Theater Talkback: Hold the Applause

October 4, 2012, 12:14 pm

By BEN BRANTLEY

Ah, the sweet, sweet sound of applause â€" music to any actor's ears. But is it always? I'm referring specifically to entrance applause, that instant and seemingly spontaneous ovation that greets the arrival of a celebrated actor onstage.

This is a holdover from another time, when stage stars were worshiped the way movie stars are today. I associate it with the age of the Barrymore clan, whose narcissism was memorably skewered in the 1920's by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber in “The Royal Family.” And as late as the 1970's, on Carol Burnett's variety show, Ms. Burnett and Harvey Korman were serving up delicious spoofs of the mock-humble “Who, me?” reactions of vintage hams to entrance applause.

Though I haven't seen anyone break character and preen like that (not even Nathan Lane) in my years of reviewing, entrance applause persists in Broadway theaters. It erupted just a few days ago at the preview performance I attended of Craig Wright's “Grace.” And it wasn't for either of the play's above-the-title stars, Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon, but for Ed Asner, who has relatively little stage time.

I presume this is because Mr. Asner (who was also accorded exit applause) is known to older theatergoers, who still make up a majority of Broadway audiences, as the lovably gruff Lou Grant from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a hit on television several decades ago. That, and possibly the fact that Mr. Asner turns 83 in November.

Brand-name stars of a certain age, especially if they have television and movie credentials (like Angela Lansbury and James Earl Jones), almost invariably receive entrance applause. It would seem t o be some sort of tribal sign of respect, and a reward for said star's still being alive and able to memorize lines. And I don't begrudge the applause so lavished on Mr. Asner, Ms. Lansbury or Mr. Jones.

But when actors are appearing in a drama â€" as opposed to a musical or a crowd-courting sitcom â€" the noise of many hands clapping can break the illusion, and the emotional momentum, that everyone on stage is working so hard to sustain.

And it also seems a trifle patronizing, doesn't it? It's offering acclaim before the people being so rewarded have had the chance to earn it. The implication is “Good for you, you've survived,” or in the case of less venerable stars like Julia Roberts (when she made her Broadway debut in 2006), “Good for you, you're famous!” (This doesn't occur nearly as often in London, where, relatively speaking, the play is still the thing.)

It is, I think, to the great credit of Scarlett Johansson, and to the director Gregory M osher, that she did not receive entrance applause when she appeared on Broadway in Mr. Mosher's 2010 revival of Arthur Miller's “View From the Bridge,” at least not during the two performances I attended.

The audience, I suspect, was ready, willing and able to clap up a storm as soon as they caught sight of Ms. Johansson, a real live, tabloid-worthy movie star making her Broadway debut in a play so classic and respectable that people even study it in high school. But the audience was thwarted, because it couldn't be sure that the brown-haired woman with her back to us, in the scene that introduced Ms. Johansson's character, was indeed she.

By the time she turned around, the scene was already in progress. Goshdarnit, she hadn't made a star entrance, and there was no natural moment to applaud. The happy ending to this story is that Ms. Johansson turned out to be really good in her part â€" and invisible in the sense that she disappeared into her character.

< p>P.S. She won a Tony that year.

Ms. Johansson returns to Broadway this season in Tennessee Williams's “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and it will be interesting to see if she forestalls an ovation during her first scene as the tirelessly sexy Maggie the Cat. Honestly, it only seems like good manners to hold your applause, please, ladies and gentlemen, and let a performer be a character instead of a star.

How do you feel about entrance applause? Should we ban it our unwritten book of theater etiquette, or are there times it's called for?