Actors are the only people left in America who are permitted to smoke in public-at least without censure. At least they were until recently.
Paradoxically, actors are also probably the only professionals who are occasionally required to smoke.
Directors can’t legally demand it of an actor, but a role can include it.
This peculiar position of performers, both free and chained to smoking, is ironic, given acting’s role in the romance of inhaling burned tobacco and exhaling symbolism. In Richard Klein’s new book, “Cigarettes Are Sublime” (Duke University Press), an entire chapter is devoted to a single film, “Casablanca.”
Humphrey Bogart, of course, is the great masculine smoker’s icon-as Marlene Dietrich is for women. The use of smoke for moody atmosphere, the gestures as hand signals and foreplay, the entire sense of smoking as communication: Scores of film actors have deployed lighters and cigs, but Bogart and Dietrich have become enshrined as the idols of this expressive, dramatic art.
Despite the Marlboro Man images of cowboys, John Wayne smoked on screen very rarely-although he eventually developed lung cancer. As for Clint Eastwood and the gym-hardened action toys who followed in the ’80s, smoking was an indulgence, not tough enough-meaning too sensual. Only Bruce Willis ever has a butt dangling from his mouth-a balding teenage boy self-consciously aping Bogart.
What did actors ever do with their hands before tobacco? A cigarette is the near-perfect stage prop: simple, hand-held, yet it can hold worlds of meaning. Smoking can be tough or soft, blue-collar or aristocratic, distanced or come-hither erotic.
Cupping the cigarette, as Bogart did, used to indicate that you were a regular GI: You needed to hide the flame on a battlefield. Cigarette holders, in contrast, suggested camp decadence or Nazi self-denial.
All of these things can delineate character in a flash. Smoking both communicates without words and removes you from communication, hiding you in a cloud. Smoking can set you outside time in a hazy reverie away from duties and jobs-the cigarette break. Yet a burning cigarette is also a simple, deadly clock: your life turning to ash.
While movies provide glorious bad examples, the stage provides something more immediate: actors really smoking, night after night, in the same room with us.
In Dallas, one of the smokier recent productions was the Kitchen Dog Theater’s “American Buffalo” by David Mamet. The Kitchen Dog’s Joe Nemmers reports that he smoked only four cigarettes during each performance, but because he was in a basement theater with a low ceiling, “there was no place for the smoke to go. There were no rafters or anything; it just hung there.”
Some subscribers complained, and a caller said she’d been warned away. One theatergoer in the front row pointedly waved his program and coughed loudly whenever Nemmers lit up.
Kitchen Dog had it easy. In our current climate, actors-at work onstage-are no longer exempt from attack. During the April 21 performance of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer” at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., an incensed theatergoer loudly berated Judy Geeson, who played the faith healer’s chain-smoking wife. Instead of relaying his complaint directly to the management, the anti-smoker declared Geeson’s actions disgraceful. After ruining the evening for the rest of the audience, the protester stomped out.
Geeson, by the way, is a former smoker who was using herbal cigarettes-with no nicotine. Even so, the Long Wharf posted warnings, and after consulting with Friel, Geeson smoked less onstage.
American Theatre magazine recently ran a report about smoking, less from the audience’s second-hand-smoke viewpoint and more about the workplace-health-hazard concerns of actors. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency declared cigarette smoke a “Class A” carcinogen, equivalent to asbestos. Yet actors and theater workers, fearful of joining the vast unemployed in the theater community, often do not object to the risks they endure.
Common sense should rule here. The entire issue can be aired during auditions, arrangements made with staff and performers, herbal cigarettes used when possible. As for the theatergoing public, smoking onstage will probably now join nudity, gunfire, strobe lights and strong language as “dangers” about which theaters must warn audiences.
