How To Deconstruct All Forms Of Privilege

Following on from talk about her 11-month-old daughter — "making work since having a baby is easier in a lot of ways... I've never felt more confident, more efficient" — we ask Sarah Giles how she came to be involved with Straight White Men, which was originally slated to be directed by Leticia Caceres, the former Associate Director for Melbourne Theatre Company.

"Do you mean on a theatrical level or an intimate level?" she jokingly seeks clarification, capitalising on the poor phrasing of the question.

"For Young Jean Lee to suggest that whiteness is as much of a construct as blackness, she's identified the tropes of whiteness and inserted them very firmly into this play."

Written by a Korean American woman, Young Jean Lee, Straight White Men inverts the pervasive, othering gaze, revealing the executors of such privilege to be just as constructed and prone to essentialist archetypes as those they have oppressed.

"For a very long time straight white men have kind of been the default human, or the tabula rasa of human experience, but the minute you start writing about gay people or people of colour it becomes their particular experience. For Young Jean Lee to suggest that whiteness is as much of a construct as blackness, she's identified the tropes of whiteness and inserted them very firmly into this play."

In preparing Straight White Men Giles confronted for the first time her whiteness, and the privilege that comes with it. The script didn't offer easy answers, and demanded multiple re-readings. All of which seems appropriate for a script from a playwright who selects projects based on how uncomfortable the material makes her.

"The first time I read the script there were elements I didn't get, I think predominantly because I am white. I've never ever thought so much about my whiteness until doing this show. I think my whiteness is potentially problematic, you know, if it was a female person of colour directing the show it might be different again, but I think it could be weird if a white guy directed it because part of it is looking at that position of power from someone who is not on equal footing, who doesn't have as much privilege as those characters."

Much of the power of Straight White Men, Giles says, lies in its ability to force you to acknowledge privilege of all types: "I define myself as a feminist and I've done a lot of thinking about that; I think what I'd never done a lot of thinking about is my position of privilege as a human. I've had to think about my privilege as an able-bodied person, as a person who is white, as someone whose first language is English in a country where that is the most-spoken language..."

Addressing these issues has also proved helpful in preparing for Nakkiah Lui's new show, Blaque Showgirls, which Giles will direct at Malthouse in December.

"Nakkiah Lui wrote a great article recently saying what Australia needs to get rid of is not racism but the privilege of whiteness, and I think that's kind of where we're at in terms of what we could be talking about more."