"Decorum in the Digital Age"

by Philip Kennicott

[On 11 February 2014, I posted an article by ROT contributor Kirk Woodward called “Reflections On Theater Etiquette” in which my friend discussed some of the ways that performers should behave while they’re working.  On 3 May 2015, the Washington Post ran a collection of articles by arts journalists on proper behavior by patrons in public spaces, including the theater.  I’m posting the introductory article by Philip Kennicott and the theater article by Nelson Pressley as a sort of delayed companion to Kirk’s piece.  The articles originally ran in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post.]

“Change in etiquette usually comes slowly, just as changes come slowly in the dictionary,” Amy Vanderbilt wrote in her book on manners, published more than half a century ago. Vanderbilt was wise not to qualify her statement. Change usually comes slowly. But look at the etiquette of public space today, and one finds everywhere great and rapid change.

Technology has scrambled the lines between public and private. Cellphones make our most intimate conversations available to anyone within earshot, while headphones create zones of pure solitude even in the midst of the liveliest crowd. Smartphones and tablets allow us to spend time with art without ever leaving the office, while sophisticated new robots enable the house-bound to participate in live events remotely. Last year, the National Symphony Orchestra invited a Beam “telepresence robot” into a side box, so that a disabled man in California could see, hear and interact with the musicians at a performance.

The democratization of art and the desire to make it more accessible also has fundamentally changed how we expect people to behave in social spaces once governed by sometimes elaborate rules. The nature of those rules — are they simply the arbitrary residue of class and snobbery, or are they pragmatic guidelines for ensuring everyone can hear, see and enjoy the experience? — continue unabated, but with a twist.

Perhaps we are entering a new age of radicalism individualism, in which the very idea of enjoying public space together is giving way to something more anarchic and carnivalesque. Silence was once prized as a mark of success in many public spaces, including libraries, museums and concert halls; the vibrancy of many of those spaces, today, is measured by noise, hubbub and laughter.

And yet etiquette also is remarkably resilient, reforming in new ways, often spontaneously. Taking a selfie in a museum may be disruptive to others, and antithetical to the experience of art, yet given the option, most people will avoid walking through the line of sight and ruining someone else’s photograph. If the power goes off in a nightclub, it’s astonishing how quickly audiences will tune in and scale down their conversations to hear the unamplified music. The silence in the Quiet Car on Amtrak is more strictly governed by ordinary passengers than the stereotypical librarian of old who rode herd on unruly students a century ago.

The two most significant forces shaping our planet today — rapid urbanization and the wholesale destruction of our environment — will only increase the rate of change in etiquette. For one thing is certain: We will live in more crowded spaces, and we will increasingly live indoors, cocooned in climate-controlled zones with a few billion of our closest friends. If etiquette is simply an elaboration of the Golden Rule, or Kant’s categorical imperative — always act in such a way that you’d be happy to have everyone do as you do — then it is certain to undergo as profound and as rapid a change as we have ever experienced.

The critics of The Washington Post spend much of their lives in theaters, museums, restaurants and nightclubs, but also on buses and trains, in airports and libraries, and all the myriad public spaces of ordinary life. What follows is a report from the field, an attempt to register the changes — or not — in etiquette from a cross section of the social world. Some have chosen to codify their own rules for an evolving social realm; others have taken a more sociological look at the forces underlying old arguments about rules and manners. Yet others have wrestled with their own internal conflicts about etiquette, about the “should” and “how” of passing down rules to new audiences.

And our conclusions? None at all. But a few themes emerge. Dance critic Sarah Kaufman sees a correlation between the intensity — and rarity — of the artistic experience and collective good behavior. Dance can’t be reproduced at home on the stereo or television, so when we encounter it in the flesh, we are completely absorbed. Film critic Ann Hornaday surveys a very different medium, where audiences often forget that they aren’t in their own living room. She also points out something fundamental about etiquette: We are better at practicing it than enforcing it, and confrontation is almost always counterproductive.

Food critic Tom Sietsema regularly patrols the unruly world of eating in public, where people can be astonishingly thoughtless. Among his observations is a basic insight about character, and behavior: “Think good thoughts,” he says. Because, in the end, empathy and a blithe spirit will always yield a better experience for everyone. Classical music critic Anne Midgette wrestles with her feelings about rules, in an environment that often feels to outsiders horribly rule-bound. There are no easy answers, she says, because the passionate desire to share music with others often leads music lovers to “lapse into a rhetoric that comes off as at once defensive and bossy.”

Theater critic Nelson Pressley provides a history lesson in rowdy behavior, and insight into what it’s like on the other side of the proscenium, where actors have their own passionate feelings about audience misbehavior. Pop music critic Chris Richards offers rules for the world of amplified music, crowded clubs and a naturally more freewheeling environment. But he sees the individual clubgoer just as much a part of a collective experience as anyone at the symphony hall. “Is your behavior helping the collective energy flow more freely, or is it clogging things up?” And thus we see the basic impulse to keep etiquette alive and well in an arena designed to be antipodal to the formal, hierarchical experience of art.

In the end, that is the fundamental paradox of art and public space: We go there both to be free and to submit (through the embodiment of experience in art) to the consciousness of others; to find and lose ourselves; to be out in the world yet to escape the crushing banality of so much of the culture we have created. Art often seems incidental to the larger world of commerce, politics and celebrity, but it teaches us the most essential lesson of living well together, how to modulate our own ego and desires in the face of something larger, more important and lasting.

