Dan Dietz: Breath in Denver

Illustration By Robert Faires

This is a story about air. Or more accurately, breath. And voice. And smoke.

Denver, like many cities, has a smoking ban. Makes sense. With crisp, clean, someone-oughta-bottle-it air like Denver's, you want it to stay clean. But it doesn't just ban smoking in public places; it bans smoking in theatres. Actors can't even smoke herbal cigarettes the way they can in other smokeless cities like New York.

Now, some plays require characters to smoke. Sometimes that's just window dressing, true. But sometimes it's crucial to the story. Sometimes smoke says something.

Take my play tempOdyssey. In it, there's a character who believes smoking is an essential part of his identity. Within 10 minutes of walking out onstage, he lights up, puffs away, and tells us the story of why he started smoking.

But here's the kicker: That character spends the second half of the play dead. He's walking around, sassing other characters, and generally helping drive the play to its conclusion, but he's dead. And we only really know this when he tries to light up … and fails. He has no breath, so he can't smoke.

But if the audience can't see the character smoke in the first half, how can they understand that this character is dead in the second?

Chip Walton, who just produced tempOdyssey at Curious Theatre in Denver, believed so strongly in the need to maintain the integrity of this moment that he challenged the ban and went to court over it. The day I flew out there for the last week of rehearsals was the day he went to court. It should have been a slam dunk. But when I landed in Denver and checked my cell phone …

"Uh, hey Dan, this is Chip. Listen, my friend, we, uh, we need to talk about the whole smoking issue."

My heart felt like a rock. And I don't mean that Bob Seger kind of "like a rock."

Turns out the judge ruled that smoking was not a form of self-expression. He said theatre was a speech-based medium, and since smoking wasn't speech, it wasn't protected by the First Amendment. Put bluntly, according to the judge, smoke doesn't say anything.

Chip and I bitched about the whole thing. We debated and hemmed and hawed. But with time running out and an audience on the way, we had to make a decision: Do we outright flout the ban, smoke on stage and damn the torpedoes … or do we find some way to "smoke" without smoking?

Fast-forward to opening night. Lights have gone down, and stars have come up, and the cosmos has flipped into filing cabinets. A character stops an elevator between floors and turns it into his own private smoking room. He pulls out a cigarette, and you can feel everyone in the house lean forward all at once. He puts it in his mouth and starts to light up … and then stops. With an impish grin, he reaches backstage and grabs a cup full of water and dry ice. It's bubbling over with rich fog. And on it, written in big capital letters, are the words "SMOKE SIMULATOR." He takes a drag off his unlit cigarette and blows onto the foggy cup. Smoke puffs out.

The audience goes wild. Clapping, cheering their support. We've managed to give this ridiculous ban the finger without doing anything illegal. We've peed all over it without actually breaking it.

And this is what the judge failed to understand. You can say a lot without speaking a word. You don't have to inhale a single breath of clean, crisp air to speak your mind. The body has a voice. And that night in Curious Theatre, it was deafening.