Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1

SUPERSTITIONS

When my friend Kirk Woodward sent me his copy for the Rick On Theater post that became “Playwriting Bake-Off” (posted on 19 July), he included the wording of the Summit Playhouse’s rules for a playwriting contest.  It included the sentence: “During this time of COVID 19, the ghost light is on in the theatre.”

Thus I learned the answer to a question that had been niggling at me for years and years.  I’d been wondering what that stand-up light placed on a dark stage is called . . . and now I know!  It’s a ghost light!!  (Thanks, Summit Playhouse!) 

Looking up “ghost light,” I hit on the idea of a post on theater superstitions and traditions.  (You’ll see the connection shortly.)  My unscientific opinion is that, after sports (especially baseball) and maybe seafaring professions, theater has more superstitions and traditional beliefs than any other field.

So here’s a round-up of many of the pervasive beliefs and practices of theater folks that seem to defy logic and reason—even though, as you’ll see, many originated in practical, though now perhaps obsolete, situations.  Some are observed nearly universally by both pros and amateurs of the theater, even by non-believers . . . because they’ve become accepted, even beloved theater traditions.  Others are rarer or regional; quite a few were new to me.

As far as the initial explanations or justifications for these practices is concerned, I’m sure everyone is aware that superstitions and traditions often have multiple origin stories; some are contradictory and many, if not all, are apocryphal.  Nonetheless, I’m going to try to present as many of them as I can gather for the sake of completeness.  There’s no accounting for what people will believe—which explains why there are so many religions in the world. 

Let me start with the practice that launched this rumination: the “ghost light.”

Also known as the “Equity light” or “Equity lamp” (in theater parlance, a ‘light’ is a lighting instrument such as a Fresnel or a “baby spot”; a ‘lamp’ is a bulb or light source—the ‘lamp’ goes inside the ‘light’), or sometimes the “spirit light,” the ghost light is a moveable stand with a single, bare bulb at the top enclosed in a wire cage.  Illuminated, it stands down center on a proscenium stage (or anywhere functional on other stage configurations) when the theater is “dark,” that is not in use, such as days off for rehearsals, days when the production isn’t performing (that is, “dark” nights), or for extended periods when there’s no production booked at that house.

For practical reasons, the ghost light is left burning in the empty theater to prevent anyone who comes in from wandering around the stage in the dark and crashing onto scenery or equipment or falling into the orchestra pit.  (The names Equity light and Equity lamp come from the fact that the Actors’ Equity Association, the theatrical performers’ and stage managers’ union, demands it in its contracts.)

The origin of the presence of the ghost light, though, is somewhat more fanciful.

First, a practical origin story: In the 19th century, before theaters were electrified, they were lit by gas.  Gas is highly combustible and pressure can build up in the pipes if it’s not drawn off by use.  A burning ghost light in a dark theater used excess gas and eliminated the pressure that might build to an explosion.  When theaters installed electric lights both on the stage and in the auditorium (around 1881), the tradition of the ghost light was retained.

As fanciful as this “history” might sound, the rest of the story is more supernatural.  One version has the function of the light as a method to chase away mischievous spirits that may hang around the theater and come out when it’s empty.  As we’ll see, nearly every theater has a legend of a ghost inhabiting it.  A few nights ago, I watched a TV mystery series episode set in a theater and someone used the theater’s ghost myth as cover for murder.  (The show was Australian and set in 1920s Melbourne.)

The other version of the ghost light legend says that it lights the way for the spirits of the theater to appease them and keep them contented.  Some theater people add that keeping the stage lit with the ghost light allows theater spirits to perform, keeping them happy so they won’t curse the theater or sabotage the set or production.

There are other superstitions that concern the theater building and how to care for it.  For instance, it’s ill-advised for actors to put shoes—and some people also say hats—on tables or chairs back stage, such as in the dressing rooms or the Green Room.  According to the belief, it risks a bad performance—but I suspect that it has more to do with disrespecting your fellow actors by taking up chairs and table tops in the cramped back stage with your personal property—especially shoes.

The Green Room, incidentally, is a room, or sometimes just a space, back stage where the actors can wait or relax when they’re not on stage.  It’s often wired for sound so the actors can hear what’s going on on stage.  Dressing rooms are cramped and often not convenient to the stage.  The Green Room can be used for many purposes, such as a place for the director to give a pep talk before the curtain goes up.  The origin of its name has many variations, some of them connected to the color the room is painted. 

