Falling Into Theatre—and Finding Myself: A Memoir

By Robert Cohen

Robert Cohen's Falling Into Theatre is a must-read for all lovers of theatre. Personal and engaging, Dr. Cohen's reflections on his life as both artist and educator provide the reader with a special journey, a virtual history tour of the American theatre for the past fifty years. His personal experiences are a constant reminder of how love and passion for theatre continue to inspire us and enrich our lives.- , Stacy Keach This engaging memoir is presented as a series of lucky breaks, or surprise turning points in the story that led to Robert Cohen's dramatic success in theatre arts. In retrospect, it would have been a great surprise had Cohen not ended up in theatre arts, given his early fascination with the stage, his chance at a young age to see original cast productions of Broadway plays, and the influence of his uncle, Marty Goldblatt, a publicist for Columbia Pictures who hobnobbed with celebrities of stage and screen. It was inevitable, Robert Cohen became a man of the theatre, not only as an actor but also working as a director, stage manager, lighting designer, playwright, translator, drama scholar, theatre educator, and worldwide theatre critic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781564747853

Book preview

Falling

into

Theatre

…and finding myself

a memoir by

Robert Cohen

2014 · Fithian Press

McKinleyville, California

Copyright © 2014 by Robert Cohen

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-56474-785-3

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to

the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes.

All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

Published by Fithian Press

A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

Post Office Box 2790

McKinleyville, CA 95519

www.danielpublishing.com

Production: Studio E Books

www.studio-e-books.com

Distributed by SCB Distributors [phone]

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Cohen, Robert, (date)

Falling into theatre—and finding myself : a memoir / by Robert Cohen.

pages cm

ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-561-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Cohen, Robert, (date) 2. Theatrical producers and directors—United States—Biography. 3. College teachers—United States—Biography. 4. Dramatists, American—21st century—Biography. 5. Theater critics—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.C567A3 2014

792.092—dc23

[B]

2014009228

In memory of my parents, Lydia and Lester Cohen; with gratitude to my high school teacher, Miss Margaret Casey; my college roommate, Andy Peck; my college teachers Henry Williams, Travis Bogard, and Nikos Psacharopolous; and my inspiring three-year colleague Jerzy Grotowski; and with great fondness for all my theatre students and colleagues over my fifty-five year career.

Contents

PROLOGUE

WASHINGTON

HANOVER

BERKELEY

BOULDER

NEW HAVEN

ASHLAND

WILLIAMSTOWN

NEW LONDON

IRVINE

POLAND

THE WORLD

STOCKHOLM

THE HERE AND NOW

Photos

About the Author

PROLOGUE

I am running from a podium back to my office to get my scribbled notes that I forgot to bring with me. The ceremony, for which I am the honoree, is just about to begin and I am supposed to give an ad-lib speech of thanks—but I realize I might forget to name some of the people I want to thank. At seventy-three, my memory is not as sharp as it used to be, and no one has called me Mr. Wizard in years. Eli Simon, my chairman (and formerly my protégé), has just told me there was plenty of time for me to run back and get my notes. But as I reach my office door, Eli is already speaking his introductory remarks into the microphone. I charge back to the podium and mount it to a wave of nervous laughter. The Dean told me to start, Eli nervously whispers to me as the crowd laughs even louder at my obvious chagrin. I sit on the chair designated for me, between the Dean, the Chancellor, Eli, and our former chair (and also a former protégé), the now-retired Cam Harvey.

We are on the campus of the University of California at Irvine. A podium has been set up, and a crowd of attendees has been gathered to celebrate the renaming of the campus’s Studio Theatre. It is now to be called the Robert Cohen Theatre. Around the corner from the theatre there is a display of photos of four or five of the hundred-plus stage productions I directed, both professionally and at UCI, over the past forty-seven years, along with some fifty editions of my seventeen books about the theatre.

How did all this ever come about? Well, I am happy to tell you. It was wholly by accident. By an extraordinary series of lucky breaks.

