The Art Thieves

How my voice was nearly stolen

As I sat down to write this essay, I became aware of a rising unease, something close to nausea. You see, I’m a canceled artist, initially shouldered aside by my theater community in Portland Oregon around 2019 for my heterodox views on pronoun usage, and finally booted out entirely for my outspoken stance on compelled speech, BLM/CRT, biological reality, DEI, children’s safety, women’s rights, and more.

My art suffered for it, and I suffered, too: I no longer direct or act in theater or work as a dialect coach in Portland... and I’ve lost most of my friends. And most of the time, that’s OK (more on that later). But opening old files for this piece has opened old wounds, and right now I wish I hadn’t agreed to write it.

Here’s my story.

In 1993, I went searching for a new place to raise my daughter Madeline. I looked at several cities and towns, and Portland won, hands-down. This was a clean, cheerful, dog-loving city with an active café and nightlife, encircled by emerald fields and forests, with Mt. Hood watching over it to the east, and the dazzling Pacific to the west. It was perfect.

I’d already had several careers by this time in multiple areas of communications. For instance, in Los Angeles I’d been a voice actor for 15 years. I was also a field reporter for an AM news-talk station and an FM NPR news anchor.

Now after 30 more years in the field, I still work as a voice actor, heard by millions as the voice of OnStar and on Archer and Buzz Lightyear, along with other shows. I established myself as a leading dialect coach for stage and screen. I directed dozens of plays, coached hundreds more, acted on stage and on camera, and coached today’s leading stars in TV series and films.

It was a sweet life all ‘round.

By 2018, however, that life began to sour.

Artists Repertory Theatre (ART), where I was a Resident Artist, began holding meetings about race, which initially I happily attended. Giant newsprint sticky notes festooned the walls, Sharpie-covered with bullet points and plans. First this mission statement, and then another morphed out of those meetings, which increased in frequency. 

Then the demand for pronoun declarations came. We were “asked” to name our pronouns in all written appearances, such as bios, and in all oral presentations, like the ones I often gave to donors about the language used in the plays. 

I demurred. Something about compelled speech didn’t feel right to me. It felt like a warning of some kind.

I didn’t make a fuss, though; I simply didn’t respond. Not the first time, or the next. Eventually, though, I had to let the company know: I wasn’t ever going to announce myself as a “she/her” in spoken or written language.

Half a year later, political correctness rose up at Portland Center Stage (PCS). Pronoun buttons abounded, and introductions got long. After friction around the pronoun issue I was called to HR “just to have a coffee, get to know each other.” That’s when I was informed that at PCS, “call out culture” was encouraged. When I responded to the earnest young woman, “So does that mean I can call out W---- for her rudeness to me because she disagrees with my politics?” The hasty amendment came: “Oh no, you can’t.”

“Oh. Uh, why?” I asked. She took a sip of her coffee, looking over the rim. “Because you’re white.”

I had a feeling that our coffee klatsch was going to go on my permanent record. Shortly after this, the longtime artistic director left to head up Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and a young woman, Marissa Wolf, took the company’s reins. She made me apply for my (freelance, but decades-long) position again, then wrote me, “I'm very sorry to say that I don't have a project for you next season.” Nor any future season. 

This was early 2019. 

Circling back to ART, I found myself in the artistic director’s office, with HR present, and I was unceremoniously let go from the company, with no real explanation. My work there was excellent; actors, patrons and critics all responded positively and the results were evident on stage. But I hadn’t taken the knee to ART’s speech demands. I’m sure the vagueness was intended to avoid legal ramifications, and I didn’t argue. I walked to the lobby, pulled my picture off the wall, and left forever. 

In response to my cancellation, and reacting to a growing sense of shrinking liberties when it came to what citizens could and couldn’t say and do, I began reading, watching and listening to the thinkers I have come to call my fellow travelers: initially Bret Weinstein, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes; later Clifton Duncan, Helen Staniland, Kathleen Stock, Graham Linehan, Douglas Murray, Jennifer Bilek, Zuby, Jodi Shaw, Jordan Peterson, Africa Brooke, Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, Andrew Gold and many more. I started speaking and posting about my concerns, and launched a Substack, “Doxie Thoughts: Heterodox pondering, maundering, wondering & wandering.” And I burned my earlier, unquestioned liberal membership card in favor of no card at all. 

In short, like a soldier leaving his fields to fight his own countrymen on his own soil, I went to war in Portland.

And began to lose friends by the dozens.

As I write this, the shame rises again. This abandonment feels like a condemnation of my character—I am guilty of being a terrible person. To center myself, I ask myself a question: Would I recant my views to win back my work and my friends? The answer is always “No.” 

But every time I have to ask myself this, something hardens inside me, and a piece of my fundamental artistry ossifies.

For a while, I simply turned to film and TV for my work, and sense of purpose. Then the attacks began on social media, with “We hate MaryMac” posts bubbling up on Facebook, led by a crew of actors, most of whom I had either coached, acted alongside, directed for, directed, or some version of all four. Words like “toxic,” “dangerous,” and “harmful” described me. I was accused of having “no trauma training” to enable me to work with black people, and of committing the sin of coaching African American English.

My last directorial effort in Portland was in 2020, a staging of God of Vengeance, by Sholem Asch. I had no idea how fraught this effort would be, nor that it would be my swansong.

