Art From the Ashes

Speaking up, being silenced, and surviving serial cancellations

ACT I: NO HAPPY ENDING.

Last summer I wrote my first essay for FAIR, called “The Art Thieves: How my voice was nearly stolen.” The piece centered on attempts to cancel me because I believe men cannot become women and should therefore stay out of women’s spaces; for my refusal to submit to the compelled speech of pronoun declarations; and for my stubborn reliance on the Constitution and its guarantee of free expression.

I ended the essay on an elegiac note, describing a hopeful future: “Dreaming of finding my way back to curiosity, imagination, passion one day. To some measure of peace and sense of belonging. To the full measure of who I am, and to what I am meant to do while I’m here: to create. ... And hoping, one day, to return to my art, as a soldier returns to his fields, home from the war.”

At the time I was in the thick of creating a stage play with a writing/producing/acting partner, The Macbeths, a reconsideration of Shakespeare’s original narrowed to focus on Macbeth and his Lady, and curated to a swift 1:20. This was an entirely self-funded play, as there were no grants in Portland for anything that didn’t focus on woke subject matter, and certainly none for artists who looked like us.

So we invested our own money and were busy finessing the script, auditioning for the third actor the play required, interviewing designers and crew, crafting the promotions and securing a theater space to stage the show.

Fast-forward to February 2025. The script was done, the actor hired, the creative team in place and Milagro Theatre booked. We were in rehearsal; scenic, costume, props were being designed or obtained; the fight choreographer had come and gone; the marketing was launched and tickets were moving.

I thought I was, as I had dreamt, returning to my art.

I was wrong.

Portland leftist activists, who had initially gotten me fired from my job as a dialect coach at the city’s two largest Equity theaters six years ago and effectively cancelled me from the community, were waiting for their moment to attack again.

The spark was struck with this post from leftist Joe Klei on Facebook:

“I’ve heard the whispers for years. The silence needs to end. The disgusting comments need to stop. Mary MacDonald-Lewis’ (sic) comments about Trans People (sic) is unacceptable and has been going on for too long. As a member of the Portland Theatre Community, (sic) I am ashamed by this person’s views. I hope others in the community will speak out about this person’s unacceptable behavior. The show being produced at Milagro is called the Macbeth’s, (sic) scheduled for opening on March 6. MaryMac wrote this piece. Boycott the show.”

This initial post was shared among the theatre community, and the screeds began to burn on several pages. They gathered in size and speed, with comments like:

• I blocked this lunatic bitch years ago. But yes, those who hear her words need her to be silenced. It’s just embarrassing and dangerous.

• Wow… what a terrible human… is there a petition or anything to sign to request her resignation from the local board of SAG-AFTRA?

• As a woman… I can say that I’ve never once felt like my gender was being “appropriated” by someone who is trans. This lady is clearly grasping at straws to try to excuse her bigotry.

To be clear, these leftists had no issue with the play’s content, but with me. Because I align with biology, federal law, and the Constitution.

The flames raced from post to post:

• Keep up the transphobic hate speech cause I can’t wait to sit back and watch the repercussions for you. This is a long time coming and truly I’m very proud of the theater and your cast for firing you.

• This is UNACCEPTABLE…..let’s let the media in on this and all rally for inclusive theater in this town and NO HATE!! Milagro…..we need a response

• Notice she has nothing to say about cis men who rape women? She’s terrified trans women will rape women in women’s restrooms, but has never posted a word of concerns about the millions of cis men who’ve raped women outside of any restroom. Most of all, I hate that she’s vicious. These are not thoughtful discussions. They are hate-filled diatribes.

The heat rose and the blaze leapt to threats against the theater renting us the space. The conflagration reached my partner, and our director. A demonstration was planned for opening night; my partner was advised to dump me; our director was told I was box office poison. All of them—the theater, my partner and our director—were promised their reputations would be ruined if they continued to work with me.

The rage-fueled Facebook threads burned hotter with each passing day. Activists suggested they put my picture and address on posters and spread them throughout Portland. Threats, thickly and thinly veiled, were made to the extent that an old friend who had cooled our relationship over my gender critical views called me, deeply worried, and left a voicemail saying “What the hell is going on? Somebody’s threatened you... have you called the police?...It’s a crazy, crazy world... I think you should call the police.”

The denunciations became a bilious firestorm, with total destruction its singular aim. And on February 21st, Milagro’s executive director Dañel Malán-González called and left a voicemail saying “I’ve got staff threatening to quit, I’ve got people threatening to boycott my company, and as much as I appreciate all the effort and time you’ve put into this, and your own money, we’re gonna have to cancel the rental... I’m very sorry... good luck with your production and hopefully you can find a venue to put on your show.”