“THE SHOW MUST GO ON, CIVILLY”

by Nelson Pressley

Our era’s curse is the cellphone, but theaters have a long tradition as rowdy places. In ­17th-century France, Molière had to tolerate cocky, talkative VIPs who insisted on sitting on the stage. That was common in London, too.

Food, especially fruits and nuts, used to be sold inside theaters, which meant audiences had something to throw at the stage whenever they felt like expressing a bit of ­high-velocity criticism.

And prostitutes! Let’s not forget the working women who used to drum up business in the stalls and galleries.

“Fifteen years ago our theaters were tumultuous places,” Denis Diderot wrote in 1758, fretting that guards — yes, it came to that — were turning unruly Paris stages into “resorts more peaceful and respectful than our churches.”

Our own mayhem is subtler — except, maybe, when an actor leaps from the stage to attack a heckler, which happened over the summer in California. Santa Clara’s Repertory East Company was performing Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and someone in the audience began making homophobic comments about the repressed character Brick. The actor playing Big Daddy took after the heckler and was fired for it. The performer playing Brick quit in solidarity. The rest of the run was scrapped.

Then there was the notorious 2013 University of Mississippi incident with a largely student audience ridiculing the gay figures of the “The Laramie Project,” which chronicles the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The jeering not only shattered etiquette but also challenged civil rights; the scandal quickly went national, with widespread backing for the actors.

“All of a sudden, there was a sense of empowerment in the cast, where they felt the support of the greater community,” the show’s director told the Jackson Free Press. “The performances were just electric.” Civility won.

“Performance is a time to think inwardly, not a time to share your thoughts aloud,” instructs the etiquette guide posted by the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, in Indiana, and, for people who have paid good money and invested valuable time only to be irritated by chatterers (let alone snorers), this bedrock principle can’t be restated often enough.

Still, that’s just scratching the surface of potential distractions. The guides alert us:

“Come clean,” advises New York Show Tickets in a note to both the dirty tourist and the Manhattan gym rat. “Try to make time for a shower before arriving at the theater.”

From the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend, Ind.: “Please consider the people that will be seated behind you when choosing whether or not to wear a hat or what hair style you choose.” Also, with alarming grammar: “Take care of personal needs (drinks of water or restroom) because you should not leave your seat until the intermission or until the performance ends.”

Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company teaches audiences, “React to what’s happening on stage.”

They have yet to include this gentle guidance: Please do not throw up on Washington Post critics. (It happened there.)

Surely, everyone knows it’s rude to rattle wrappers during a show, yet a minor Twizzlers incident upstaged Al Pacino during a 2013 New York performance of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” and prompted the breathless headline, “The Great Fight Way: Broadway Audiences Are Behaving Badly, and Someone Is Going to Get Hurt.”

But the particular bane of our age is the cellphone. In April, Madonna reportedly texted through the second act of the hit off-Broadway musical “Hamilton,” prompting the show’s star and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda to ban Madge from backstage. Hugh Jackman stopped one of his 2009 Broadway performances of “A Steady Rain” with Daniel Craig and stood hands on hips as he told an audience member to turn the bloomin’ thing off. Actress Laura Linney has said that casts now discuss ahead of time what to do when the inevitable cellphone incidents occur.

The most sensational option, of course, is to go ballistic, a la Patti LuPone.

“I have to say this: We have forgotten our public manners,” an inflamed LuPone told a crowd after stopping a performance of “Gypsy” to have a picture-taker thrown out. This was in 2009, when LuPone became the poster diva of “Don’t do that! Don’t make me stop this show!” Only months after “Gypsy” closed on Broadway, she interrupted another performance in Las Vegas to cross-examine an audience member using a phone. When the New York Times characterized the star’s behavior as a trifle touchy, LuPone fired back in a letter.

“This has been going on in my career for 30 years since I starred in ‘Evita,’ and, you’re surprised I stop shows now?” she wrote.

Thirty years predates the “smart” phone, which still hasn’t learned modern theater audience etiquette. (“People” appear to be a poor app for that.) That underscores the bigger point: We are an intuitively restless species. In a crowd, someone is always distracted or out of step. Theaters used to be raucous because they were public squares, places to display one’s privileged self sitting on the stage or to shout as you stood in the pit. The distractions are different now because we’ve evolved into electronic palmists anxious to instant-share and nervous about ever disconnecting.

LuPone’s “Gypsy” tirade is a masterpiece of performer’s pique. On YouTube, you can hear LuPone revving into “Rose’s Turn,” her energy in full throttle, when suddenly she shouts the orchestra to a halt. In a voice that could crack an ocean liner’s hull, she roars at a picture-taker in the audience, “How dare you! Who do you think you are? Get them out!”

The cheers are Olympian. The audience is fully behind her. It had to be said.

The irony that LuPone’s righteous tirade is preserved by an illicit recording? Priceless.

[The other opinion pieces on proper behavior in public places were “Poking Holes in Notion of Anything Goes,” a consideration of etiquette in museums by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s art and architecture critic; “Maintaining Sense of Harmony,” a discussion of correct behavior at a pop concert by Chris Richards, pop music review-writer; “A Blockbuster Idea for Citing Infractions,” an article on etiquette at the movies by Ann Hornaday, a Post movie reviewer; “Dining Out with Good Taste,” an examination of good manners in a restaurant by Tom Sietsema, the Post’s restaurant reviewer; “Caught up in the Performance,” an article on proper conduct at a ballet by dance critic Sarah Kaufman; “To Do and Not to Do,” a consideration of what’s proper at a classical music performance by Anne Midgette, the classical music critic for the paper.]

