Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 2

MORE SUPERSTITIONS

[Welcome to the second part of “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms,” the continuation of my account of the supernatural beliefs held by many theater people.  (In Part 3, I shift over to telling ghost stories about haunted theaters.)  I pick up here where I left off in Part 1, starting after the curse of the “Scottish Play.” 

[This is not the kind of post that requires starting from the beginning for easy understanding.  I do make reference to things I have explained or defined earlier, but each superstition mostly stands on its own.  Still, I hope you will go back and catch Part 1, posted on 14 August, when you have a chance.  Reading about the famous Macbeth curse is worth the visit in itself, I’d think.]

The Macbeth curse (see Part 1) is surely one of the most elaborate and pervasive—not to mention direst—bringers of bad luck in the theater.  There are others, however.  Another one that’s well known even among what one of my teachers liked to call “civilians” is the admonition never to wish an actor “good luck.”  (The prohibition applies to pit musicians in a musical, but apparently not to stage crew personnel or designers.  Go know!)

The principal excuse for this proscription is that those mischievous spirits that inhabit the theaters like to cause havoc by bringing about the opposite of what the living wish for.  Hearing the actors wish one another good luck drives them to bring bad luck to the production and the offending actor(s).  Think of Puck and his tendency to mess with Bottom, Titania, and the four lovers—especially Lysander—in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Theater sprites are a rascally lot!

So, what do actors say instead?  You may know this one, too: “Break a leg!”  There are many explanations for the origins of this phrase as the theatrical substitute for “good luck,” dating the expression from Ancient Greece (though we really don’t know very much about classic Greek theater practices) to Elizabethan (i.e., Shakespearean) times to the 19th century.  Most of them seem fanciful to me.

First of all, “Break a leg” is an English expression, though even the Australians have their own theater saying (“chookas!”).  It’s also only a theater term.  Opera singers, I’ve learned, say “Toi toi toi” to one another; it’s an utterance to defend against a spell or hex, perhaps an onomatopoeic representation of spitting on the ground three times to ward off evil spirits and bad luck.  Dancers, it seems, greet each other with “Merde!” for some reason.  Merde is French for ‘shit.’ 

The most preposterous explanation for the phrase is  that it’s a mordant reference to John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.  As most Americans know, Booth was an actor and after shooting the president at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, he jumped down from the presidential box to the stage, breaking his leg.  But members of the profession are mortified that an actor committed that act, so why would any actor want to invoke the murderer for any reason, especially a greeting of happiness and good fortune?  I don’t think so!

Another implausible explanation is the suggestion that Elizabethan or even Ancient Greek theater audiences either stomped their feet or banged chairs on the floor or ground to express applause.  The more pleased they were with the performance, the harder they stomped or banged . . . until they broke their own legs or those of the chair. 

The first notion is just preposterous on its face and the second is unlikely to start with, but even less credible since Elizabethan theaters had few actual chairs.  The groundlings stood in the pit and middle-class spectators sat on benches (which I can’t see anyone picking up); only the aristocracy had “lords’ chairs,” and I can’t see a duke or an earl standing up and banging his seat on the theater floor like a navvy.

Another suggested origin of the saying comes from the theatrical use of the word ‘leg.’   In stage tech, a leg is a tall, narrow drape (curtain) hung parallel to the proscenium opening at the sides of the stage.  It’s used to frame the sides of the acting space as well as to mask the wings (off-stage space to the right or left of the playing area), where actors may be preparing to enter the stage and set pieces may be stored before being moved onto the stage.

A successful run with repeated curtain calls could wear out the fly machinery that raises and lowers the leg.  “Break a leg” is a way of expressing wishes for a show that is such a hit that the audience demands so many curtain calls that it “breaks” the legs.  This strikes me as more than a little forced.

Some explicators maintain that in Shakespeare’s time, ‘to break’ meant ‘to bend.’  To bend a leg, then, means take a lot of bows.  The problem with this one is that neither my Shakespearean glossary nor my dictionary of early English confirms this definition of ‘break.’ 