WASHINGTON

I was born in Garfield Hospital in downtown Washington, D.C. in 1938. For the next sixteen years, I had no interest in theatre whatsoever, apart from a few days in second grade when I was asked to be in a pageant, during which, as far as I remember, I walked through a ten-foot-tall book to the tittering of my ­classmates.

What I was interested in was politics. By the age of five or six, I had discovered that my home town was also the capital of the United States, and when the war ended I realized my home town had become—more or less—the capital of the entire world. I have never felt such a sudden sense of pride. I lived in the center of the world!

This seemed to be confirmed throughout my years in the Washington area. My first words, so my proud Republican father told me, were Wodie Weedee Weekee which apparently was my way of saying We Want Wilkie, referring to Wendell Wilkie, who was running against Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. When I was six I gaped at the funeral cortege for President Roosevelt from my father’s seventh-floor office in the Colorado Building, just a block east of the White House. By the time I was in high school, in suburban Maryland, I was playing and studying with classmates who were the children of senators (one being Abe Ribicoff), national news reporters on radio (Eric Severeid and Charles Collingwood), Washington Evening Star’s Potomac Fever columnist Fletcher Knebel, and the Romanian ambassador, who lived next door. I had met, courtesy of my parents, several U.S. senators and congressmen; and I had seen President Truman on his morning walk around the White House, President Eisenhower giving a speech at my synagogue, and Senator John F. Kennedy arguing, in a packed Senate chamber, in favor of a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the Electoral College. And my parents told me of their run-ins with Supreme Court justices, and with Vice President Nixon, with whom they stood in line at a suburban (Spring Valley) movie theatre’s ticket booth. Even if my beloved Washington Senators were in a pitched battle with the St. Louis Browns to be the worst team in baseball history, I felt very privileged to be a Washingtonian. Although the local joke went: Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League, I was happy to be first in war—and even happier to be first in peace. I decided I would become a politician.

I was lucky to be in Washington, of course. Indeed, I was enormously lucky—and extremely grateful—to be in America at all. My eight great-grandparents had all emigrated to New York from the same town, Kovno, Lithuania, in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Not one of the Jews who remained in that sad city when World War II began survived it. My grandparents on both sides had first settled in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and then finally in Virginia, all of them eventually landing in the Norfolk-Portsmouth locale—an area known locally as the Tidewater, where the Chesapeake Bay flows into the Atlantic Ocean. None of my grandparents went to college, and I believe only one, my paternal grandfather, Simon Cohen, graduated from high school. By the time I knew them, Simon and Rachel Cohen were running a pawnshop on Norfolk’s Main Street, directly across from the city’s very important U.S. Naval Base—the largest one in America. These Cohens made the bulk of their income in December, selling jewelry and musical instruments to navy sailors sending Christmas presents home to their wives and mothers. I loved visiting Daddy Simon’s pawnshop, with its musty smells and beautiful treasures set out in glass cases, and the shiny guitars and saxophones displayed across the long side walls of the narrow shop, and I was overjoyed when he would let me play with his mechanical adding machine behind the brass bars of his cashier’s booth. Max Goldblatt, my grandfather on my mother’s side, began his career as a janitor in Norfolk’s Union Station, but by the time I got to know him he was the Comptroller of the Virginian Railway, attending board meetings once a month in New York City (where he stayed at the posh St. Regis Hotel) and playing golf on the weekends. Max’s wife, Sadie, was a fiery and funny lady who read The New York Times every day and had mastered its crossword puzzles; she always accompanied Max on his New York business trips, and we joined them there sometimes as well. Since both families attended the same Norfolk synagogue, my parents had known each other since they were children—indeed, my grandmother Rachel had instructed my dad, Lester, to invite my soon-to-be mother, Lydia, to his high school graduation party, which began their courtship.