The Cheapening of the Standing O

by Erin Woodward

[I’m posting a new article by a Woodward, but this time it’s not my college buddy Kirk; it’s his daughter, Erin.  Coincidentally, though, I’ve paired Erin’s disapproval of the over-used standing ovation with Kirk’s discussion of the curtain call—not just because the authors are related, but because the topics are.  (The two posts were not composed together, by the way.  That was just serendipitous timing.)  If you haven’t already read “Curtain Calls,” check back to 3 February and give it a read after (or perhaps before) you’ve read “The Cheapening of the Standing O.”

[Like her father, Erin has some standing to comment on theater and its aspects.  She’s not only an actress and director herself, but she’s been teaching theater in the New York City public schools for a number of years.  (She got her degree from the New York University studio program, so her training background is substantial as well.)  I’ve known Kirk since we were in college together in the mid-’60s; I haven’t known Erin quite that many years—but it’s been almost all her life!  As I’ve said of her Dad, Erin knows whereof she speaks . . . or, in this instance, writes.]

It was a high school show. Lots of heart, lots of smiles. No particular emotional connection occurred, nor was there “that kid” that took our breath away. Big numbers received a range of applause, the last number before the end earning the least-the kids were a little worn out, or perhaps it was the choreography. But the performers were working hard, and there was nothing but positive energy flowing to and from us, the audience, as relatives, friends, alumni, etc.

However, while I clapped with vigor during the curtain call, I was utterly dismayed and flummoxed when, after a couple minutes, in drips and drabs, a standing ovation commenced. I looked to my friend, who also clearly thought it was unearned, as he raised his eyebrows, and then got up himself. “I can’t see the stage,” he explained apologetically. Eventually, as nothing else was happening for a few unnecessary minutes filled with the smalls of backs of this audience, I too stood up for what seemed too long and too little.

That show is unfortunately not the only production for which I had it decide if I would insincerely ovate an undeserving show or sit in protest of all the over-exuberant theatergoers. Broadway shows with huge stars, Off-Broadway shows with no stars (nor script of worth), and educational theater with some heart have all within the last year gotten me begrudgingly to my feet mostly due to wanting to see the stage over the head of a standing ovator. Standing ovations are becoming the norm for any show that, well, finished, regardless of its actual impact on an audience.

I believe the ovation is the moment when a performance literally pulled you onto your feet, whether it be the performance by a great star doing what she does brilliantly, or the first time the kid got through the song, with such pure heart that yours is in your throat and you find yourself utterly compelled and stunned by the moment of pure . . . now.

For the ovation is about the NOW of performances; right at this instant, your work changed me, exceeded my expectations, gave me goose bumps on my arms or a metallic taste of adrenaline in my mouth. You did that, just now. Not in that other show you were in, not in sum of all your performances in the Harry Potter films, not in the fact that you tried awfully hard. An ovation is not an Honorable Mention, nor is it a Lifetime Achievement award. It is a rare and precious aurora borealis for that moment. It is perfect 6.0s across the board at Sarajevo, it is the aria no one ever really heard until she sang it, and it is the performance that was pure nuclear energy from start to finish. The audience should be so eager to honor the work that just concluded that it develops a quick bout of stage fright, or the gift of tongues, either crisis propelling it onto its feet in an elevated genuflection to the art witnessed milliseconds prior.

This occurrence is unfortunately not new. In 2003, Jesse McKinley of the New York Times questioned the overabundance of standing ovations: “Go to nearly any Broadway house, any night, and you can catch a crowd jumping up for the curtain call like politicians at a State of the Union address. And, just as in politics, the intensity off the ovation doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of the performance.”

McKinley goes on to research the proliferation of the standing ovation, noting a long tradition of standing as part of astounding performances of opera and classic drama. For shows on Broadway, however, standing ovations were never the norm until musical icons the likes of Angela Lansbury and Carol Channing, bedecked and bedazzled, took long and glamorous curtain calls, drawing people to their feet. Now, even Broadway icons are unimpressed: “‘It’s gotten totally out of hand,’ said Chita Rivera . . . . ‘It’s become a bit of audience participation. What does it mean anymore?’”

Some theorize that there is a relationship between the increases in ticket prices to the increase in standing ovations, and there are definite moments of engineering an ovation at the end of the show to encourage business, such as the end of Mamma Mia! that encourages the audience to dance-while standing-during the last song. The audience will just stay up for the curtain call, and since it is ABBA, you know they will be clapping along: voila! Standing Ovation! Clock it, critics!

Ben Brantley, the man with the power to kill or crown a Broadway show, urges his readers in a 2012 New York Times article, “Want to Applaud a Broadway Show? Don’t Get Up. Really,” to “think before you stand.” He associates the “reflexive” standing ovation with tourist or irregular theatregoers who attend the more popular shows versus the habitual and therefore more discriminating theatergoers that attend the shows of higher quality versus higher popularity.

Yet I have attended plays at Brooklyn Academy of Music (pre-Barclays Center), attended by mostly locals and tri-state area subscription holders, with the occasional first timer, that both I and critics described as  “fine” or “clear.” Yet they too received standing ovations because, well, that actress, from that Woody Allen movie, she was in it, you know, what’s her name? She was good, and I loved her in that other movie, with Ben Affleck, you know the one! Despite applause during the play maintaining a reserved volume, once those characters turn back into (somewhat) famous actors, Connecticut subscriber and Brooklyn hipster alike lurch onto their feet, as if to push the performance into the realm of “remarkable”.

