The actor asked her if she was “up for this.”
It was the first day of rehearsals for a local play, and Lauren Briggeman had been cast as a romantic lead. Still early in her career, she was feeling unsure of herself after just moving back to Indianapolis from New York City, where she’d acted in only one show.
By “this,” she thought the actor, who was about 15 years older, was doubting her ability to play the role. To match his stage presence. To do the intimate scenes. The intimacy, including onstage kisses, began right away, with no direction or discussion.
“But then it bled into offstage,” said Briggeman, who was in her 20s. “In front of other actors, he would come up and kiss me, or gesture for me to kiss him. I thought maybe he was just trying to make me more comfortable, so I went along with it.”
The actor was friends with the show’s director. None of the other, more experienced cast members said anything about the off-stage behavior, and Briggeman said she didn’t really understand the rules. On-set intimacy directors — roles that became more in-demand after the #MeToo movement and have become more common in Indianapolis theaters — didn’t really exist back then.
Briggeman, now 40, said she remembers thinking she must have looked ridiculous, especially to the other women in the cast.
“I felt shame about what was happening, but I just joked and flirted and played the part that I felt like I was expected to play both on and off stage.”
‘I felt like I had no choice’
Looking back, Briggeman, the founding artistic director of Summit Performance Indy, said she didn’t know how to stand up for herself at that stage in her life and career. Because of the power dynamics that can take place across stages, actors often are afraid to say, “No,” because they worry about being seen as difficult or losing roles.
It wasn’t until 2021 that Briggeman worked with her first intimacy director, Claire Wilcher, on the set of “Alabaster” at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre.
Wilcher, 46, who is also a well-known actor, helped sketch out the intimate scenes, both the physical and raw, emotional ones. She made sure consent and comfort were always in clear view.
In “Alabaster,” Briggeman played Alice, a photographer who has just lost her wife and unborn baby in a car accident. To heal, Alice travels to document the stories of women who have severe physical scars.
While in Alabama, she stays with June, a folk artist who was hurt in a tornado. One night, June wakes up in terror, reliving the storm that also killed her younger sister and parents. As June paces, Alice grips her shoulders. The two women sit on the ground. They kiss.
During early rehearsals, Wilcher asked the two actors about their boundaries: What was a hard “no”? What was acceptable? She told them they could use “placeholders” for intimate moments. For example, they could touch their foreheads or cheeks together instead of kissing.
“It was always OK to set boundaries like, ‘Today I’m not comfortable with you touching my stomach,’ and then that was the rule — no questions asked,” Briggeman said. “In the past, I felt like I had no choice, that I needed to do what the script or the director said, or that I and the other actor were left to just ‘figure it out together.’”
Like fight scenes, but with intimacy
When intimacy directors try to explain what they do, they sometimes compare it to choreographing fight scenes. Except they’re working to design scenes that involve physical touch and emotional depth.
“You wouldn’t hand actors swords on day one and say, ‘Go figure it out,’ right? That would be dangerous,” said Wilcher.
An intimacy director’s aims are similar: Avoid surprises. Minimize harm. Collaborate with the actors so they can feel creative and empowered.
“My job is to make the moment not only look real, but to preserve the actors’ joy and safety in creating a very unreal moment,” Wilcher said. “If I’ve done my job, the audience feels the chemistry.”
“You wouldn’t hand actors swords on day one and say, ‘Go figure it out,’ right? That would be dangerous.”
— Claire Wilcher, intimacy director
Wilcher estimates she’s worked on 35 local and regional shows since earning a certification in intimacy direction in 2022 from the Intimacy Directors and Coordinators Professionals, a worldwide organization that offers training and mentorship. She’s also the in-house intimacy consultant for the Indiana Repertory Theatre.
From larger theaters like the IRT to smaller community playhouses, it’s becoming more common for an intimacy director to be part of the crew, no matter the play’s subject matter.
The IRT worked with two intimacy directors, including Wilcher, during its 2024-25 season. According to artistic director Ben Hanna, this helped them “level the playing field” when it came to power dynamics and hierarchies.
The Naptown African American Theatre Collective, whose last two seasons were based at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre, has hired intimacy directors for three of the five shows it produced in the past two years, said CEO and founder LaKesha Lorene.
“Without coordination, you run the risk of not being able to have your talent work at their best, in scenes where intimate moments are portrayed,” Lorene said.
Intimacy directors: The ‘fun’ police?
