned? Is it even possible to decenter it? I believe that at this point in my life, it is not a choice to center the male gaze. It takes an active effort to decenter it every moment of every day.

What does it mean to perform?

Performance is not unique to the theater world. As French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir makes clear in her book The Second Sex, to be a woman is to perform.

As a feminist who specializes in live theater, I have two concepts of performance that I think about frequently. The first is the more obvious type—one where an actor gets on a stage, says lines, moves in a planned sequence of actions, and then is applauded by an audience. The second type of performance is one that I believe everyone participates in consciously or subconsciously every single day. This includes putting on makeup, picking out one’s clothes, and how one behaves. I don’t believe these two types of performance are all that different.

We know how we perform in our daily lives. We see it in ourselves and in other people, sometimes even when it is not present. Performances of femininity and power are familiar to us all. This concept is doubled when an actor is performing in a theater. They are performing their role, yes, but they are also performing performing. When actors perform performing, they often want to perform being likeable. This means that being pretty, obedient, and making it clear that if they are doing something undesirable, that they make it abundantly clear that they are acting. There is a separation between the actor and the character, where the actor is letting the audience know—I would never behave this way. This could be where we get tropes about actors being incredibly dramatic and taking long pauses when they have something particularly important to say. I find myself drawn to actors who are able to turn off that “performance of performance”—actors who are able to step away from their performer persona and tap into their mess. What if actors allowed themselves to be unlikeable? Ugly? Messy?

I believe that the theater can be a liberatory space, and yet, the most seemingly liberated people I have seen in rehearsal rooms are men. What is it that makes the theater less of a liberatory space for women? Is it perhaps that performance for men is a fun escape from reality, while performance for women is something to be expected constantly?

I choreographed and assistant directed The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare directed by Professor Patty Gallagher at UCSC from early January to late February 2025. I observed a voice workshop conducted by Professor Amy Mihyang Ginther, a guest in our rehearsal space, on February 5th. She told the actors to walk through the space and hum. Automatically, the cast began finding harmonies with one another. Ginther stopped the workshop and told the cast that they sounded pretty, but that’s not what they should be looking for. I even noticed that their walking was odd. Nearly every actor moved with some sort of pomp—their chins raised, their shoulders moved noticeably more than they usually do. I had been working with this cast for a month by this point, and I knew how they moved when they weren’t working on a scene. In the presence of this professor who they wanted to impress—from whom they sought validation—their bodies automatically went into performance mode.

I was introduced to actor and writer Yoshi Oida’s The Invisible Actor by my mentor, Patty Gallagher. Oida says:

In Kabuki theatre, there is a gesture which indicates ‘looking at the moon’, where the actor points into the night sky with his index finger. One actor, who was very talented, performed this gesture with grace and elegance. The audience thought: ‘Oh, his movement is so beautiful!’ They enjoyed the beauty of his performance, and the technical mastery he displayed.

Another actor made the same gesture, pointing to the moon. The audience didn’t notice whether or not he moved elegantly; they simply saw the moon. I prefer this kind of actor: the one who shows the moon to the audience. The actor who can become invisible.

Costumes, wigs, makeup and masks are not enough to achieve this level of ‘disappearance’. Ninjas had to spend years training their bodies in order to learn how to become invisible. In the same way, actors must work very hard to develop themselves physically, not simply to acquire skills that can be displayed to the audience, but to be able to disappear. (Oida xvii-xviii)

Pretty acting or the “performance of performance” is just visible acting. It’s ineffective, it’s inauthentic and it leads to weak choices. Invisible acting creates performances that leave audiences thinking about the story, not how pretty the actors were. When actors can set prettiness to the side and fully embrace the ugly mess of a character, they create a performance where the performance is invisible, and the story is fully centered.

Animal Farm

In order to conduct research on the feasibility of getting actors, primarily young women, to get out of their comfort zones and play physically and morally unattractive characters, I proposed directing Animal Farm for Barnstorm Theater Company.

My approach to directing is neither fully artistic nor fully academic. I care about producing an intriguing piece of art for viewers to enjoy, but I care even more about the process in which the actors I work with are asked to engage. As a sort of teacher-director, I let my actors know from the very beginning of the process that my work on this play would be centered about women and non-men embracing mess and not performing beauty, and that it might take some uncomfortable effort to get where I wanted them to be. The actors had to work incredibly hard to release control over their appearances, which is a major request of anyone between the ages of eighteen and twenty three.

I asked my actors in Animal Farm to walk on two legs, but to incorporate some sort of non-human body language into their performances. Were they humans or animals? Category crisis! They were monsters. I did my best to reinforce their ability to take up space both vocally and physically, but all the way through tech week, I found myself telling them they were still not loud enough or messy enough.

