Biography:
Robert
Cohen
 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 speaks and conducts workshops
around the country and abroad, including residencies in Canada,
Korea, China, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Costa Rica, Hong
Kong, Romania, Poland, 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, and in 2009 he received the honorary
degree of Honoris Causa at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania,
and the Polish Medal of Honor.
Cohen
lives in Laguna Beach, California with his wife, Lorna Cohen.
He has two children, Michael and Whitney. |