This account is contradicted, though, by another superstition about the theater building: Never paint the Green Room green.  This may be related to the prohibition of wearing green  on stage: the color is considered bad luck.  I’m not certain that the color of a costume on stage and the color of a room back stage are related, but maybe; superstitions are weird things.  Anyway, I always heard that the Green Room was named for the man who first used one, and his name was Green—but I never found any confirmation of this explanation.

Another practice concerning the theater building itself, related to the ghost light, is the closing of the theater one night a week. In the United States and Britain (as well as many other Western nations), this is traditionally on Monday nights, which conveniently gives the actors and crew a day off after weekend performances (which, also traditionally, include a Saturday matinee and evening performance and a Sunday mat, adding up to three shows over two days). 

The simple explanation for this practice is that Actors’ Equity requires a day off during each performance week and puts it in all union contracts.  (I believe all the theatrical unions follow suit on this—the directors’, stage hands’, and theater staff guilds, for instance.)  Monday is the traditional dark night in U.S. theaters, but some houses and productions close on other weeknights instead. 

The explanation for the one-dark-night tradition from the superstitious, however, is that the theater ghosts like to relive their performing days and the dark night gives them a chance to perform their own plays as they did in life.   I wonder if the spirits that haunt other theaters pop in to see their peers work, just as live actors try to do?  Do you suppose there’s a spectral director to stage the ghostly shows?

Among the superstitions of theater folk, the most common and best known are curses and bad-luck bringers.  Arguably, the most famous of these is the curse of “The Scottish Play.”  Most of you probably already know what this is.

The most wide-spread version of this superstition applies only inside a theater and to speaking aloud, not thinking or writing (though beliefs vary).  Guided by that, I think I’m safe to be specific here (cross fingers and knock on wood!).

This belief is quite simple: When in a theater, never speak the name Macbeth.  That Shakespearean play must always be called “The Scottish Play” whenever someone refers to it.  (Some actors say Macbee for the play and “Mr. M” and “Mrs. M” or “the Scottish king”/”the Scottish lord” and “the Scottish lady” for the characters Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.)  Many actors even avoid saying lines from Macbeth, especially the Witches’ spells, inside a theater.  

Company members working on a production of “The Scottish Play” are, obviously, exempt from the prohibition.  As Oskar Eustis reminded the 2006 cast of the Macbeth (Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring Liev Schreiber as Big Mac) presented by the Public Theater, of which Eustis is artistic director, their lines require it.  Otherwise, to breach this practice will bring disastrous luck down on the current production in the theater and all who work on it.

The supposed origin for this superstition is that Macbeth is a cursed play, stemming from a catalogue of misfortunes that have befallen past performances of it, including the first staging (1606) when the actor playing the title role died shortly before or after the production.  

Richard Burbage is believed to have played Macbeth; he died of natural causes in 1619, as much as 13 years after the play’s début performance (some records show that Macbeth’s public première at the Globe was in 1610), at the age of 52—pretty old for the Elizabethan/Jacobean era (when life expectancy was under 40 and only 59 if a man made it to 30).

In an alternative version of this rationale, it was an actor named Hal Berridge who’d been cast as Lady Macbeth.  He died of a fever, requiring Shakespeare to replace him.  (In Elizabethan and early Jacobean times, women weren’t allowed to appear on stage and men or boys played female roles until the Restoration in 1660.)  

One contemporaneous account asserts that at the first performance of the play in 1606, for King James I, William Shakespeare himself played the part at short notice.  (One assumes he already knew the lines.)

There are several other familiar explanations for this superstition.  One is the belief that the Weird Sisters’ lines are actual spells that will summon evil spirits.  (The Elizabethans believed in witches and actively hunted them.)  

Another version of this rationale has it that the use of the spells angered real witches and caused them to curse the play.  A third version states that the Weird Sisters were played in the first production by actual witches and thus brought a curse down on the play.

One rationale for the jinx on Macbeth is that Shakespeare himself put a curse on it so that no one else but he could successfully stage it.  (How did that work out for ya, Will?)  Another, less mystical  explanation is that there is more swordplay in Macbeth than most other Shakespearean plays, and therefore more chances for someone to get hurt. 

