Adam Magazine on the Crazy Years

I don’t think of myself as a superstitious person.  I don’t fear Friday the 13th, black cats, or broken mirrors (although I do have a healthy respect for sharp pieces of broken glass). I do, however, sometimes find myself acting as if I believed in superstitions. I always say “Bless You” after somebody sneezes — I guess my mother raised me right. To my immense embarrassment, I will occasionally say “knock on wood” involuntarily.

I  always tell actors to “break a leg, ” because it’s bad luck to wish an actor “good luck” before going on stage. There are many folk origins for this superstition; here’s a few from the website of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company:

1) If the havoc–wreaking spirits (Sprites) heard you ask for something, they were reputed to try to make the opposite happen. Telling someone to “break a leg” is an attempt to outsmart the Sprites and make something good happen.

2) To break a leg was to hope the actor would have so many curtain calls that his trousers would be creased permanently.

3) In Shakespeare’s time, to break meant to bend. So, bend your leg, means take a lot of bows.

4) One popular etymology derives the phrase from the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, the actor turned assassin, leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theater after the murder, breaking his leg in the process. The logical connection from this event to wishing someone good luck is none too clear, but such is folklore.

5) Evidently, in the days of early vaudeville, the producers would book more performers than could possibly perform in the given time of the show, since “bad” acts could be pulled before their completion. In order to ensure that the producers didn’t start paying people who hadn’t actually performed, there was a general policy that a performer did NOT get paid unless they actually appeared onstage. So the phrase “break a leg” referred to breaking the visual plane of the “legs,” or curtains that lined the side of the stage. In other words, “Hope you break a leg and get onstage, so that you get paid.”

6) It came from the understudies telling their primaries to “break a leg” enough times that it came to be considered bad luck if they didn’t say it.

7) In Ancient Greece, people didn’t applaud. Instead, they stomped for their appreciation and if they stomped long enough, they would break a leg. Or, some would have it that the term originated during Elizabethan times when, instead of applause the audience would stomp their chairs – and if they liked it enough, the leg of the chair would break.

All of these explanations sound implausible to me except the first — warding off evil spirits by asking for it’s opposite. This is a common kind of superstition.  In the Eastern European Jewish tradition, a sickly child would be renamed “Alta” or ” the Old One” in order to fool the Angel of Death. In fact, I’m named after my great-grandmother Alta. I don’t think anyone in the family knows what her original name was. (BTW, it worked. She lived to be very old.)

The “Break a Leg” superstitition is, in my opinion, harmless and quaint.  I don’t believe that I could cause bad luck, of course, but I think it’s a fun tradition. I also think that trying to fight it would just take too much energy for too few results.