Like selfies at events, or watching events through a 2 x 4 inch screen despite actually being in the same space as the event itself, the ovation perhaps offers audience members a way to step into the moment more firmly and more egotistically. It is a way to join the cast in that millisecond: I am here with you in this moment! I laud you so that I am part of your memory and moment: I was contributing to the event!

Why is our role as audience not enough? Has the viral video life made us incapable of not being a star in our life at every moment?

As the fifteen minutes of fame has evolved into something of an entitled occurrence, people are hurling themselves against the wall of anonymous and obscure. To be followed on Twitter, now Instagram, is to win Fame merit badges: the more followers one collects, the closer one is to the Eagle Fame Scout.  We are being taught more and more that a talent or special ability is not required-leave that to the circus folk. The slightly less pretty sisters of pretty women make magazine covers now for being lonely, or not lonely, or cranky, or married, then not married. Fame and presence in our modern world need not be earned by skill, achievement, or even notoriety, really.

So stand up for the end of Mountville Middle School’s production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers! Nobody fell down! On your feet for the Broadway show that did not bore you or one of the supporting actresses of Sex and the City two rows in front of you! Jump, audience, jump, so the performers see YOU ovate THEM and you can star in the cast’s memory of this moment. That’s why you’re there, of course . . . for the spotlight, not the show.

Curtain Calls

by Kirk Woodward

[Readers of ROT will be familiar with the writing of my friend Kirk Woodward by now: he’s contributed nearly 50 posts to the blog since I started it (at Kirk’s urging) in 2009.  This piece is slightly different, not so much because of its topic or its writing approach, but because of its “companion” post.  I’ve paired Kirk’s take on curtain calls at a theatrical performance with another discussion on the increasing prevalence of standing ovations, posted on 8 February, which was composed by his daughter, Erin.  (I recommend coming back to ROT for “The Cheapening of the Standing O” after reading “Curtain Calls.”  They weren’t written to go together—that was a coincidence of timing—but they compliment one another thematically.)  As usual, I know you’ll find Kirk’s discussion of this common part of a theater presentation revealing and interesting.]

Talking with friends about theater experiences not long ago, I realized that one aspect of theater I’ve never seen an article about is the curtain call, that episode after the end of the play when the actors line up on stage to receive the audience’s applause, acknowledge various other members of the production who may have contributed something to it, and generally bask in what one hopes will be a general aura of triumph.

I would like to quote the results of a great deal of research on the subject, but unfortunately I don’t have any. I can find nothing on the Internet on the subject, and next to nothing in books. This is odd, since research indicates that our last impressions are our lasting impressions; one study I remember seeing estimated that 60% of what an audience remembers about a show is its end.

A snappy curtain call can do a great deal to convince an audience that it’s had a good time at a show. Conversely, a slow or sloppy curtain call can cause an audience to forget a good deal of the excellent work that preceded it. A good director will know this, and try ingeniously to make the curtain call a treat. Sometimes this effort succeeds, sometimes it doesn’t.

A typical, straightforward curtain call of a show with a moderate sized cast brings out, first, the actors who are hardly in the show at all (the Policeman who enters at the last moment, the Maid, the couple who appeared briefly at the top of Act Two); then the actors of middle-range roles; and finally the handful of performers that the play is basically about.

Variations on this theme are endless. One gambit is to have the actors enter “in character,” that is, still pretending they are the people they portrayed in the show. This approach works well for comedy; it would be obnoxious for tragedy, I would think, with Oedipus or Lear staggering out to receive their ovations blind, or mad, or even dead.

But inventive curtain call routines for comedies can be fun. For example, actors whose characters dislike each other in the play can carry on their fight in the curtain call. What is not fun is for these “bits” to be carried on longer than a moment or so – for example, for the fight to spill all over the stage. The audience wants to applaud the actors; but, after all, the play is over, and they also want to get out of there eventually.

The worst vice of a curtain call is for it to be simply too long. Sometimes this happens for professional reasons. I recall my parents telling me about a trip they made to New York in the 1950s to see Der Rosenkavalier at the old Metropolitan Opera House. My father reported that there were something like fourteen curtain calls, and that from about the sixth on, there was not a single hint of applause in the house, just the sounds of people leaving, and the rustle of the curtain going up and down.

I would bet the large number of curtain calls had a contractual basis – any number of singers were guaranteed any number of bows. In Broadway-level shows the number of individual curtain calls can be a negotiated item.

Often a curtain call is too long because it is under rehearsed, or not rehearsed at all.  I assume this is unlikely to happen with Broadway shows, but you never know. It certainly happens in community theater, as I and many others have witnessed. I have been in a production or two where the director literally did not remember that there was supposed to be a curtain call at all, until the last dress rehearsal, or even the first performance. I may even have been that director myself of one of those.

To be fair, a curtain call may legitimately be the last thing in mind for a director struggling valiantly to get a production to work on some meaningful level. But it has to be done.

There has always been controversy in the theater about whether applause during – or after – a play is appropriate at all, or whether a play – usually a tragedy or something particularly solemn - should simply be received in respectful silence. This controversy, I may add, is seldom stoked by actors, who usually feel that they deserve applause and are entitled to have it.