A related explanation has to do with a man’s trouser legs.  In men’s haberdashery, the cuff of a man’s pants was supposed drop about a quarter of an inch below the tops of his shoes so that it crumpled just a bit.  This was called the “break” (and it stopped being popular in men’s styles in the 1960s).  One theory concerning “Break a leg” is that if an actor bows enough times, the pants legs will be permanently creased, that is “broken.” 

When I lived in Germany as a teen, one of the first German colloquialisms I learned was the common expression for “good luck”: Hals- und Beinbruch.  This was disconcerting to hear at the top of a ski slope when you’re about to schuss down the piste because it literally means “neck and leg-break.”  But I wondered if it had any connection to the English-speaking actors’ good-luck wish, “Break a leg.”  The similarity was just too striking.  The German expression is a general saying—it seems to have started among German air pilots—not theater jargon, but nonetheless, I couldn’t shake the apparent coincidence.

One explanation is that the saying made its way from German aviation to German society at large and then to the English-speaking stage by way of immigrant German actors—and German-speaking Jewish actors, of whom there were quite a few transferring from the Yiddish theater—to England and the U.S.  No one really knows the true origin of “Break a leg,” but this is the theory I like the best.  It has the advantage of at least being conceivable.

Another more well-known jinx in the theater is non-verbal: whistling back stage.  This behavior was originally prohibited for practical reasons to avert actual danger; now, it’s just bad luck for an actor to whistle back stage.  Why?

If you’ve ever been back stage at an older theater—I’m not talking ancient here, but up to post-World War II and earlier—and looked at the technical apparatus, you may notice it’s mostly ropes and pulleys; if the theater hasn’t been modernized, the ropes are all tied off at racks of wooden pins along the sides of the wings.

If you take a mental step back and look around at the whole set-up, it may remind you of something: the rigging of a wooden sailing ship.  That’s not your imagination; nor is it a coincidence.  The pins are belaying pins and the racks are pinrails. 

In the heyday of the proscenium stage—the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries—when moveable sets with flying (that is, rising up into the “fly” loft above the stage) set pieces was the height of modern theater technique, the apparatus for rigging a theater was designed and constructed by sailors and shipbuilders. 

This was because seamen knew about ropes and rigging, so it was natural that the men who ran that rigging for plays were sailors.  Deckhands used coded whistles to give commands such as hoisting or lowering the sails, moving cargo in or out of the holds, and so on. 

Therefore stage hands used the same system to cue scene changes.  An actor who whistled could confuse them into changing the set or scenery at the wrong time or dropping a counterweight (usually a sandbag) or piece of scenery onto an actor, resulting in injury or death.  

The same proscription is followed for clapping because sailors and stage crews also used it to communicate instructions for actions on a ship’s deck or back stage. 

Today, the stage crew normally uses an intercom or cue-light system to initiate a change, and much of the process has been mechanized and computerized so that real-time commands are rare.  But the superstition that grew out of a necessity persists. 

(By the way, some believers extend the prohibitions against whistling or clapping from just back stage to on stage as well—but it’s hard for an actor in a show not to whistle or clap if the playwright put them in the script or the director calls for them.)

Yet another silent bad-luck-bringer is wearing blue on stage (unless it’s thwarted by also wearing something silver).  The rationale for this ill omen was that blue dye was once very expensive and if a foundering acting company dyed some of their costumes blue in the hopes of pleasing prospective spectators, they wouldn’t have any money to pay the actors.  The use of silver was to show that the troupe was wealthy (or had a rich patron) which enabled its actors to wear real silver.

Green is also considered unlucky (hence the ban on painting the Green Room green; see Part 1).  One explanation for this belief dates back to when most performances were given outdoors where wearing a green costume would make it hard to distinguish the actor from surrounding foliage.

Some specific green and yellow items of costuming, such as a tie, a vest, or a hat, are believed to bring very bad luck.  This may be because they’re traditionally symbols of the Devil in the medieval mystery, miracle, and morality plays.

(For those who’ve forgotten their theater history, mystery plays are enactments of Bible stories, such as The Second Shepherds' Play; miracle plays are the stories of saints, like Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, a French miracle play; and the morality plays are allegorical dramas, like Everyman, that demonstrate a moral lesson.)

