The Art of the Curtain Call

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.”

Sir Ralph Richardson (1902 - 1983)

It’s a good rule of thumb, for the actor, director and playwright that one should always keep the last half of a show shorter than the first half. People have short attention spans, especially after an intermission. During the classical period of music people would come to a Mozart performance to “actively listen” to the music. Today we nod off in the seats because we’ve forgotten how to actively engage ourselves. Music is now background. Today we spend so much time being inundated with snippets, that we no longer have the time to delve into information fully. This isn’t a new problem by any means, and I don’t see a way of fixing it, which is good because that’s not what this article is about. This article is about how we can help keep theatre from following the same path.

While sad to say, I think theatre may be the only art form that hasn’t reduced itself to bite-sized chunks for mass consumption. Film is television, Art is advertising, Music is muzak. Theatre can’t be reduced for an audience; it can only be forgotten by them. Bore them now and loose them forever. So how can we take a profession that may actually be as old as prostitution and keep its support base interested? (A problem that prostitution doesn’t seem to face, oddly enough) Let’s face it, as actors we hold our art high. Ours is a profession that is noble to us, yet archaic and silly to others, so I’m not suggesting that we can turn theatre into the highest calling of society. As actors, we’re limited only to influence through performance. So if we must accept that a shortened attention span is that fate of humanity right now, we must also accept some methods of keeping them interested. Once again we find ourselves up against the wall of how fast we can go without loosing the life of our story.

We’ve talked before about only going as quickly as you can go intelligibly and acting in one beat, which is one of the best ways to keep an audience engaged. Another is to keep the last half of a show moving faster than the first half. Actors are a bit like sports teams, in that we tend to get cocky during half time and that’s when we loose the game . . . god, I hate sports metaphors, but when it works it works. Anyway, we tend to turn ourselves on autopilot during the second half of a show because we’ve had time to wind down during intermission, or are certain of our captive audience, or a multitude of other reasons. It’s usually at this down turn in our energy that we slow the show down, bore the audience and have them leave dissatisfied, because it all comes down to this: People remember only the last thing you’ve done to them. As a group, the audience will judge a show mainly by what happens in the second half. If you’re show was great in the first half and horrid in the second, they’ll say it was horrid, because they are somehow able to forget how much they enjoyed act one in the intermission.

The last thing the audience is going to see is you taking a bow and this could make or break you, believe it or not. I went to see a ballet version of Dracula about a year ago at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta. The show was as good as a ballet of a 19^th century erotic horror novel could possibly be, except the curtain call. Dracula was dead in a spectacular puff of smoke and everyone was happy again, the curtain went down and the music kicked into a higher, happier gear. Well, after about seven bows, three false curtain closes, and five standing ovations, I was ready to conclude that it was the worst show I’d ever seen. All it took to truly ruin my opinion of a fair show was to make me applaud it more than I wanted to.

One of the great rules of magicians is to always leave your audience wanting more. There’s no faster way to alienate a room full of people than by keeping them from somewhere they want to be. Realize that by the time you’re out on stage and they’re clapping, they’re already on to thinking about something completely different, like where they left their coat and what might be the best way to beat the traffic home.

When you’re taking your curtain call, think of it as a thank you card. I know that while everyone is clapping for you it might seem like that’s your time to be praised by the audience; it isn’t. A curtain call isn’t your time to be revered, it is your chance to graciously thank your audience for their time. When you bow, it isn’t a grandstanding motion calling attention to yourself; it is a movement of humble gratitude. Remember that you live and die by that audience. We cannot cut theatre down to the same bite-size pieces we’ve made with other art forms, so the least we can do is to give thanks to an audience for simply taking the time to not leave during intermission.

Taking your curtain call should be a quick and easy way to spotlight your audience. As the bows are being taken you should hit the stage just as the actor before you is coming up from their bow, that way they step backward just in time for you to step forward and take your bow. There should be no dead time in between people; your curtain call should fly at break-neck speed.

You bow itself should have four separate steps and be sure that you rush none of them. Take as only as much time as you need to complete each steps, no more, no less. The steps are:

Stand

Bow

Straighten

Step Back

Take one moment to present yourself, then bow, take another moment to straight up and recompose yourself, then back out to make room for the next person. This should take no longer than about two to three seconds without seeming rushed. The bow should be confident and brief, and there should be no dancing school bows; the bows you used to have to do during cotillion when you bowed with one arm at your waist and one arm at your back. When you bow, keep your arms down by your sides. And ladies, curtsies are great for that day when you meet the Queen of England, but until then stick with a simple bow.

I know instructions for bowing seem pretty stuffy and unnecessary, but an immaculately choreographed curtain call can be a great celebration both for the audience and the performers. It’s the time we take to thank one another for a wonderful evening. It’s like a first date: while we’ve spent the whole evening trying desperately to be entertaining and liked, to finally be rewarded at the end of the night with a kiss at the front door. First a non-descript sports metaphor and now this . . . what’s happening to me?

Done right, the end of a show should feel like the destination of a long train ride; we saw the sights, felt a few bumps and are ultimately better off for where we’ve ended up. The magic of theatre is that is still irreducible after thousands of years. It has always been and will always be the best art form for showing human beings how to be human beings and that can never be made anything less than it is.

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