In point of fact, Macbeth is no more unlucky than any other play or production. British actor Sir Donald Sinden observed, “More actors have died during performances of Hamlet than in the ‘Scottish play’ as the profession still calls it.”  More accidents and injuries were probably reported during the rehearsals and performances of the late Broadway spectacular, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark (2011-14)

In my brief performing life, I actually did Macbeth twice (the only play of which I was in two productions).  One was a New Jersey community theater offering in which I played a character who was a composite of Big Mac’s sons Malcolm and Donalbain (1979) and an excellent (if I do say so myself) Off-Broadway staging in New York City in which I played the Thane of Ross (1981).  Both were successful and during neither of which did anything awful happen.  (Well, my stage name was misspelled on a promotional post card in the New Jersey production, but that’s all.)

If an actor slips up and utters the name of the play in a theater, there are traditional cleansing rituals required of the person who made the mistake.  The rituals are supposed to ward off the evil that speaking the play’s title is feared to generate.  The actor has to leave the theater (some believers only make her or him leave the room and close the door), perform the rite, and only then be invited back in.

The tradition usually requires the actor to turn around three times (as always, there are variations), spit over her or his left shoulder, swear or say a Shakespearean insult, or recite a line from another of Shakespeare’s plays.  

Popular lines for this ritual include: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” from Hamlet, “If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here, whilst these visions did appear” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you” from The Merchant of Venice. 

Some casts add brushing yourself off, running around the theater counterclockwise, tapping your left shoulder while saying the play’s name.  A variant cleansing ritual requires the actor’s spinning around and brushing her- or himself off, and saying “Macbeth” three times before reentering. 

There are numerous parodies and travesties of the “Scottish Curse.”  Playwright Lee Blessing wrote The Scottish Play, which examines the history of the tradition, and in the 2007 indie film Never Say Macbeth by screenwriter Joe Tyler Gold and director Christopher J. Prouty, the play becomes a farce when a non-actor is accidentally cast in a production as a witch and utters the name of the play, and sets off a cascade of unfortunate events.

The superstition is even parodied in a November 2003 episode of the animated TV series The Simpsons called “The Regina Monologues.”  While visiting London, the Simpson family meets Sir Ian McKellen outside a theater showing Macbeth.  (McKellen actually did the play opposite Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company, opening in 1976 at the RSC’s home theater in Strantford-upon-Avon.)  

Every time someone (one of the Simpsons) says “Macbeth,” something happens to McKellen.  Among other things, he’s struck by lightning and a chunk of concrete falls on his head..

Hundreds of production of Macbeth have been mounted all over the world without mishap.  There’s an African version, Welcome Msomi’s Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth, for instance, and Akira Kurasawa’s 1957 film, Throne of Blood, is Shakespeare’s tragedy of medieval Scotland reset to feudal Japan.  

(I saw a production of Umabatha directed by the author for the Johannesburg Civic Theatre at the Lincoln Center Festival in July 1997 and a stage adaptation of the Kurosawa screenplay, directed and adapted by Ping Chong for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2010.)

There’s also the famous 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth with an African-American cast (set in the 19th century on a Caribbean island)—which got into political trouble (as usual for both Welles and the FTP), but no actual disasters occurred.  [After posting this section of “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” I discovered that this statement is historically inaccurate.  See my corrective Comment below, dated 23 August 2020, for a fuller explanation.  ~Rick]

The Macbeth curse has become so much a part of our theater culture, even among non-show biz people, that in recent years Playbill, the national theater magazine, has published a number of articles that refer to it.  Here are some from the last 26 years—but just the ones in which the headline mentions the Macbeth superstition (many more include references within the article, such as “8 Rules Every Theatre Person Must Follow—Do You Know All of Them?” by Mark Robinson, 1 July 2019):

·   “Paradise Productions Curse Macbeth through Apr. 4,” 31 March 1998

·   “Chicago’s Oddlife Tempts Fate With Inaugural Show: Macbeth, July 13,” 13 July 1998

·   “World Premiere of Lee Blessing’s The Scottish Play Finalizes Next La Jolla Season,” 15 March 2004

·   “PLAYBILL.COM’S THEATRE WEEK IN REVIEW, Feb. 9-15: The Curse Is Off,” 15 February 2008