When casting Animal Farm, a story that primarily has male characters, I made an effort to cast women, trans people, and non-binary people as much as I could. I managed to create a cast of 12 women, 3 men, and 2 non-binary actors.

I wanted my actors to take up as much space as possible—to move with abandon, to speak loudly, and to fully embody the grotesqueness of the animals they played. My goal was to create a space where people of marginalized gender identities were encouraged to confront their discomfort with ugliness and mess, rather than hide from it. When I explained my concept for Animal Farm to the cast, I knew some of them were nervous. After the show, I interviewed a few actors to see how they felt about their experience. One actor told me her first thought was, “If I don’t look nice, how am I supposed to look?”

Cohen’s sixth thesis of Monster Culture is, “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” (Cohen). The fear of being an unruly woman comes from a desire to completely abandon the need for oneself to perform beauty. Counterintuitively, unruly women generate fear in men because unruly women, despite not abiding by gender norms, are attractive. Men fear their attraction to these women who refuse to abide by patriarchal views of female beauty, and this fear manifests as violence against women. This vicious cycle of gender-normative men and non-gender-normative women instilling fear in one another creates an even more fear-based motivation for women to abide by gender-normative beauty standards. This leads me to wonder—Is liberating women from their prettiness also liberatory for men (gazers)? How could providing a new narrative empower both gazers and objects of the gaze?

In order to help the actors overcome their fear so they could fully indulge in the freedom of forgetting about prettiness, I asked them to engage in a sort of exposure therapy. I am not a psychologist, but this seems like the closest term that applies to what the actors were asked to experiment with. It is understandably scary to take part in a project that asks you, as a young woman, to rid yourself of the shield of prettiness, especially while on stage in front of an audience.

This goes hand-in-hand with themes in Animal Farm and other works by Orwell. Using the body of a beast to represent something unlikeable—in Orwell’s case, politicians who systematically abuse the lower class—is an effective mode of storytelling that allows the reader just enough distance from reality to experience the narrative as if it is being told for the first time. When the reader steps away from Orwell’s work and applies it to historical or modern events, parallels can be drawn between pigs and political powerhouses or horses and working class laborers.

Orwell writes about the individual body as a source of revolution and freedom, and by placing women in the roles of the pigs, who represent manipulation and greed, I hoped to see acting choices and behaviors that typically are discouraged of women—intentional loudness, obnoxiousness, and the demanding of attention, all at the expense of any dainty beauty which may be coveted outside of the theater. Rather than creating small victims, which are the characters explicitly offered to women in the script (Mollie and Clover), I set these women up to command the room with all the energy they could muster.

I did my best to help the actors tap into a desire to be ugly and messy—something women are rarely encouraged to do, especially in the theater. Even when crying or screaming, I notice women show restraint. Roles written for women have the performance of womanhood built into them. By gender-bending Animal Farm’s casting, I aimed to quell the need to perform womanhood on top of playing a specific role. The actors could fully focus on what a pig would do—not what a girl pig would do.

One actor from the Animal Farm cast, who was arguably conventionally beautiful, made a statement that solidified my belief that this thesis was worth pursuing: “I’m attractive, so I can get away with being weird and off-putting. It’s charming almost. When you put me in a pig costume, I lose some of that armor. Some of that protection I have from being attractive goes away.”

Being pretty is armor. Without it, who might you be? When so much of the identity of young women is tied into their appearance, it can be terrifying to reckon with who is under the layers of performance. If young women are encouraged to identify with their prettiness, asking them to intentionally set it aside in favor of mess is a monumental request.

We have established that an actor’s job is to be looked at, but according to Mulvey, that’s also the job of women after clocking out from being an actor. This became more apparent than ever while interviewing actors after Animal Farm, when I asked actors what kind of maintenance goes into being a woman every day. Then, I asked them what kind of maintenance goes into being an actor, and most interviewees were shocked at how similar their two responses were. Both preparing to live a day in the life of a woman and preparing to perform in a theatrical production included putting on makeup, wearing an intentionally put-together costume, and altering the way one speaks in order to elicit specific reactions from those around them. Men, on the other hand, answered the questions very differently. Their grooming and behavioral maintenance was far more relaxed outside of the theater than it was inside of it.

It is obvious and distracting when an actor is thinking about their physical appearance rather than their inner world. As someone who has spent years on stage trying to strategically hide my side profile, I know one when I see one. What makes great performances is when an actor allows the inner world to inform how they move and speak—how they occupy space.