But let’s forget about banning cigarettes entirely from the stage. You can just see the lowlifes in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” complain about drugs and sex-and then stare fondly at the cigarette-strewn ashtrays, unable to light up. Sure. For its recent production of “Mad Forest,” Caryl Churchill’s drama about the Romanian revolution, the Undermain Theatre posted warnings but continued with the characters’ mad puffing. How else are you going to portray Eastern Europeans without setting off what amounts to a volcano in the room?
To be lumped with nudity, gunfire and strong language is a fitting fate for cigarettes. Even at its most sophisticated, smoking has always been allied with the dissipated, the rebellious, the dangerous.
Sex and death and smoking. This is the cigarette’s core appeal, Klein argues. It’s why he describes cigarettes as sublime. Borrowed from art criticism, the term refers to any experience of the beautiful that includes fear or an awareness of death. Instead of tranquility or repose, the sublime inspires awe, the jolt you get when you look into an abyss.
Why else would anyone smoke? To face death with a casual drag and a flicked ash. It’s impossible, nowadays, to smoke without knowledge of its toxic consequences. We all know that we don’t really smoke the cigarette; it smokes us, leaving our lungs coated with tar.
Even so, according to Klein, at any one moment, more than a third of the adult population of this planet puffs away.
I used to smoke in graduate school. During a summer at Oxford, I picked up the habit and soon became what 19th Century French writer Theodore de Banville called “a cigarette dandy.”
I smoked only John Player Specials and owned a Dunhill cigarette lighter and case. With a half-pint of Bass ale and a book, alone in a dim pub, I’d be utterly absorbed in procuring the cigarette from its gold case, tapping it, flicking the lighter open, lighting up-and blowing out that first cloud.
In short, smoking was something of an act, performed with the fingering of a magician. Perhaps that’s why I was never hooked. Or perhaps because, on a teaching assistant’s salary, I never could afford that many John Players.
The point is that smoking almost always begins as an act, often as a dramatic pose of rebellion or sophistication.
Klein ruminates on many of these ideas in “Cigarettes Are Sublime”-including, yes, tobacco’s deadliness, the habit’s hacking ugliness.
The notion that we’ve become incensed over the dangers of cigarettes only recently because of our modern, civic-minded health consciousness is nonsense. Klein notes that a Spanish doctor who traveled with Christopher Columbus denounced smoking as pernicious. The first surgeon general’s warning: in 1498.
Curiously, Klein barely touches on theater, although he inevitably devotes an entire chapter to Bizet’s “Carmen.” Carmen was the first female in literature to smoke; and, as a cigarette-factory worker, she is identified entirely with tobacco. She was the 19th Century’s apotheosis of the Gypsy female, the woman-as-cigarette, the woman-as-seductive-habit. Her liberated image remains with us in Virginia Slims ads.
Despite such an example of the power of the stage, Klein never mentions Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams or any other playwright. Yet they’ve done much to invest smoking with the aura of the sordid and doomed or the unflappable and chic.
Noel Coward, for instance, made smoking a staple of upper-class comedy. In “Private Lives” and “Blithe Spirit,” smoking is an integral part of his characters’ flirtatious interplay, timed to the line. The coolly held cigarette became a hallmark of the meticulous Coward style.
Of course, just reflecting on the allures of smoking may prompt expressions of outrage. As Klein notes, as much as there is a real socio-medical concern in the anti-tobacco movement, there’s also a degree of Puritanical scorn, an obsession with personal purity.
Even in this, cigarettes and the stage are linked: The Puritans shut down the London theaters in 1642. The ban was tied to the Puritans’ opposition to the crown (the theaters were beneficiaries of royal support), but it was also directed at the entire way of life the theaters promulgated. For several centuries, smoking has been an aspect of that life-the bohemianism, the unconventionality, the coffeehouses.
Not all theater artists smoke, of course, probably not even the majority. But there does seem some fundamental, inspirational link-if in nothing more than that most of us learned to smoke from watching actors.
In the end, perhaps it’s all because smoking a cigarette is so much like a play: to flare briefly and brightly onstage and then fade, leaving only memories-like smoke.