·   “ASK PLAYBILL.COM: Macbeth (‘The Scottish Play’),” 22 February 2008

·   “Shhh!: ‘Never Say Macbeth’ to Arrive on DVD in August,” 11 June 2008

·   “Spiritual Symbol Protects Lincoln Center Theater’s Macbeth From Legendary Curse,” 1 January 2014

·   “Disaster Averted, Harlem Macbeth Goes on Tonight,” 8 July 2016

One of the articles above, “Spiritual Symbol Protects Lincoln Center Theater’s Macbeth From Legendary Curse,” specifically discusses an element in the set design apparently intended to ward off the evil spell.  Writer Robert Viagas asserts that “the cast of the current [that is, 2014] Broadway revival of what is known as ‘the Scottish play’ believes they may have found the antidote [to the play’s curse].”

The production in question is the Lincoln Center Theater’s Macbeth, which ran at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre from 21 November 2013 to 12 January 2014.  Directed by Jack O'Brien, it featured Ethan Hawke as Macbeth, Anne-Marie Duff in her Broadway début as Lady Macbeth, Richard Easton as Duncan, Brian d’Arcy James as Banquo, Daniel Sunjata as Macduff, and Jonny Orsini as Malcolm.  The rep company production ran for 60 regular performances and was nominated for one award, a Drama Desk for Japhy Weideman’s lighting design.

Viagas stated, “The centerpiece of the show’s artwork is a mandala, created by set designer Scott Pask, consisting of two circles, a pentagram and three heptagons, labeled with the name of God and his angels, according to a program note.” 

Mandala is a Sanskrit word that refers to a “ritualistic geometric design, symbolic of the Universe, used as an aid to meditation,” part of Hindu and Buddhist belief.  Ben Brantley of the New York Times asserted that the figure is inspired by Kaballah, a Jewish belief in mysticism that’s heavily reliant on numerology.

A pentagram is a five-pointed star formed by  extending the sides of a pentagon until they meet, forming five triangles on each side; it often has occult connotations.  A heptagon is a seven-sided polygon; it’s also a mystical symbol (7 is a magic number in numerology).

The LCT show was played right on the mandala because it was painted in black on the theater’s circular stage floor. The mandala also appeared on the show’s posters and program cover. 

Pask’s design was based on John Dee’s 1582 “The Seal of God’s Truth.”  Dee (1527-1608 or 1609), a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who’s believed to be one of the inspirations for the wizard Prospero in The Tempest, was a mathematician, astronomer, and scholar who was a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I.  He claimed to have been instructed in the mandala’s design by direct communication with angels.

Company members seemed to have felt the magic worked.  Stephanie Fieger and Shirine Babb, two members of the ensemble, reported “that the mandala seems to be warding off most of the usual backstage glitches and gremlins that seem to bedevil many productions.”  They believed that the image “has blessed the show and has given us the protection of the angels.” 

The two actors concluded that “now we never have to worry about the so-called Macbeth Curse!  We can say the title all the time backstage and we don’t ever encounter any of those things people say.”  Still, the superstition is so ingrained in the psyches of theater people that most say, like director O'Brien, “I don’t believe in those things, but I don’t not believe in those things.” 

Stage manager Tripp Phillips echoed the director’s sentiments: “I’m not a big superstitious person, but on the other hand there are so many traditions in the theatre, like not whistling in the dressing rooms, that we try to observe them.  There’s no point in tempting the Fates.” 

While some “oddball incidents”—a mysteriously misbehaving (and unmanned) dimmer and a recalcitrant on-stage banner—inexplicably occurred, the production had been “uncharacteristically trouble-free,” affirmed Phillips.  “I feel that this production has been a blessing,” proclaimed the stage manager.  “And if the mandala helps that, fantastic.”

[My survey of the strange beliefs of theater folk and their stories of ghosts and hauntings turned out to be much more extensive than I anticipated.  I’ll be posting “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms”  as a series.  This has been Part 1; Part 2 will be posted on 17 August and will continue my discussion of superstitions.  I’ll start the ghost stories in Part 3, to be published on 20 August.  (There may be a Part 4, the conclusion of the ghost section; if there is, it’ll come out on 23 August.)  I hope you’ll all come back to Rick On Theater for the continuation of “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions.”]