Higher education, of course, was deeply important to my grandparents, as they had been deprived of it themselves. My mother was admitted to Goucher College, then in Baltimore, and graduated with an English major. Her greatest collegiate memories were playing the second title role in a college production of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion (and yes, she roared), and dancing in the school ballet. Her younger brother, Norman, went to Virginia Polytechnic Institute but joined the army before graduating, losing several of his toes in the Battle of the Bulge; after the war he moved to New York, sired a family of five children with his wife, Dorothy (but known in our family as Nordy), and shuttled through a number of positions with Viking Press, McCall’s Magazine, and several other publishing houses. A highly creative man, he created cartoon ideas for James Thurber and accompanied playwright Garson Kanin on his book tours. The third and youngest of the Goldblatt progeny, my uncle Marty, fought in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy and afterwards went straight to mid-Manhattan, where he became a public relations staffer for Columbia Pictures and a close personal friend and confident of an assortment of theatre and film ­celebrities, including Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Bill Holden, Truman Capote, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, Susan Strasberg, and her mother, Paula. For the Hollywood women in his life, Marty—who was homosexual—was assigned to escort the studio’s female stars when they came to New York, as Columbia wanted to make sure that they did not inadvertently become pregnant at the height of their careers. Marty’s neighbors gawked when he brought Marilyn Monroe up to his fifth-story apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, and, though I never met her, I still have a silver chalice that Kim gave to Marty for his birthday. Kim even gave me—via my uncle—a fluffy red ski sweater when I was in college, which I bragged about for weeks to whoever would listen.

My father’s family, on the other hand, suffered more seriously during the Great Depression, which coincided with my parents’ college years, and my dad, immediately after graduating high school, was sent to New York to work as a stock clerk in a distant cousin’s five-and-ten-cent store. This didn’t work out, though I never found out why (and have long regretted that I never asked him why), so by September he had headed home in a state of despair. And his immense lucky break, which became the background for all of mine, came just a few days later. He was sitting with his parents on the front porch of their Norfolk home on a sweltering southern afternoon when his high school English teacher came strolling by on the sidewalk. Seeing my father on the porch, she turned and marched straight up to him, demanding, Lester Cohen! What are you doing here? The University just opened this week! My dad shamefacedly muttered that his family couldn’t afford to send him to the University, which in Norfolk referred only to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, so she wheeled to face my very tiny and refined grandfather. Mr. Cohen! she yelled so that all the neighbors could hear. What the devil are you thinking of? You send that boy to college! And then she strode huffily away. The next day, my dad was on the train west to Charlottesville and to the University founded by Thomas Jefferson.

Dad absolutely adored college. He made the Dean’s List, joined a Jewish fraternity, became a lifelong friend of the campus boxing champion, one Bobby Goldstein, and, as this was during the Great Prohibition, was honored as his fraternity’s most acclaimed mixmaster of bathtub gin. He also learned adequate German in a single semester and discovered English poetry—and for the rest of his life he quoted Browning, Keats, and Shelley until I knew many of their poems by heart. He was not a scholar, however. He loved to recite Heinrich Heine in German, but only recently have I discovered that his favorite Heine poem—beginning "Du bist mein, ich bin dein"—was actually written some 500 years before Heine was born.

But his greatest literary love was Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in the wonderful (and in my view unsurpassed) Brian Hooker translation, taking me more than once to its 1950 film with José Ferrer, which made a lasting impression. Cyrano’s I carry my adornments on my soul became my dad’s personal credo, and had a lasting impact on me as well.