Occasionally, a director will insist that a play end with no curtain call. I have never known this approach to succeed, and usually it is filed away as a bright but rejected idea well before opening night. The tradition of the curtain call is too strong; audiences that don’t get a chance to acknowledge what they’ve seen resent the omission.

However, traditions can change. In the theater up to modern times, as in opera up to, well, now, major speeches might be followed by applause, with the actor breaking character to bow and acknowledge the cheers. As the movement in theater known as “realism” took hold, audiences began to realize how peculiar it was for a scene presumably meant to represent “real life” to be interrupted by applause, something that seldom happens within the reality of most of us, or at least at my house.

Curtain calls are meant to be happy occasions, so they become notable when off-stage tensions burst out. In Second Act Trouble, a book on short running musicals, the book’s editor, Steven Suskin, reports how in the musical Rex (1976) the late Nicol Williamson, playing the lead role of King Henry VIII, “bashed a chorus boy in the face during the curtain calls [sic]. (The lad whispered to another actor “It’s a wrap,” but the hypersensitive Nicol heard “It’s crap.”)”

I’m sure theater people try to remember the number of curtain calls they’ve received for various shows, and I’m also sure that those numbers tend to expand in the telling, like the length of a fish somebody caught. Someone on the web claims that Placido Domingo (or maybe it was Luciano Pavorotti) once received 102 curtain calls (or maybe it was 165) in Vienna (or maybe it was Berlin).

As I said above, I can find little on curtain calls, even in books of theater lore. I invite others to assemble the information if they can. Meanwhile, here are accounts of four memorable curtain calls that I saw or heard about. Theater isn’t the only kind of performance that has a curtain call; one of these stories is about a comedian on Broadway, one about a dance company at Lincoln Center, and two about musicians.

VICTOR BORGE

I saw the famous Danish pianist and comedian Victor Borge perform a number of times, but the show I remember best was one on Broadway in the 1970s. I had something like fifth-row seats, and Borge was at his best. When the intermission arrived, I stood up, stretched, read the program for a while, and finally made my way slowly to the aisle, passing as I did so a woman who was still laughing at what she’d seen in the first act.

Anyway, at the end of the first act, Borge bowed, the curtain fell, and it kept on falling until it landed in a heap at his feet, with Borge smiling and bowing behind it.

This was so funny that I wondered how Borge could possibly “top” it at the end of the show – set off pyrotechnics? Burst into flame?

What he did was even better. For the curtain call, he took out his handkerchief, held it in front of his face, and rolled it up like a curtain rising. He bowed, and then unrolled the handkerchief again so it covered his face. He repeated the procedure several times, while we laughed helplessly.

MARTHA GRAHAM

In 1978, enjoying a revival of her company and her choreography, the great Martha Graham, then eighty-four years old, presented a program at Lincoln Center that included the delightful ballet The Owl and the Pussycat and was enthusiastically received and reviewed.

At the end of the program, the bows went something like this: the company bowed, and the curtain closed; it opened again, the principal dancers bowed, and the curtain closed; it opened again, the company bowed, and the curtain closed; it opened again, and Martha Graham was standing stock-still in the center of the stage. The audience roared, and the curtain closed; it opened, the company bowed, and so on. We cheered and yelled furiously, demanding that Ms. Graham return; but she didn’t.

B. B. KING

I saw a performance by the great blues guitarist and singer in Montclair, New Jersey, a year or so ago. King has health issues and performs from a chair these days; he tells long, outrageous stories that lead into blues verses, and when the words of the songs won’t express the feelings of the song enough, he plays his guitar and takes the song straight up to heaven.

At the end of the show, he slowly got to his feet and bowed. For what seemed about ten minutes he bowed, waved, shook hands, signed autographs, and basically milked the experience for all it was worth. Finally a man came out carrying a hat and coat. King put them on, made his way slowly to the side of the stage, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared into the night.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

To my deep regret, I never saw the greatest of all American musicians in concert. I had my chances, I suppose, but I missed them, and he died in 1970. On YouTube.com you can see a full-length video of a concert (an excellent one) that Armstrong and his All Stars gave in Berlin in 1965 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5O-oIUXIjo).

At the end, after several bows for the band, the curtain closes, and then Armstrong comes out through the curtain, with his tie loose and holding his jacket. He bows, waves good bye, and goes back through the curtain. The applause continues, and Armstrong comes out through the curtain again, this time in a bathrobe. He bows, acknowledges the cheers, and leaves again. That’s it.

[And then there are the famous James Brown endings, with his series of capes and false exits.  “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business,” indeed!

[I once did a Chekhov play in which the curtain call was a simple pose.  The cast reentered in singles and small groups and assembled around the furniture in the center of the set for the last scene.  When everybody was on stage, we froze in poses resembling a 19th-century photograph.  The lights dimmed and the curtain closed.  No bows.  The end.  The play didn’t go on beyond the final scene, but the world of the play was extended a little.  I don’t know how satisfying this was for the audience, but the actors all thought it was clever and appropriate.  And fun.]

Reflections on Theater Etiquette

by Kirk Woodward

[If it seems like I’m turning ROT over to my friend Kirk Woodward, you aren’t far from wrong.  (Well, to be honest, starting the blog was his idea.)   Kirk turned in “Religious Drama,” posted this past 24 January, and he’s got another piece in the pipeline for me (and his daughter has one in progress as well!).  This time around, Kirk examines how actors behave back stage and on stage while they’re working—or at least how they should behave.  Actors have all kinds of reputations, not all of which are even valid (thanks to Hollywood’s fictional portrayals), but one thing is (and has to be) so: they’re a sensitive lot.  Not just in the meaning of perceptive or even touchy, though those characteristics are part of the equation.  Actors, like many other artists, can be easily thrown by even the most minor intrusions or disruptions, derailed from the tracks of their work or performance.  Think of it as the performance equivalent to the dust particles that can ruin a delicate lab experiment.  What looks to outsiders like a kind of narcissism is usually nothing more than artistic self-defense.  Most theater etiquette comes from efforts over the centuries to minimize tectonic disturbances.]

