Actor Amy Morton may be right about smoking cigarettes as a character in a play when she says that “the minute you light up on stage anymore, people start coughing in the audience. The smoke hasn’t reached them. . .It’s like some weird kind of Pavlovian reaction” (“For stage actors, smoking is a cloudy issue,” Tempo, April 8).
But she also thinks that the smoke “will never reach them.” That’s where she’s wrong.
Some of us are cursed with especially sensitive noses. I can have my car windows rolled up and smell cigarette smoke from a car stopped in front of or next to me at a stoplight–even before I’ve looked to see if someone in that car is smoking.
Sitting in bleachers at an outdoor sporting event, I can detect smoke from a cigarette several rows behind me.
Even in a large theater, if an actor lights a cigarette it won’t take many parts per million for some of us with this overdeveloped sense of smell to get a whiff and start to cough.
I love the theater, but my nose hates this kind of realism.
