Robert Cohen (playwright)
American theatre director and writer
Robert Cohen (1938 – November 15, 2024) was an American academic, theatre director, playwright, and drama critic. A Claire Trevor Professor emeritus after 50 years teaching at the University of California, Irvine since 1965, he continued to write, and has published many books on theatre, along with articles, dramatic anthologies and many plays, and has conducted advanced teaching residencies in numerous countries and much of the United States. He has been called a Master Teacher by the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, has been praised as a "walking theatre directory and encyclopedia" by his fellow teachers, and has been honored during his career with the Polish Medal of Honor, the Honoris Causa Professor Degree at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, UCI's Distinguished Professor of Research, and the Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Biography
Cohen was born in 1938 in Washington, D.C. His theatrical education began as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College and UC Berkeley and earned his DFA (Doctorate in Fine Arts) in 1965 at the Yale School of Drama. Soon after, Cohen joined the charter faculty of the brand new campus of the University of California, Irvine, where he served as its founding departmental chair of drama for 25 years, and, from 2015, was an emeritus Bren Fellow and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama for the University.
He was an accomplished director, scholar, drama critic, and theorist, and his approach to stage acting, which employed a system he referred to as "GOTE," , a derivative combination of Chekov and Meisner, was acknowledged as one of the most widely used approaches to stage acting in use today.
Cohen resided in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife Lorna. They had two children, Michael and Whitney. Cohen died on November 15, 2024, at the age of 86.
Directing career
Cohen signed his first Equity contract to direct a production of Wilder's Our Town for the Virginia Museum Theater with his Yale classmate Keith Fowler as producer and actor in the role of the Stage Manager.
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