Biography

Born in Washington DC in 1938, Robert Cohen took his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College and UC Berkeley, and received his Doctor of Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama in 1965, whereupon he joined the charter faculty of the newly-founded Irvine campus of the University of California. He has served there ever since, first as the founding departmental chair of Drama (for 25 years) and now as a Bren Fellow and Claire Trevor Professor of drama.

At Irvine, Cohen has directed more than seventy stage productions, including new plays, classics (often in his own translations), musicals, experimental works and operas. Off campus, he directs professionally, with works including a dozen productions at the Utah and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals plus many other works at Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood, the Summer Repertory Theatre in Santa Rosa, the Image Theatre in Boston, Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, and the Focused Program in Medieval Drama at Irvine.

Cohen is also the author of many important theatre books, including leading texts in acting, a study of French playwright Jean Giraudoux, an introduction to theatre, a collection of theatre essays, and both original plays and translations. He has also published more than two dozen journal articles and two hundred-plus play reviews, the latter appearing mainly in the London-published Plays International, for which he is the regular southern California drama critic.

As a teacher, Cohen specializes in acting – particularly his own, closely-wrought integration of realism’s authentic underpinnings in human behavior with the classical, musical, and experimental dramatic styles commonly performed today. Cohen’s investigation of acting extends to scientific theory and world theatre practice. In the late 1980s, Cohen paired with Polish director Jerzy Grotowski in the creation of the Objective Drama Program on the UCI campus, a three-year, full-time round examination of the origins of ritual performance and their theoretical and practical applications to modern acting and dramatic art. In addition to his regular teaching at UCI, Cohen serves as master teacher at the Actors Center in New York City, and regularly speaks and conducts workshops around the country and abroad, including recent residencies in Canada, Korea, China, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Romania and Australia.

UCI awarded Cohen its highest honor, the UCI Medal, in 1993, and conferred on him a Claire Trevor Professorship in 2001. In 1999 he received the Career Achievement Award in Academic Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Cohen lives in Laguna Beach, California with his wife, Lorna Cohen. He has two children, Michael and Whitney.