In addition to costume parts and colors, there are other things that actors are barred from binging on stage because they presage bad luck.  Based in practicality is a ban on mirrors.  Of course, mirrors have many superstitious connections in general society and a number of magical and supernatural powers are attributed to them (here’s one: looking into a mirror could open up your soul to the devil), but on stage they can be an actual problem. 

After theater performances were restricted to daylight and theaters started to use artificial lighting for effect rather than just visibility, mirrors were a nuisance for stage lighting because they cause shadows and reflected glare that are difficult to control.  This is mostly true of large mirrors, but even a hand mirror can create a moving hot spot that wreaks havoc with lighting (and can be distracting for both spectators and actors on stage). 

A similar problem is attributed to jewelry, so wearing real jewels on stage is forbidden as well.  Paste and even cut glass doesn’t cause the same difficulties that real gems do—and they’re less of a temptation for theft and less of a loss if they’re swiped.

I’ve watched a production’s lighting designer, set designer, costume designer, and director stand on stage before a tech rehearsal trying to figure out how to stop a mirror, big glass object, or large costume jewel from reflecting a stage light and ruining an effect.  (One attempt: coat it with hair spray.  It actually sort of worked!)

One of the oddest prohibitions I’ve run across—though I’ve never seen it in action—is the one against using peacock feathers on stage.  I love this one, not because of the ban itself, but the explanation of its origin.  It’s one of the few theater superstitions that’s derived solely from mythology; there’s nothing rational about it.

As everyone knows, the tail feathers of the male peafowl are patterned with what look like giant eyes. (As a result of nature’s own sexism, the peahen doesn’t have this elaborate and striking feature; she’s basically brown.)  The peacock’s eyespots are believed to represent a malevolent “evil eye” that imparts a curse on the show.  They are seen as a manifestation of Argus, the mythical Greek monster whose body was covered with a hundred eyes.  It’s not rational, but it’s neat.

Probably everyone who’s gone to the theater more than twice has seen someone bring flowers to the leading actress in the play during the curtain call—that is, at the end of the performance. Sometimes the director and playwright are called onto the stage and handed bouquets, too.  It’s a gesture of appreciation and even devotion, very welcome to the actress who receives them.

Often, the actress and any other women in the cast (and even some of the men) will find flowers in their dressing rooms after the curtain falls for the final time of the evening.  Back-stage visitors will frequently bring flowers when they call.

But woe betide the actor who receives flowers as a gift before the performance!  A gift of flowers before the show’s opening harbingers a lackluster performance that night.  This is one of several traditions concerning the rewarding of actors for a performance they haven’t given yet.  (Another is the proscription of practicing the curtain call before the cast has earned one—that is, near the very end of rehearsals.)

In a related practice, it’s considered good luck to give the director flowers stolen from a graveyard when a production closes.  As macabre as this gesture is, it denotes the “death” of a production and laying it to rest.  (In theater, as you all no doubt know, there are no reruns; when a stage production ends, it’s over and any revival is a new show altogether.)  Also, actors historically don’t make a lot of money, so cemeteries are a cheap way to get flowers.  (I don’t know anyone who ever did this.)

As you might surmise from this list, there are lots and lots of things that superstitious theater folk believe will bring bad luck or cause bad shows.  A few others include knitting in the wings (hear that, Madame Defarge?), using a real Bible on stage (other books or prop books with Bible covers are substituted), using real money on stage (another temptation for theft), peeking at the audience from the stage side of the curtain (a tacky and amateurish thing to do in any case), and bringing a pet onto the set.

Interestingly, that last item on the list has something of a corollary.  While black cats are felt to be bad-luck omens in ordinary life, some theater people think one brings good luck.  Except for the sheer perversity of the theatrical profession, I have no idea why this belief exists.  As far as I know, actors don’t deliberately stand under ladders or break mirrors.