What’s it like to work in theater? People get their impressions of the answer to this question from many sources – for example, from popular songs, like Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (Annie Get Your Gun, 1946), with its cheery opinion that show folk “smile when they are low.” A little less general, perhaps, is Cole Porter’s presentation of first night jitters in “Another Openin’, Another Show” (Kiss Me, Kate, 1948). Positively glum – except for the bright music – are the many details of life on the road as described in Stephen Sondheim’s “The Glamorous Life” (A Little Night Music, 1973).   

And then there are the many movies and TV shows, for example, All About Eve (1950) and Smash (2012–2013), that present theater as a cauldron of bitterly competitive relationships and combative personalities. Those show folk! How frenetic! How bizarre!

So it may be useful to affirm that behind the scenes, theater isn’t all that different from “real life” for teachers, soldiers, cashiers, clerks, the clergy, or any other group of people working together. All work situations have their tensions and conflicts, as the comic strip Dilbert demonstrates daily. Actors, we say with only slight hesitation, are people too. (“They are?” says Max Bialystock in The Producers. “Have you ever eaten with one?”)

But there are structural differences between acting and other careers. There are very few other work situations where every job is temporary, and also where one’s job performance is actively judged by every person who comes in contact with it. A bricklayer, laying bricks, doesn’t have every person who will ever walk on that sidewalk commenting on how well the bricks are being laid. Actors lay bricks – alas, sometimes in more than one sense – in front of everyone, and everyone has an opinion on the result.

In the current environment of live theater, every actor is a step away from the breadline, and there just aren’t that many jobs available. In an article in the New York Times some years ago (“Broadway’s Anonymous Stars” by Peter Marks, February 2, 1996), a brilliant actress and singer (Liz Callaway) described how, a few months after getting a Tony Award nomination, she was working in a gift shop, because she couldn’t find another role.

In nations where the theater is subsidized, the situation is less dire, but the constant question of failure or success is still there. Actors, in other words, are always on the brink. The natural result is a heightened level of tension, which can express itself in various forms, like competitiveness, anxiety, superstition… Even a routine rehearsal is an Event, with a degree of success and failure riding on it, and with the great purpose of creating some sort of a work of art giving an additional dimension to the experience.

Because theater is in some ways different from everyday life, people do sometimes behave somewhat differently in it. That’s what this piece is about – stage etiquette, that is, how people behave in the theater, as opposed to how they perform. Those are two different things. Sometimes they are harder to keep separate than one might expect. Theater people sometimes feel, act, and even believe that the world of the theater is the only world there is. Sometimes there are consequences for feeling that way.

Theater people have a reputation for being extravagant, unpredictable folks. Some are, of course. Most, though, would never stand out in a crowd, except for that undefinable something that compels them to go on the stage in the first place. However, because of the nature of their work, actors tend to be insecure people, and this insecurity can lead to strange behavior. Awareness helps, some.

For example, being insecure, actors will accept help from anyone. “My manager said I should do the part this way . . . . “My agent said the scene doesn’t work for me . . . .” Directors can get testy over that kind of thing. They don’t like to think that someone besides themselves is doing the directing. It would be wonderful if every actor would learn not to tell the director (or anybody else) that someone else knows how to do their job better than they do.

In fact, generalizing from this example, just about all stage etiquette is contained in four words: Mind your own business.

Here’s an example of that principle that I personally find myself frequently yelling about: an actor should never, never, never tell another actor how to do a part, a line, a moment . . . anything.  Correcting an actor’s performance is the director’s job, and nobody else’s. One actor telling another how to do something in a show is the grossest breach of stage etiquette.

And as often happens, there’s an artistic reason for that piece of theatrical etiquette, as well as a behavioral reason. When one actor gives another actor “notes” on something the actor is doing, she or he stops being an actor and becomes a spectator. Instead of performing, the actor, essentially, is directing. And, incidentally, not minding his or her own business.

As always, the details of the principle I’ve just described can be difficult to work out. What if another actor asks you how to do something? I’d say the best answer is, “I’m afraid I’m too focused on my own part, but I’ll bet the director can help.” This is the ideal. But what if the director can’t help – if the director is completely inept? I would say that if possible, the actor who knows better should lead by example. But this takes a great deal of willpower.

Although nowadays classes are offered on every aspect of art, I suspect it’s still true that the best way to teach, in the arts, is by example. Those who are capable of learning, will understand and apply the lesson. Those who aren’t, won’t, no matter what. Artists both influence and inspire each other, and they do pay attention to what others are doing (whether out of a search for knowledge, or out of jealousy). As someone has said, “The best criticism of a work of art is another work of art.”

Artists can be critical, even picky, people, for several reasons. Their work is always being evaluated; they work in competitive fields, no matter how little they want to acknowledge it; they are members of a small community, in which people tend to know a great deal about each other.

Insecurity is highest at a first reading of a script. All concerned are trying to prove that they’re worth casting (even though they’ve already been cast). The remedy for insecurity in this case is the same as the answer for most problems in the theater: focus on the script. Easier, however, said than done.