We were to open in 13 days, and we were homeless. And it was evident from the smoking ruins of my beautiful project that no theater in town would ever touch it.

Hours after Malán-González’s call, my partner phoned and said our agreement was over; that I was to publish a statement distancing myself from him and our director, and that I had to dissolve our theater company, Red S. He demanded this, he told me, so that he could still produce the play in town somewhere. That is, after he took my name off it.

I was blindsided and devastated that he abandoned me to the mob so he could still stage the show. That he didn’t defend me or care what they were going to do to me. Or that I felt like my life was in danger, all for simply expressing myself honestly. I did as he required, posting, in part, that everyone involved with The Macbeths and Milagro Theatre “...are wonderful people who care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusion, and who support every aspect and facet of the LGBT+ community. They are not in any way connected to me or to my opinions; in fact, they 100% support the recent concerns and for this reason have disassociated themselves from me. ...the cast and crew and the entire staff at Milagro are all 100% courageously committed to the protection of all marginalized people. They have demonstrated this powerfully by asking me to leave the show and the company, and to dissolve the company itself. I am happy to comply.

I love the Portland theater community and support its right to free expression with my whole heart.”

That same day, Willamette Week, a left-wing free newspaper, published an article headlined “Milagro Theatre Cancels Play Over Star’s Remarks on Transgender People,” wherein the theater promised to “to add background checks and a clause to contracts about abiding by the theater’s mission and values.”

And the theater community capered around the bonfire, posting:

“Hopefully, this is the first step in putting an end to her involvement/influence in Portland theatre and film community... Now that this first act has been accomplished, what else can we do to help make sure she becomes persona non grata in the Portland theatre and film community?”

Thousands of hours of work on The Macbeths squandered. Thousands of dollars lost.

I returned all the tickets. Told my daughter to cancel her flight from San Francisco. Told her in-laws to cancel theirs from Michigan. Told my pickleball partners, my building mates, my longtime pals: cancel your plans—I’ve been cancelled. Again.

The Macbeths was nothing but smoldering ash.

ACT II: MUDDLING THROUGH THE MIDDLE

On the same day all this was taking place, I had to fly to Sacramento to help my best friend from high school die, and to help my elderly, ill, developmentally delayed sister live. Valerie was close to death and I needed to tend to her and to the myriad details that accompany a passing, while my sister Bronwen, recovering from a fall in her assisted living residence, needed me to find a new home appropriate for her increasing frailty. As I passed through the Portland airport and then the Sacramento airport, I had the oddest experience. It felt like everyone was watching me. I felt vulnerable, stripped bare, ashamed, embarrassed, exposed.

Being on the receiving end of this sort of mob “justice” turns the world upside down: nowhere is safe, no one is to be trusted. Everyone, everywhere, is a danger. It robs you of rational thought, lays your guts out in the open, and causes you to second-guess yourself, the validity of your position, and your right to express it. You feel as though you are going mad.

This destabilized state reminded me of being stalked years back by an unbalanced student from an adult class, who emailed me hideous treatises from “theendofmarymac@gmail.com.” The effect was because he could get to me somewhere, it felt like he was everywhere. And I was terrified.

So as I made my way to the car rental desk, I was certain everyone in the airport was staring at me, and somehow... stalking me.

Lost in a blackened mental landscape, even as I cooked for my dying friend and worked for my ailing sister, I needed guidance. Fortunately, a fellow traveler on X sent me Jenny Lindsay’s book Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, and I found a wise companion. Hounded details the violence done to women who speak in favor of protecting female agency, specifically the psychological, social, economic, and democratic damage. Lindsay frames the harm done to women as particular to our sex; that is, vocal gender critical women suffer and endure a very different response than men addressing the same topic.

As Lindsay puts it, “Women are harmed on three levels by gender identity ideology, and its activism: by the demands of the ideology itself, and then, for speaking out about it. On top of that, they are further punished for highlighting what activists do to them after they speak out, in an attempt to silence them on both counts. It is a heady experience for all women subjected to it.”

Perhaps most importantly, Lindsay identifies the pattern of houndings. While each one may differ depending on the targeted woman—her area of employment, her circle of friends, the town she lives in and so on—there is a type of person and concomitant mobbish behavior which predictably shows up. Lindsay again: “The outraged strangers. The betrayal of friends. The mass notifications. The misrepresentation of your views, and the consequences of holding them. The fear. The escalation. The canceling of contracts and associations with vague reference to ‘inclusivity’ and ‘values.’”