A large part of this process was assisting the actors in finding their “animal body”. That was the phrase I created to inform my actors that they were looking too normal or too human. For one of the actors who played a pig, we spent roughly thirty minutes in an early rehearsal making small adjustments with the full cast giving input. Notes given to the actor included, “hunch one of your shoulders,” “jut your neck forward”, “hinge your knees”, and “let your breath be loud”. All of these notes on physicality are in direct opposition to the corrections given by etiquette coaches and doctors alike, including, “stand up straight,” “roll your shoulders back,” “keep your chin up”, and “don’t put more weight on one leg than another”.

As I explored the idea of my actors distancing themselves from the assumed roles of women in theater, I did my best to remain cautious about the femme fatale stereotype. In “Men Writing Women: Internalized Misogyny and the Objectification of Women in Media”, Saška Petrović says:

The femme fatale (...) shares male characteristics and yet she is often conventionally attractive. The archetype presents itself as feminist, as an opportunity for the female character to achieve some form of self-actualization but the oppressive, voyeuristic gaze is still firmly obsessed with her. These female characters align themselves with the men in the stories, distancing themselves from more ‘traditional’ roles. (Petrović 38)

In embracing their mess, I did not want my actors to remove any signs of femininity. I am not opposed to femininity, gentleness, softness, or emotion. In fact, I welcome all of these traits into my work with an open heart. There is, however, a line to walk when exploring these traits in comparison to traits commonly found in men in theater: authoritative, bold, and loud. The challenge of reminding these actors of my goal for Animal Farm was to make sure they weren’t forcing their idea of masculinity onto their performances. Rather, the goal was that they didn’t let their prescribed gendered expectations get in the way of their acting process and performance.

Did playing a monster help actors of marginalized gender identities decenter the male gaze while performing?

Rather than proving that playing a monster helped actors decenter the male gaze, I believe my thesis demonstrates that playing a monster made them aware of how much they centered the male gaze. This is certainly a step in the right direction for the work I am interested in doing later in life.

A psychologist I know connected my research to classical conditioning with phobias and systematic desensitization. This helped me understand that the work I wish to achieve is a lifelong mission. My initial belief was correct: Animal Farm was a sort of exposure therapy for the actors. Exposure therapy is used when a client has a phobia of something unreasonable. The goal of exposure therapy is to expose the client to the thing of which they are afraid. After being exposed to the object of fear several times with no negative consequence, eventually the client will no longer associate that object with danger. They will know that there is no reason to fear that thing.

Unfortunately, for the cast of Animal Farm and other actors I may work with in the future, I cannot guarantee that shedding one’s performance of prettiness will be completely harmless. I can, however, predict that embracing one’s mess will improve their performance as an actor.

Conclusion

It’s hard to prove that something has been unlearned in the same way it’s challenging for an actor to perform not doing something. In my findings, I can’t prove that the actors I worked with unlearned centering the male gaze, but I believe they did learn how to notice when they are centering the male gaze, and that is a step in the process of decentering it. I care about directing intriguing plays. I care about being an interesting actor. As much as I love theory and deep diving into a script, my priority is to put on a show that I am proud of—one that is captivating, emotionally complex, and accessible to a wide range of audience members. I find that getting actors to care less about how they look achieves that. This is not all theory with no praxis. The praxis lies in making a show that actually makes audiences feel and think. It lies in giving actors a show that they can be proud of and look back at fondly. This work made the actors better. It made Animal Farm better.

I want to leave you with a section of my favorite poem, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves. (Oliver)

I am tired of the women I work with feeling like they have to be good. The mess, the anger, the sadness, and the confusion that they bring to every step of the production process is what excites me most about creating performance art.

When I was in the third grade, my mom bought me The Care and Keeping of You. This book was created by the American Girl company to teach young girls about hygiene, puberty, and other conversations that parents may find awkward to have with their young daughters. In the book, I remember viewing images demonstrating how to shave, how to insert a tampon, and how to make sure I didn’t smell bad. This book is one in a long lineage of self-help books teaching young people how to be a girl. It reminds me of the Etta Kett comics my grandma bought me when I was even younger. Since I was a child, I have been handed books and lectures and television shows that have taught me how to be a girl the right way—how to perform being a girl. We have performance built into us. It’s only natural if you spend our early developmental years teaching us how to make our bodies and behaviors less offensive to those around us.

Obviously, I cannot undo all of the deeply instilled patriarchal thinking that occupies the minds of actors I work with, but I do hope that through exploring monstrous characters and providing a space to bravely experiment with an ensemble of trusted co-creators, actors can begin to feel empowered by tossing the need to be pretty, likeable, or virtuous aside in favor of liberatory mess.

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