This air of excitement and creativity is one of my favorite things about theater. I love to see plays performed, but I don’t know anyplace I’d rather be than a rehearsal. It almost doesn’t matter what the rehearsal is for – I just love the feeling of it.

When a show is going badly – or sometimes even when it’s not – actors tend to look for someone to blame. This tendency to blame can get badly out of hand, and once it starts, it’s hard to stop. One director I know begins each production by saying to the cast, “Anything that goes wrong in this show is my fault. Is everyone clear on that? Good. Then we can get started,” thus, he hopes, getting blame out of the way early.

When blaming does start, the atmosphere can become poisonous quickly. Carping spreads like a prairie fire. There’s a relevant verse in the Bible:  “Avoid profane chatter, for their talk will spread like gangrene. . . . Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.” (2 Timothy 2) Good advice, but sometimes hard to remember.

A great deal of theater etiquette has to do with being a professional. A professional, in theater, is a person who does a job consistently, under all circumstances. An amateur is a person who doesn’t, although the word should mean someone who loves doing it. That is to say, an artist should be both. The poet W. B. Yeats captures professionalism perfectly in his poem “Lapis Lazuli”: 

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.

Professionalism counts for a great deal in the theater. No matter how creative and full of ideas directors may be, at heart they really only want two things: for the actors to show up on time, and for them to know their lines. Given a choice between the two, they’ll take the latter.

Professionalism can be as simple a matter as always having a pencil handy. In a theater it’s always a good idea to have a pencil. You never know when the director might tell you something you’ll want to write down. For example, where to stand, where to walk . . . . They get depressed when you say, “Don’t worry, I’ll remember it.”

Much of theater etiquette has to do with how one treats one’s colleagues backstage. Of course actors are frequently reported in the press as hating each other, and sometimes they actually do. This makes their satisfaction at giving good performances all the greater. But real satisfaction, I’ve noticed, comes when actors support and encourage each other. This happens most frequently when someone in the cast consciously starts the ball rolling by making it a point to praise and encourage. Others follow along, because everyone wants praise and encouragement – they just sometimes forget to give it.

Actors are notorious for being superstitious, although not are. Many backstage practices look like superstition, but on examination turn out to be just training. For example, performers have their own preparation routines. Before a show, they may hum, sing, pray, meditate, beg others to run lines with them, huddle in a corner and say nothing, talk loudly to whoever will listen; and some, although fortunately not all, will do vocal exercises consisting of high-pitched, piercing noises like the sounds of trains braking. Other actors will almost never tell these people to stop, not that they wouldn’t love to.

Actors seem seldom to force their religious beliefs on others. On the other hand, they promote their superstitions with the fervor of the newly-converted. I will say that there don’t seem to be as many theatrical superstitions in force as there used to be. However, the one about not saying the word “Macbeth” is still in full swing. The play is supposed to be unlucky, which strikes me as odd since the time I directed it was one of my best theater experiences. . . . I wonder how people will avoid saying “Macbeth” in a time like the present when practically every production that’s not Les Miserables seems to be Macbeth.

I was a member of a theater company where everyone assiduously avoided walking under ladders, until a member pointed out how odd that behavior was for people who claimed to believe in God. I had to acknowledge the justice of her comment, and since then have walked under ladders with abandon, with no ill results so far.

Speaking of walking under ladders, actors aren’t the only people involved in theater etiquette. Shows have technical staffs too. Smart performers recognize the members of the stage crew as colleagues. “Techie” (technical worker) simply means someone who can do things the actors can’t do, or don’t want to. The technicians wouldn’t be doing the Broadway show without the actors, but then the actors wouldn’t be doing the Broadway show without the technicians either.

Everyone is supported by someone. Actors are supported by technicians. When Lady Gaga introduces herself to all the members of the orchestra at the recording studio, that’s her theater training showing. Of course, just because they’re actors, doesn’t mean they’re inferior to technicians either.

If you are on a ladder or catwalk, above the stage, and drop something, you are supposed to yell “HEADS”! A good technician, they say, is one who shouts “HEADS” while falling off a ladder.

Theater etiquette also extends to how one relates to one’s colleagues when they’re in a show and you’re not – especially when they’re in a bad show. There is only one correct thing to say to a person involved in a bad show: “You were great,” and don’t elaborate. There is only one correct answer to a compliment, whether deserved or undeserved: “Thank you” – again without elaboration.

Despite the above, theater people keep thinking up ingenious and deliberately ambiguous things to say to someone whose performance, or show, falls short:

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It was amazing.”

“You’ve never been better.”

“I can’t wait to tell everybody about it.”

“I wish you’d been out front.”

A line like that should be better rehearsed than the performance, perhaps, was.

Another offstage area for practicing theater etiquette is social situations. At parties, theater people talk about their own work, and if a visual representation is available, they watch it. This is fine. In fact actors are permitted to talk about themselves anytime, anywhere.

Except – in auditions, where the advice Michael Shurtleff gives in his excellent book Audition must be followed: don’t talk about yourself. Directors don’t want to know why the train was late, what you had for breakfast, why you chose those pants . . . . Directors are busy thinking about themselves. Let them.

Story: An actor on tour comes home unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with his best friend, also an actor. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!”  the husband explodes. “Well,” the friend replies, “I’ve got a commercial, and I just did an indie, and next week I start rehearsals for . . . .”

