For Actors and Audiences, Smoking Can Be a Drag

Before the curtain goes up on "The Country Girl," Stiff and his team set up onstage. He takes cigarettes from a packet of XTC herbal cigarettes and places them in a pack of Camels, which is wrapped in a color photocopy of a Chesterfield label from the 1950s. A stage technician squirts hair gel into the ashtrays, which will make a cigarette go out immediately upon contact.

Every detail here is meticulously planned to bring out the authentic feel of the '50s, down to the clunky crystal ashtrays and stylish Zippo lighters.

"There's no doubt that cigarettes can add a touch of reality," says Overbey of "Good Boys and True." "But sometimes the audience coughing is not a political point, but a subconscious one. There's been a huge cultural change, and people notice smoking when they would never have noticed it before."

"Good Boys and True" is set in 1988 among prep-school boys. Overbey's relatively brief smoking scene helps trigger memories of a more tobacco-friendly decade, her XTC herbal cigarettes disguised in a Pall Mall box.

A former smoker, Overbey is grateful that herbal cigarettes don't taste as good as tobacco. "They have all of the bad taste, none of the good. I've whittled down the amount I have to inhale to the very minimum," she says.

For some heavy smokers such as actor Liev Schreiber, tobacco helps them relax while performing, and going herbal is an artistic sacrifice they are not willing to make.

Using a little-known exemption to New York's anti-smoking laws, Schreiber was allowed to use real cigarettes for "Talk Radio" at the Longacre Theatre last year.

"We got the permit from the city as long as we kept the smoke away from the audience," says "Talk Radio" representative Elon Rutberg. "We had extractor fans at the top of the stage that took Liev's smoke straight up and away."

Some actors report that anti-smoking protests are far worse in health-conscious Los Angeles.

Geraldine Hughes, who played Sylvester Stallone's love interest in 2006's "Rocky Balboa," recalls taking a single drag from a cigarette during a performance of "Kevin's Bed" at the Laguna Playhouse.

"There were huge signs in the lobby that said: 'THERE WILL BE SMOKING ON STAGE.' I was only allowed to take one puff and put it out, and even then people coughed and made a big stink about it," she says.

According to Actors' Equity representative Maria Somma, union rules cover smoking backstage, not in front of the audience.

"Ultimately, we hope it's about artistic choice," she says. "If an actor wants to do it, go ahead. If they don't, they should be allowed to leave the cigarette case backstage. How much is the production really going to suffer?"