Smoke and the Small Theater: The Audience Is Sniffing

I have been a devotee of Equity-waiver theaters for 17 years now, but in the last few weeks a phenomenon has occurred that threatens to end my devotion and even my attendance. The last four plays I have seen have all featured smoking on the stage. This means, in theaters of less than 100 seats, heavy fumes of tobacco smoke all through the theater--and not once, but several times in each play.

Until these last weeks, I came across stage smoking perhaps once a year, at most. So where is it coming from? Is it a defiance by the producers, a thumbing of the collective nose at the State of California for daring to try to interfere with their sacred right to do whatever they feel like doing and believe they have an artistic right to do?

If so, they’re thumbing their nose at the audiences too, because the new law forbidding smoking in public places--including theaters (unless it is a necessary part of the plot)--was passed at the urging of a public that has insisted on being protected from this kind of assault.

Is it just a manifestation of the well-known smoking syndrome that afflicts almost all theater people, as it does newspaper people and others known for their restlessness and nervous habits? I know it well; I suffered from it when I was working in the theater not many years ago: Almost everybody was a chain-smoker. Thus, the ironic phenomenon of educated Americans composing an almost smokeless class, except for a group that has the power to afflict other educated Americans.

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Do they claim artistic freedom? How dare they! What the First Amendment defends is the verbal or graphic expression of an idea, not a physical assault. Threaten to attack me and I’ll defend you; really attack me and you’re on your own.

I tried to find out why the producers of the four plays felt they had to follow the smoking stage direction so closely. One reason I found easily from a particular script: The smoking was intended to show that the character was mentally distraught.

I asked the producers of two of the other productions: One admitted that the smoking was entirely irrelevant to the play; he had simply not thought about it. (It was a play from Britain, which has a tradition of distracting the audience from weak dialogue or plot by the constant lighting of cigarettes.)

The other reminded me that the character was showing defiance of her mother, and the smoking could not have been eliminated without changing quite a number of lines. But this last production was a world premiere, and the author was on hand to change lines and must have changed many other lines in the course of rehearsals, as authors do in their premieres.

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A few suggestions to producers, if your audiences mean as much to you as your personal prerogatives:

1) Use a little imagination, and the talents of your actors, to find an alternative to the smoking stage direction.

2) Use fake stage cigarettes, which will give as much of the impression as you need.

3) If you still think you can’t avoid the real thing on stage, the very least would be a mention of the smoking in all notices of the play. (No use advising a call to the theater before reserving seats to ask if there will be smoking: How often does your small theater answer the phone with a live person?)

You can say it in three words: smoking on stage , as part of the standard notice in The Times and other publications--plus, most important, a spoken warning whenever an order is taken for tickets, whether at the theater or an agency. (For annual subscribers it would be a mention in the notice of the next year’s offerings, before we’re asked to shell out our money.)

Anything less, and the only audience you’ll have left will be other (smoking) theater people.