Just Break EVERYTHING

After the curtain lowered on the Skylight's show at the Broadway Theatre Center’s main stage, I’d crossed through to the lobby of the studio theatre to use the men’s room only to find a host of people milling around in faux chain mail carrying swords, shields and such. Milwaukee Shakespeare’s production of 1 Henry IV was approaching the end of its penultimate performance, which found me falling into a conversation with Noel--the Company Manager. One of the actors (Jake Russo, I believe) was practicing his golf swing with a broadsword as Noel related to me some of the injuries sustained in the production over the course of the show’s run. They’d made some half a dozen trips to the ER since the show opened . . . really, REALLY bad luck.

Luck is, of course, a problem. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. I seem to remember overhearing bits of conversation about the nature of this amongst Chicago theatre types in the early 1990’s. Memory may have embellished the conversation over the years, but it went something like this: The old cliché of professional stage actors being superstitious is completely understandable. Any one living out a normal life outside the stage knows how difficult it is to get things right at any single moment in a world of uncertainty. Imagine the stress of having to get everything right while re-living the same 90 minutes over and over again for a whole month with a crowd of people watching every time. Excessive superstition in most people is a sign of neurosis. In a professional actor, superstition is more like and adaptation than neurosis.

In a world where success is so given to the whims of chance, superstition can keep anyone sane. For the most superstitious however, the act of wishing someone good luck before a performance raises all kinds of questions: “Why is this person wishing me luck? Why would I need any more good luck than I already have? Haven’t we rehearsed this thing enough? Does this person wishing me luck have some sort of bad feeling about what’s going to happen tonight? . . .” and so on into the inevitable abyss of neurosis that usually comes of most good intensions. Seeing a friend or colleague before a performance and not wishing them well in some way, however, could be seen as being quite rude. This is, presumably where the practice of wishing someone bad luck before a performance originated. According to the Antonym Theory, the old cliché of telling someone to “break a leg,” came out of the desire to wish someone good luck by wishing them bad luck. The Antonym Theory is, of course, complete nonsense, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t at least some truth to it. The cliché had fallen out of favor with actors in Chicago in the early ‘90’s. The reason for this, theoretically being the fact that, being a cliché, “break a leg,” began to sound insincere. They started telling each other to, “break limbs,” before a performance. Somehow, “break limbs,” sounded more sincere than “break a leg.” (Notice here that the phrase is still derivative of “break a leg,” and not “throw your back out,” “Get struck be a broadsword,” “get bit by a dog,” or any of the other unfortunate events which have plagued the cast of Milwaukee Shakespeare’s final show of the season.) The problem is that, once a sentiment falls into popular usage, it instantly starts to seem pretty insincere. There has got to be a more enduringly authentic way of wishing a performer the bad luck they need to have truly good luck.

Ryan was born and raised in Milwaukee, but never fully understood how wonderfully cool a city it is until she started working with Vital. Now she's an art scene devotee, and she's loving every minute of it.