The father's business success allowed him to send the younger Widmann to Brooklyn's Poly Prep Country Day School where he acquired a taste for the stage.
"The very first thing I ever did," Widmann told a reporter in 1921, "was at Poly Prep when I was a youngster...Mr. William J. Peters was my elocution teacher, and one day he came to me and said that the boys were getting up a play and he wanted me to come to the first reading...I was offered a very small part, a parlor maid with a policeman for a beau."
According to the critic, Widmann (age 27 at the time) "bore close inspection from the fifth row in the orchestra through a pair of very good opera glasses and was pronounced an extremely pretty girl.
The magazine's editors allowed that while, "Oscar Widmann's fame in Brooklyn and Manhattan does not rest entirely on the Poly Shows, he has been most widely known because of them," noting his "admirable playing of the leading feminine part in each," his "elaborate and striking costumes," and his having acted as the "chief force" behind each production.
[10] Beyond their decorating, manufacturing of reproduction furniture, and dealing in antiquities, both helped to found the American Institute of Designers; Kimbel was president of the New York chapter from 1935–36, and Widmann from 1944–45.