The arts are primarily about mentoring – about “ways to do it” that are passed along, often through the generations. Sometimes the process is conscious, sometimes unconscious. It’s a reason that age, in theater, actually gets some respect now and then.

But the principle is the same as above: mind your own business. If at all possible we should only pass on to future generations the good stuff that’s in our heads, not the nonsense.

[As I read Kirk’s exploration of stage etiquette, I found myself thinking back on some of my own experiences and conclusions about actors and how we behaved on stage and back stage.  I made the word-processing equivalent of marginal notations, which I sent to Kirk along with my editorial comments.  His suggestion was that I preserve those somewhat random thoughts and use them as commentary on the blog post itself.  So, in more or less the order in which Kirk raises these issues, I append my own thoughts on the subject of back-stage behavior by working actors.

[One of my one-time actor friends used to love to say, “Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing . . . if you let them!”

[Acting is one of the few professions (perhaps the only one outside modeling) in which appearance is of vital importance.  It’s not just whether you’re handsome or pretty—although that’s part of it—but how tall or short you are, how old you look (not are) or can pass for, what color hair you have (and how much!), and so on, and so on.  I once knew an actor who lost a role because he didn’t fit into the costume!

[And then there’s me . . . the Jew who lost a part because I wasn’t “Jewish enough”?  Where else does that happen?

[Acting is also one of the few professions where someone has to invite you to work.  Writers and composers, painters, and others can work when they wish—even if they don’t sell their work, even singers and musicians can sing or play for themselves or friends—but an actor can’t very much wake up and say, “I think I’ll do a little acting today.”

[The Producers line Kirk cites about actors and eating always makes me chuckle because when I was an actor, hanging out with other actors, I soon noticed what seemed to be a universal truth: When there are actors and free food, don’t get between the actors and the buffet table!  Don’t even try to engage them in conversation while they’re around food—you won’t get anywhere.  If there’s free food around and you want to find some actor—look where the food is—she or he’ll be there!  (Some actors drink, some don’t; some smoke or toke and some don’t—but all actors eat and they can divine free eats!)

[How many other fields are there where you can train, study, and accumulate experience and still lose a job to a guy who used to be a football player or a gal who’s a pop singer?

[Speaking of newspapers (and, hence, reviewers), is there another field in which a publication would go eenie-meenie-miney-mo to select a review-writer even when the writer has no experience or background in the subject?  Cars?  Music?  Books (well, maybe)?  Clothes?  Video games?  Architecture?

[I once worked with an actor (twice, I believe) who had the annoying habit of making “suggestions” about scenes we had together.  (He was directing them, to be frank.)  I always just ignored his comments but after a while, I told him straight out to let the director make the decisions, at least about other actors’ work, and not to put his two cents in—essentially, Mind your own business.  He still did it, but I no longer felt I had to respond in any way.  (The clincher was that he wasn’t an especially good actor and could have benefited by paying more attention to his own work.)

[Most actors who do this, of course, are really trying to get you to alter your performance so they can do something they want to do—not really to “improve” your work.

[On the other hand, with respect to directors who are inept (or, in this case, inattentive), I have once or twice had to be part of a conspiracy to direct a scene together with the other actors, on our own.  I did this with the England scene in Macbeth: the actors playing Macduff and Malcolm and I rehearsed together on our own, directing ourselves and each other (by agreement) because the director, who was playing Macbeth, wasn’t doing it.  (Some spectators told us it was the best scene in the production, though I don’t know if that was really true.  We felt good enough about the work that the three of us took the scene around to auditions; if one of us had an audition, the other two would come along to do the scene.)  I also was in a cast of An Ideal Husband in which the director refused to set any blocking.  After floating about the stage for a few weeks, feeling insecure and adrift, the whole cast got together and blocked the play.  Of course, we had to direct each other a little to accomplish this.  These, of course, are extreme circumstances.  (I was also the beneficiary of a situation in which a cast collectively fired its director—and I was asked to come in and take over.  That was The Importance of Being Earnest, my first gig.)

[Like Kirk, I always loved rehearsing, too.  The energy and creative potential is almost heady!  Performing was the desert, but rehearsing was the nourishing meal.

[The norm with theater casts, in my experience, is that they become temporary family groups.  When I was in the army in Berlin, we started a theater group because we didn’t like the practice at the official brigade theater of coming together, doing a show, and disbursing with no follow up.  We wanted contact even when we weren’t in production for anything.  (I’ve always theorized that theater people practice serial marriage so often because when a couple are in a show together, especially one in which their characters fall in love, the actors fall in love, too.  It’s very intimate work, very exposed, and close friendships, love, and sometimes intense enmity, can result from that.  It doesn’t happen that way in an office or a factory.  (It can happen that way in the military, especially in combat.)

[I did two productions of Macbeth and both were fine and un-endangered.  (The second had artistic problems, as I’ve hinted, but nothing life-threatening.)

[I had an acquaintance—she was a stage manager for one of my shows—who had a code system with her friends when they saw each other’s performances.  If the play was so bad, despite the friend’s work, that the others couldn’t sit through it, they sent a note back stage with one word on it: “Potemkin.”  I don’t know why that word was selected, but it meant: “I love you dearly, but this show is just dreck!”

[The age and mentoring notion—there’s a little of that in Richard Nelson’s script of That Hopey Changey Thing (and possibly the other Apple plays, since the old actor, Uncle Benjamin, and the young one, Tim, are in all the plays together).  I reported on a performance of this play on ROT on 15 December 2013.]