Intimacy directors — or intimacy coordinators, as they’re called in the film industry — are still pretty new roles, though they’ve been making national headlines over the past several years. (The term “intimacy choreographer,” though, has been around since 2004, when it was coined by Tonia Sina, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University.)
Some people knock intimacy directors as being the “fun police.” But when actors feel safe, that opens the door to more risk and freedom.
“There’s this idea that it will somehow limit creativity or spontaneity, but I can’t emphasize how untrue that is,” said Chris Saunders, founding artistic director of Indy’s American Lives Theatre, which produces contemporary shows.
Along with hiring intimacy directors for American Lives Theatre shows, Saunders also works as one.
“A lot can go wrong when you just tell a couple of actors to ‘make out hardcore and make sure it looks real,’ which is what I was told once,” he said. “It’s fine — we truly didn’t know any better. But now we do. I wanted to be part of that.”
Nationally, some actors have faced backlash for rejecting the need for choreographed intimacy. The leads of 2025 Oscar-winning “Anora” chose not to work with an intimacy coordinator because they said they trusted the “authenticity” of director Sean Baker and because the straightforward sex scenes were shot quickly.
“There’s this sense that if you really trust your director, or you really trust your scene partner, then that is enough. Or that the only people who need intimacy direction are the ones who are less experienced,” said Olivia Mozzi, a 38-year-old intimacy director who works in central Indiana. “My belief is that intimacy direction benefits everyone.”
Not just nudity or sex
Intimacy doesn’t just mean kissing, touching, nudity or sex simulations. It means anything that could make an actor feel vulnerable, whether the scene involves physical or emotional abuse, bodily functions, medical situations, heartbreak or grief.
Or even the Nazi salute.
In a 2024 production of “Cabaret” at Footlite Musicals, actor Nate Taillon played Herman, one of the boys at the Kit Kat Club, along with other roles such as a sailor and train conductor. While his character never performed the salute, other cast members did. Mozzi, the musical’s intimacy director, talked with the full cast about Nazi symbolism and the Holocaust.
“She literally looked up the best way to do the Nazi salute and taught (the cast) in a respectful and educated way,” said Taillon, 25. “She was so much more than someone who addressed intimacy. She was a great resource for topics that were a little hard to research on our own.”
For Mozzi, who is also an actor, exploring the “why” of each scene — the emotional, historical or political context — is always crucial.
In a 2022 production of “Cost of Living,” she played Ani, who was learning to live as a quadriplegic following a car accident. After Ani returns home from rehab, her ex-husband, Eddie, an unemployed truck driver, comes back around and says he wants to take care of her. In one emotional scene, Ani sits in a bathtub talking to Eddie.
“Before I would go on stage every night, I would say, ‘I’m letting him give me a bath because he loves me,’ because that’s the context of the scene, right?” Mozzi said. “Because he loves me and I love him. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re doing this randomly.’”
A ‘life-changing’ experience
“Cost of Living” was produced by American Lives Theatre on stage at Fonseca Theatre and it was the first time Mozzi worked with an intimacy director, Destiny Heugel. Mozzi called the experience “life-changing for me as a person and as an actor.”
The show cast two actors who have disabilities to play the two lead characters with disabilities. One of them was Mozzi, who has cerebral palsy.
“As a disabled actor, and as a disabled person, I am very aware that I am more vulnerable than the average person in the room,” said Mozzi. “Knowing that extra processes were put in place to make sure everyone was on the same page about the intimate scenes was very empowering.”
That’s when she decided to become an intimacy director. Her first show was Cryptid Entertainment’s “Bigfoot Saves the World” in 2024. She’s now working on her fifth show, “The Rocky Horror Show,” which Main Street Productions will open Sept. 25 at the Basile Westfield Playhouse. Mozzi also just started a Facebook group so intimacy directors can share ideas and resources.
In Indianapolis, some intimacy directors have gone through hundreds of hours of training and mentorship through organizations such as IDC Professionals, while others are learning and gaining experience as they go. Intimacy directors can make anywhere from $100 a day to $250 an hour (plus travel expenses), depending on their experience and the budget of the theater company.
Bigger cities with bigger theater and film scenes and budgets have more robust standards and practices in place, Wilcher said, whereas in smaller and mid-sized cities like Indianapolis, intimacy direction “is very much a grassroots campaign.”
“Indianapolis, where we are Midwest-nice and where politeness reigns strong enough to make folks feel like they can’t speak up — this is where the work is truly rich,” Wilcher said.
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Amanda Kingsbury is Mirror Indy’s managing editor of innovation. You can reach her at amanda.kingsbury@mirrorindy.org.
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