Actors drooling over each other’s parts

When Miriam Silverman performed in “The Liar” at Shakespeare Theatre last year, her character Lucrece faced a man who compulsively lied through his teeth. But lies weren’t the only thing that shot through his teeth.

When his character sweetly proclaimed his love for her, actor Christian Conn spewed more than romantic platitudes.

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(Alla Dreyvitser)

(Alla Dreyvitser)

“A big piece of spit flew into my eye,” Silverman says.

She was not flustered. She had spit on his face, too — and on the rest of the cast, as well.

“I don’t think there’s a leading man that has not been sprayed by me in performance,” she says. “During ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ last year, I had a scene with Ted van Griethuysen. I would lean over Ted’s wheelchair and it would be an ocean of spray.”

For theater actors, swapping spit isn’t a euphemism for kissing — it’s an exchange of bodily fluids that happens every night onstage, leaving no face unmoistened. Acting may be one of the only professions where it’s okay — even encouraged — to spit in your co-worker’s face. Spit is such a normal part of being an actor that it has developed its own backstage mythos, with actors reveling in being spat upon by a famous actor, or cracking jokes about aiming at inattentive audience members in the front row.

If you have never sat in a front row or seen theater in a tiny, black box space, you may have never noticed the spit. But move up — theatrical lighting will amplify the Shakespearean or Sondheimian spray.

Silverman’s worst spit moment came when she was doing a soliloquy in “Dog in the Manger.”

“I’m talking to the audience and I let a big glob of spit fall out of my mouth and onto my chin,” she says. “I’m supposed to keep talking, and I am thinking, Can people see the spit? Should I wipe it? Will I call more attention to it? That’s one of the dangers, that it’s a big amount. I don’t remember if I ended up wiping it.”

There are spitters, then there are sprayers. Spewers, even. Danny Scheie, currently playing Nero in “You, Nero” at Arena Stage, is one.

“Sometimes it’s running down their face,” he says of his tolerant co-stars. He’s careful to be courteous about it, citing a famous line in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.”

“I have a ritual. I floss. I have breath strips,” he says. “It’s gross enough — a nice shower of clean spit, you can’t complain about.”

The works of Shakespeare, anecdotally, are known to produce more spit than that of other playwrights. The same goes for any play where an actor is expected to take on a foreign accent or speak in verse. It’s also bad news when an actor has to eat during a scene.

“You have to use a little more energy diction-wise, and it takes more vocal energy,” Silverman says. “You’re doing the same thing with your mouth when you’re chewing, it triggers the saliva glands to start producing, so I can only assume that’s what’s happening. It’s more aerobic in the mouth.”

Christopher Henley, one of the founders of the Washington Shakespeare Company, now with WSC Avant Bard, says any play can produce equal opportunities for spray.