But the Depression finally overtook his plans, after all, and with no money at home, Dad left Charlottesville at the end of his sophomore year and moved to Washington, managing to get work in an accounting office. A year later, he had built up enough cash to take night classes at Georgetown University’s Law School (in those days, two years of college was enough to enroll in most American law schools). Soon thereafter, while still working at the accounting office by day and studying at Georgetown at night, he was hired as an office boy at one of Washington’s small but burgeoning law firms, Hogan & Hartson. Frank Hogan, the firm’s founder, was already one of America’s top criminal lawyers, having landed on the cover of Time magazine after successfully defending oilman Edward Doheny in the famous Teapot Dome trial of 1924. My dad, who adored Hogan, became his protégé and, much later, his biographer (Frank Hogan, Remembered, published by the Hogan & Hartson firm in 1985), and one of our country’s leading attorneys in the field of radio—and then television—law. Among his colleagues that I knew well by their nicknames were Jimmy Byrnes (a ­onetime senator, secretary of state, South Carolina governor, and Supreme Court justice), Ed Williams (the celebrated criminal lawyer who represented Joe McCarthy, Frank Sinatra, gangster Frank Costello, and would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley), and Johnny Sirica (who, as a judge, broke open the Watergate case). My mother, who had begun her career working as a secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and, during the war, as an enemy aircraft spotter, went on to become a volunteer American Red Cross social worker and eventually the Chairman of Volunteers at the D.C. chapter of the Red Cross, and the head of the chapter’s blood drive. When she died, her obituary in the Washington Post was half a page long, twenty times the size of my father’s.

When I was two we moved to a suburb in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a mile north of the D.C. line. It was a very pleasant residential community; my block included a dozen or so children close to my age, most of them boys, and we played every day on the street corner: softball in the spring and summer, football in the fall and winter, and basketball between the seasons. When it rained we all moved into one of our houses to play board games and listen to our radio shows. I was lying under the bed in a friend’s house listening to an afternoon radio episode of Jack Armstrong, when an announcer broke in to say that President Roosevelt had died; at the age of six I had to run home and inform my parents of this unsettling news. (I was mainly upset, though, that after reporting the President’s death, the station didn’t come back on the air to give us Jack Armstrong’s secret code for the day so that we could win the prize that we were anticipating to get in the next week’s mail.)

But the great society of my childhood was not my neighborhood but rather my summer camp in the hills of Lackawanna County in Pennsylvania, about ten miles north of Scranton, where I spent seven years as a camper and then five as a counselor. While the camp was passionately devoted to sports—chiefly swimming, softball, and baseball, at which I excelled—it managed to produce a number of campers who went on to become prominent theatre and film producers and directors. Chief among these were Mayer Abrahamson, who as Mike Ellis produced seven Broadway shows (including the premiere of Neil Simon’s first Broadway production, Come Blow Your Horn) and owned and ran the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania for a dozen years; Ralph Levy, who directed the pilot of I Love Lucy and served as producer and/or director of most of the early TV comedies emanating from Los Angeles, including The Ed Wynn Show, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and The Jack Benny Show; Gerald (Jerry) Adler, who produced over two dozen NBC films at Universal Studios and ran the Cinema Center film division of CBS in the late 60s; and my 1947 camp tent-mate, Lee Kalcheim, who is now the author of twenty plays and dozens of TV shows and episodes, including several for All in the Family and Paper Chase. And though I had little interest in the camp’s dramatic activities, I was persuaded in one of my last years as a camper to play a role in Lord Dunsany’s one-act A Night at the Inn (I can still remember the first twenty lines—of everyone in our cast), and then to act and sing in a couple of our original marionette shows, which were the passion of the camp’s owner and hence were produced during the parents’ weekend in the middle of each summer. The camp was generous in giving prizes at the end of the summer—managing to give everybody at least one—and proved a confidence builder at the highest level. While I have maintained contact with only one of my Chevy Chase pals since growing up, the friends I made at camp have remained with me all my life. In 2011, fifty-three years after I left camp forever (and thirty-eight years after the camp itself went out of existence), more than 150 of us gathered in Philadelphia for a two-day reunion, for which I gladly served as MC.