When I offered a role to an actor on the show, I got this reply: “I am conflicted by the lack of Jewish talent represented, especially with a mostly White and Gentile design/directoral (sic) team,” to which I responded, in part, “I don’t look at racial pedigree nor ask for it in the interview, which is against the law, nor hire or don’t hire based on whether someone is Jewish (or Muslim, or African-American, or Northern European, or...), which is also against the law.” And then I rescinded my offer of work.

The email exchange went wide, and I received a note from another actor who was also an Antifa trainer, offering to help me “learn and grow.” An exchange occurred between us and subsequently the assistant director, dramaturg, stage manager and an actor all quit in protest of the lack of Jewish representation on the show. Nota bene: Of course there were Jewish actors cast. But that was incidental, and I wasn’t ever going to capitulate to the demand to identify them. 

I never directed in Portland again.

What happens when you’re banned from your art? When you have chosen to fight for something larger instead? For me, worry, fear and rage moved into the space formerly occupied by curiosity, imagination and passion. Joy withers, replaced by grim determination. In Portland, the city was on fire for over 100 nights, its blaze flaring while my personal fire dimmed.

In the summer of ‘21, Portland’s social justice activists came after my role as Portland’s national board member for SAG-AFTRA, attempting to derail my election. A disingenuous petition-style post read, in part:

“We, the undersigned, feel compelled to urge Portland local SAG-AFTRA members not to vote for Mary McDonald-Lewis for board member. Serving the local as a board member is a difficult and often thankless job; anyone willing to run would normally be welcomed. But when the behavior and public pronouncements of a candidate are so shaming, exclusionary and toxic, having that person represent our local would be hurtful and slam the door on artists we should be welcoming.  ...

We stand with the many actors of color and trans actors that she has harmed directly with her racism and transphobia. We do not support her insistent, public criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, trans awareness, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, systemic racism, and indigenous land acknowledgements. We reject her characterization of us — as sinister, cultish, Stalinist, bigoted, authoritarian propagandists — just because we support those efforts.

(McDonald-Lewis) cannot be trusted to fight for the diverse needs of our community.”

I won that election and the next one, which featured oppo campaign material calling me a “transphobe and a relic.” But the attacks have continued, as recently as a month or so ago. Once again social media was aflame with attacks on my character and essential humanity, with comments like “Lock her transphobia ass up” inspiring others to throw gas on the virtual pyre. This most recent assault brought a decades-old friend to my home to stage an hour-long struggle session, where she mourned that I was “harming the community” with my stance on biology; that I should “lead with my heart and not my head” when it came to that; and that perhaps I should move out of town. When she left, I thought “Well, there goes another one.”

I was deeply destabilized after the living room denunciation rally, but asked myself the same question once again: Would I recant? No. 

I don’t mind the occasional attacks on X, or even getting fired. Though frightening, I wasn’t overly concerned when, in 2021, armed Antifa activists assaulted me in Portland for coming to the aid of a Vietnam vet they were hounding.

But it’s still hard when the aggression comes from people I love. I’m lonely, even though some of my fellow travelers have become friends: McWhorter, Duncan, Shaw, Gold. But they can’t meet me at my local to drink whiskey and solve the world’s problems, at least for one night. I connect with my new friends online, and while I’m grateful, it’s simply not enough.

And it saddens me that I avoid going to plays now, and that when I meet anyone in my former field around town my first thought is “Hang on, is this someone who hates me now?” It sickens me when I see members of this community dogpiling on me online, only to smile at me offline at union events. My life is a morass of social uncertainty; something deeply torturous for an extrovert. 

As an artist, perhaps worst of all, it’s mob-driven theft: a smash-and-grab of my purpose, and of my ability to create. Writ small—just one person losing her craft—this is a minor thing. Writ large, it is grand larceny: stealing that which describes us as a culture and a country, and which mirrors our humanity to us. Art is what makes us human; stealing its creation is a crime against us all.

As I sleepily outlined this essay in bed, late one night, I had a chilling thought: what if all this—all this loss—was for nothing? Have I given up the beating heart of who I am for a failed cause? 

But the cause is real, and worth fighting for.

Well then, could others have borne the standard, course-corrected the country instead of me? Could I have sat the whole thing out and retained the shape and mission of a life now entirely taken from me? My Unitarian minister father risked his life on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Dr. King, and in the fields with Cesar Chavez. Today, others in the fight get death threats regularly, lose friends, careers, families, and health because they’ve chosen to speak up for the American Experiment, for the Western project. The thought leaders I admire and thousands of ordinary citizens just like me have suffered, are suffering. I have an obligation to continue, I think.

And despite the twist in my stomach that writing this has caused, I’m glad to have written it. The art thieves have tried to steal my voice, but I’m still here.

So I trudge on, reading, watching, listening; speaking, writing. Grieving. 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.

But will I recant to get there? No. No, I won’t.

So where does that leave me? Hardened. Heartbroken. Determined. And hoping, one day, to return to my art, as a soldier returns to his fields, home from the war.

For more of Mary’s work, you can visit her website here. This is an essay for our new series, “Make Them Hear You: Stories from FAIR Artists.” Learn more about the series and contribute here.

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.