After a litany of bad-luck generators and curses, here are some harbingers of good luck.  I just told you about the black cat, a beneficial “familiar” for theaters that want a house cat.  Another good-luck charm is a walking stick: use one in your show, and you’ll have success and good health.  (Unfortunately, the opposite effect will occur if you put a character on crutches in your production.  Has anybody checked the accident record of productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?)

It seems that beneficent traditions—should we say charms—are rare among stage people.  Are we a dour bunch as much as we are superstitious?  One good omen every actor and director knows is the fervent belief that a bad dress rehearsal presages a good opening night. 

As far as I know, there’s no actual origin of this superstition.  It’s probably wishful thinking by the director, stage manager, and cast and something the director tells the cast (and him- or herself) to buck up their spirits when the final dress goes poorly.  (It might work despite its total lack of logic.  To borrow a common expression, a bad final rehearsal might tend to concentrate the minds of the cast and crew on opening night.  Might work . . . .)

How ’bout this one: sleeping with a script under their pillow will help actors learn their lines faster.  This is less a superstition than an old wives’ tale, but it’s often repeated—more or less jokingly.  To be truthful, I never even tried this because it’s so obviously counterintuitive—and I don’t know any actor who’s tried it, either.  (I did sleep with a tooth under my pillow and woke to find a quarter—about a buck-and-a-half today . . . but I was six or seven at the time.)

Osmosis may help you stop smoking (“the patch”) or manage pain, but it won’t help you learn anything, much less the lines for a play!  In fact, sleeping with a script under the pillow is believed to have caused bad luck.  (That one is a superstition.  Why anyone would test it to begin with is implausible to me.)

One other way to secure good luck, though, is to be certain that the first spectator to be seated is a man.  Sexist, I know, but if a woman is the first patron to enter the house, bad luck will ensue and the run of the show will be short. 

The story behind this is about the 1866 presentation of what was to become known as the “first American musical” as it was about to open in New York at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway near Prince Street, in what is now SoHo in lower Manhattan. 

(The theater center of New York City steadily moved uptown over the decades.  In the 1870s, it was around Union Square at 14th Street and Broadway and Edwin Booth built his theater in Chelsea at 23rd and Broadway in 1867-69.  In the 1880’s, it had begun to move uptown to Longacre Square—which became Times Square in 1904—at 42nd Street and Broadway.  That area was officially designated the Theatre District in the 1980s.)

The Black Crook, with a book by Charles M. Barras (1826–1873) and music selected and arranged by Thomas Baker (ca. 1820-88) was a flashy extravaganza that was some 5½ hours long.  It was a serendipitous combination of a theater manager desperate to put a production into his dark theater and a stranded ballet company, the Great Parisian Ballet Troupe, whose scheduled theater had burned down.

Barras cobbled together a script about a fantasy world from Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust that didn’t make much sense, into which Baker shoe-horned some songs and William Wheatley (1816-76), the manager of Niblo’s Garden, inserted the unemployed ballet dancers.

All that mattered, though, was that there were beautiful dancing girls in flesh-colored tights on the Niblo’s Garden stage.  So on opening night, 12 September, Wheatley was at the theater’s entrance as the audience was about to enter.  To his chagrin, first in line was a woman.  “No!  You cannot be first,” Wheatley is said to have exclaimed, pushing her away.  “To allow a woman to be the first to enter would ruin the success of the play!”

The Black Crook ran 474 performances, unheard-of for a time when long runs were unknown.  Its success immediately generated scores of imitations, putatively giving birth to what became the American Musical Theater.  Wheatley reportedly credited his great triumph to having denied a woman the first seat on opening night.  (Try that today and see what it gets you!)

Counting this as a box-office superstition, here’s another: it’s a bad omen to start off a show with an empty till.  To defeat this, some house managers will hold “comp” (that is, ‘complimentary,’ i.e. ‘free’) ticket-holders until a paying spectator has entered the house.  (How does this work today when few tickets are purchased for cash or even at the box office?  All credit-card transactions are done electronically, so there isn’t even a paper receipt to put in the cash-box.)