I was not a particularly stellar student in school, however. Indeed, I was more of a cut-up than a student, and was continually told to leave the room of my eighth-grade algebra class because I and a classmate (Deane Beman, who went on to twice win the U.S. Amateur Golf title and serve as commissioner of the PGA for forty years) would pretend to be Australian platypuses and say gloop gloop to each other. And I never did my homework when I came home, preferring to go up to the corner to play softball or football or whatever game was going on. So I would do my first period homework during home room class, my second period homework during first period, and on and on, generally in a state of mixed panic and ecstasy. My high school grades, I discovered in my senior year, while they landed me in the top quarter of my class, were not high enough for me to ascend to the top fifth (why the school had these separate figures is still unknown to me)—which meant that I was somewhere in the seventy-fifth to eightieth percentile.

Nor did my parents participate much in my studies. Both worked in downtown Washington during the day, my dad played golf on the weekends, and they partied often in the evenings—at least four or five times a week and sometimes going to as many as three cocktail parties a night. Washington at that time (this was the Eisenhower administration, and my parents were Republicans) was a partying paradise for those who could afford it—and manage to down five martinis a night—and by this time my parents had no problems doing just this. But I did get from them a huge interest in the arts. I was frequently taken to music and dance concerts (my mom had studied piano and ballet), art galleries, (my dad retired at sixty to become a very fine painter—on both canvases and used furniture), the Smithsonian Museum(s), and, first and foremost, to the theatre, where I saw, both in Washington and on Broadway during trips to visit my uncles, original productions of most of the great musicals of that era. Oklahoma!—with its original cast on a post-Broadway tour—was the first, though my parents had to drag me to it; thereafter, I needed no dragging. Then came Where’s Charley? on Broadway, with the great dancer, Ray Bolger; and then the flood: Guys and Dolls, The Boy Friend, South Pacific, The Pajama Game, Call Me Madam, Wonderful Town, The Music Man, Gypsy, and West Side Story, all with their original Broadway casts (John Raitt, Julie Andrews, Mary Martin, Ezio Pinza, Ethel Merman, Stubby Kaye, Robert Preston, et. al.). I was dazzled by these shows—though utterly bewildered by the moment in Guys and Dolls when Sky Masterson (played by Alan Alda’s now largely forgotten father, Robert) sang Luck Be a Lady Tonight and the character betting against him (Big Jule, played by B.S. Pully) enthusiastically joined in cheering him on with the chorus. How could Big Jule be cheering on the guy he’s betting against? I asked my dad. Dramatic license! Dad explained, and the phrase has remained with me ever since.

But I also saw nonmusicals, both in Washington and on Broadway: Mrs. McThing (with Helen Hayes), The Lark (with Julie Harris), A View From the Bridge (the original one-act, with Van Heflin and Eileen Heckart), The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (with Henry Fonda), Mr. Johnson (a true though sadly un-revived masterpiece, with the magnificent—and very young—Earle Hyman in the title role), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (with Burl Ives, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Ben Gazzara—wow!). In the virtually new Off-Broadway format, I saw George Bernard Shaw’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets and The Admirable Bashville, with Frances Sternhagen, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village; and in my own hometown of Washington I saw many of the initial plays at the Old Vat (soon to become the Arena Stage), including, most memorably, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon. I also read novels voraciously, checking them out at a lending library in our neighboring town of Bethesda for the price of ten cents for three days, and always returning them when my dime was up. I became particularly familiar with war fiction, such as Battle Cry, From Here to Eternity, and The Caine Mutiny, but also read adult romances including By Love Possessed and countless others now long forgotten—though the torrid scenes of passion in them still register in my mind.

But it was the theatre with which I fell in love, though at the time I never had the slightest thought of being anywhere in a theatre other than sitting in the audience. Nor had I ever read a play until my first year in high school, when Julius Caesar and eventually Hamlet—and in French class Cyrano de Bergerac—became part of my class assignments. The idea of reading a play outside of class never occurred to me—until one propitious day. As a lawyer with clients around the country, my father was required to transmit legal documents on tight deadlines, and, this being the age well before FedEx, on one winter day he required a courier to deliver a brief for a client in Boston. Thinking it would be good for me to see this historic