Complicating this is the absence of hounded women’s support systems. Whether or not friends agree with gender critical views, surely the doxing, deplatforming, cancelling, rape and assault threats should be considered outrageous, and the women protected and defended?

In my case, with fewer and fewer people to turn to, even those still close to me didn’t fully understand what was happening, or why. One kept asking me “But what else did you do?” to cause the leftists to destroy my show. She couldn’t believe the degree of damage just for expressing an opinion. It was out of proportion. Surely I must have done something to warrant the destruction? Another told me I had “poked the bear.” That is, on some level, I had brought all this upon myself, and I should have known better.

Call it compassionate incredulity. But you see, when a woman is hounded, especially on social media, it’s not just on the screen. It’s real, whether others believe it or not. It’s invasive. It’s in her head. It’s in her home. And she’s on her own.

This is why after February 21st, as I sat in my dining room with the darkness crowding the window, I wondered if this was the night I was going to get shot through the glass.

And sadly, recent history shows us these houndings don’t cease. My cancellation in 2019 eventually went quiet—but it was not the end of my persecution, just merely a pause. The leftists waited until I had made something small, delicate, and beautiful, and then they burned it to the ground. There’s no indication they will ever stop.

What I wish those around all women enduring this would grok is that this is not normal. This is not how civil society works. It is cruel and unusual punishment. As Lindsay puts it, “I do not think the harms ... [are] something any woman should become wholly used to. I would worry should these experiences come to be viewed as normal. ... That we are all in it together is some comfort, though few of us ... have come through it with our mental well-being wholly unscathed.”

Can I get an amen?

Reading the stories in Hounded helped me come back into myself, aided by the admiration I have for the many brave women Lindsay writes about who went before: Magdalen Berns. JK Rowling. Rosie Kay. Kathleen Stock. Kellie-Jay Keen. Many more.

I wasn’t alone. I’m not alone.

As I walked through the two airports on the way home, I still struggled with anger, grief and fear, but there was no one stalking me anymore.

ACT III: BEGINNING AGAIN

The evening after I flew home from Sacramento, four short days after the initial firestorm, I was in the kitchen preparing dinner. This room, where I make all my meals from scratch (generally with a 40s film noir playing on the laptop), is my favorite. Simple, practical, outfitted with both fire and water, its purpose is modest and nourishing in every sense. I’m whole in a kitchen. And as I chopped the vegetables and wrestled with the loss of The Macbeths—its failed future, my betrayed partnership, my lost investment and friends, I heard a voice say quietly, clearly, and firmly, “I didn’t come here to have an easy time.”

I nearly turned to see who else was there. Because while I recognized the “I” in that statement meant me, the words came from outside myself somehow. It was as though my soul was speaking to me.

“I didn’t come here to have an easy time.” Got it.

So here’s what I did. After I’d had dinner and done the dishes, I created a fundraiser to rise from the ruins of The Macbeths and raise it back to life, called “Speak up for a Silenced Artist.” I tweeted about it and asked friends on X to boost the signal, which they did.

I scoured the responses to the cancellation and online assaults on social media, and found artistic directors who wanted to talk to me about staging the show in their houses, one in the red rocks of Utah and another on the misty Atlantic coast. I reached out to them and we had promising meetings.

I began work on my own version of The Macbeths, with my name alone on the title page.

And then I asked myself if I would change a single thing about what happened; if I would recant my alignment with science, federal law and the Constitution to stage my play in Portland, and the answer was “no.” But I have to confess that underneath this question is a darker one, now. A harder one than before, when I thought my trials were over and I was going to be able to “return to my art as a soldier returns to his fields, home from the war.”

Even though houndings might terrify me, decimate my friendships and drive my art out of Portland; even though they might never stop—am I willing to endure it all to speak up for women and girls?

It seems I have to.

After all, I didn’t come here to have an easy time.

So when The Macbeths tours to your city or town, please come see it. And if I’m there, say hello. We descend from a long line of fellow travelers, you and I, and it wasn’t easy for our forebears either. Let’s show them we’re carrying the torch high, and forward. And not to burn everything down. But to cast a bright and leading light on the path ahead.

Mary McDonald-Lewis

THE FIGURE HEARS THE HOWLING MOB

The figure hears the howling mob
But does not turn and run
For him the stand is half the job,
Then speaking 'til he's done.
The man who fears not any crowd
And will not live with lies
Nor short nor long he is unbowed,
Untroubled 'til he dies.

MML

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