A few weeks ago, at a local production of Richard Greenberg's brilliant play "The Violet Hour," spectators entering the theatre were treated to the following sign:
Warning: there is cigarette smoking in this play.
Indeed there was, for Pulitzer Prize-winner Greenberg's odd and endearing opus is set in the 1920s, when, in many places, individuals smoked more over breakfast than whole neighborhoods now do in a week. What's a hard-working playwright to do, in representing the tough literary world of 1920s postwar New York, but allow his boozing, stressed-out, bohemian characters to smoke onstage as much as they would have done in real life? But the company producing the play still felt the need to notify spectators--who have chosen to see a play set indoors during working hours in a time when people often chain-smoked at work--that the characters might be inhaling onstage.
At least the producers of this play were allowed to let their actors smoke. Increasingly, tough and non-negotiable public-smoking laws have made it illegal for actors to light up onstage. One can just imagine what this will do to the realism of any play ever written about such highly dramatic historical figures as Winston Churchill or Henry Clay, both of whom loved cigars so much that kinds were named after them. In fact, we don't have to speculate. One of the most enduring one-man shows in American theatrical history is Hal Holbrook's "Mark Twain Tonight!" in which the erstwhile smoker and classic American author is shown chewing a stogie throughout. Recent productions of this show have had to risk legal action in order to retain that stogie-chewing action--without which Mark Twain would hardly be recognizable as Mark Twain.
Smoking bans in such places as Nebraska, Colorado, and parts of the United Kingdom are so strict that they don't even allow actors, playing smokers, to light up onstage--even if the cigars or cigarettes are replaced with herbal cigarettes. This has led to at least one lawsuit. In 2007 that three Colorado companies sued their own state under area free-expression laws. The smoking bans which go so far as to prevent actors from representing smokers in the course of artistic productions, they argue, are a violation of an artist's free speech, besides forcing the theatre companies to change several plays--Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf prominent among them--that feature smoking. (Such changes are frequently in violation of copyright laws to which theatre companies must submit, further complicating the situation.)
In other places it's causing controversy, if not legal action. Theatregoers in Chicago, which boasts one of the country's largest and most active live-theatre scenes, have argued bitterly in the pages of local newspapers and arts publications over whether the recent Chicago smoking ban should apply to currently popular productions of Cabaret and Chicago, both of which take place in the twenties and feature proto-feminist characters--women who wouldn't have been caught dead in public without a smoke of some kind. The problem is erupting in other theatre-centric towns too: a recent London production starring the great actor David Suchet ran into problems over a brief smoking scene.
Perhaps this new tendency shouldn't be a surprise. Several years ago, a major publisher raised eyebrows by digitally removing a cigarette from the hand of the illustrator of a classic children's book, after his photo had been published for decades on the book's About the Author page. And anti-smoking groups raised a minor furor in the summer of 2008 when The Incredible Hulk featured a villain, Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross, who constantly smoked cigars--as he has done for decades in the long-running Hulk comic book series that inspired the film, not that this placated the film's critics, who called for The Incredible Hulk to be given an R rating for this reason alone. (Such groups complained, similarly, when 2006's Superman Returns depicted Perry White, a longtime smoker in the comics, chomping a stogie.)
This is one issue, perhaps, on which free-speech advocates (whether they like being around smokers or not) and cigar lovers can agree: if the script calls for smoking--or if the character being depicted in a play or movie would likely have smoked in real life--maybe a bit of artistic license is allowed?
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