The days of the week can be portentous.  One belief I know is seldom indulged is that rehearsing on Sunday engenders terrible luck.  One suggested explanation is that members of the company have been out late on Saturday—though I can attest to the fact that most actors in rehearsal for a show are too tired to stay out late on any night after rehearsing all day. 

In any case, Sunday is seldom a universal day off, especially near the end of the rehearsal schedule.  Though non-union shows are different, Actors’ Equity mandates not only how many hours an actor can work in a union production without a break, it also mandates how many days in a row an actor can be called for rehearsals without a day off. 

The Equity deputy in the cast—the equivalent of the shop steward in a factory—keeps tabs on this, among other work rules.  But the union doesn’t determine what days a given actor has off; that’s up to the director—with the deputy looking over his shoulder—and depends on the needs of the show.

Another superstition that concerns a day of the week is the belief that a play should never open on a Friday.  It’s also another one that’s seldom observed much today when shows open any day of the week that suits the production and the producer.  Shows even open on Monday, the traditional dark night when the world was more regular, and also on Sunday, usually a matinee day in most schedules. 

(Until the middle of the last century, the theater season used to start in September and end in May and then the theaters would all close down in the days before air-conditioning—and the actors would go off to do summer stock in places like New England and the mountains of Pennsylvania to avoid the heat of the cities.  But that all changed once silent A/C arrived in theaters and not only did shows continue through the summer, but occasionally a new production will even open between May and September.)

With the admonishment against practicing the curtain call before it’s earned, the proscription of Sunday rehearsals starts a small sub-group of theater superstitions concerning rehearsal practices.  Another in this category is the notion that the cast should never say the last line of the play without an audience present.  It’s supposed to be bad luck because a play isn’t really finished until it’s performed before an audience so the company should never “finish” it without one.  (I’m not sure about the logic of that—but superstitions are basically alogical, so . . . .)

“Given the number of tech cues associated with that last line—lights, sound, curtain—plus somewhat frenzied blocking to get everyone offstage and in position for the curtain call,” observes one director and theater professor, “isn’t it awfully risky not to rehearse it?”  To get around this, some directors allow a limited number of friends and family of the company to attend dress rehearsals.  (It’s also a way to start getting the cast used to having spectators and to get a feel for how the show plays before the public.)

There are also a couple of make-up traditions with which I was unfamiliar.  In the film and television worlds, it’s common that actors almost always have a professional on the set to do their make-up.  (This is true mostly because film and TV make-up is much more precise and specific, what with close-ups and high-definition cameras, than stage make-up; the days of black-and-white cinematography were even more exacting and often counterintuitive because of the “grayscale.”) 

In the theater, actors usually do their own make-up—except perhaps wigs and prostheses—and maintain their own make-up kits.  One superstition in this domain is that an actor shouldn’t ever wear brand-new make-up on opening night.  I assume that if you ignore this taboo, it’ll jinx your performance, but I have no idea where the notion comes from. 

It’s probably akin to the Macbeth curse (but less dire) in that someone compiled a record of the times she or he gave a bad opening performance and correlated it with the times s/he wore new make-up and . . . .voilà!  A superstition!

Other make-up beliefs include never cleaning your make-up kit—which will certainly cut down on anyone wanting to borrow your make-up but could end up pretty gross after a few shows—and the advice always to use a rabbit’s foot to apply your make-up.  Obviously, a rabbit’s foot is soft against your skin (until it gets all caked with make-up), but I don’t really know where that last one comes from, either, unless it’s associated with the old belief that a rabbit’s foot is a good luck charm (though obviously not for the rabbit!).  Today, from the point of view of wildlife conservation and animal-cruelty sensibilities, it’s a terrible practice.  (I never knew an actor who did this, incidentally.)

[Well, that wraps up my look at theater superstitions.  There are certainly more, but I picked out the most interesting and best known traditional beliefs held by American actors and others who work in the theater. 

[I’ll be posting Part 3 of “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” on 20 August.  Part 3—and a possible Part 4—will cover the stories of ghosts that inhabit theaters around the country and in New York City.  I hope you’ll come back to Rick On Theater  to see what I’ve come up with,  You may have heard some of the spooky tales, but I’d bet you don’t know them all.]