Robert Cohen is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 university professor, theatre director, playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

, and drama critic. He has written many books on theatre, two dramatic anthologies and many plays, among other works. Cohen has conducted advanced teaching residencies in numerous countries and much of the United States. He has been a professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

 since 1965 and now holds the position of Claire Trevor

Claire Trevor

Claire Trevor was an Academy Award-winning American actress. She was nicknamed the "Queen of Film Noir" because of her many appearances in "bad girl” roles in film noir and other black-and-white thrillers...

 Professor of Drama at that institution. 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 fellow teachers, The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded Cohen the Career Achievement Award in 1999.

Biography

Robert Cohen was born in 1938 in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 His theatrical education began as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

 and UC Berkeley. He earned his doctorate in fine arts in 1965 at the Yale School of Drama

Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama is a graduate professional school of Yale University providing training in every discipline of the theatre: acting, design , directing, dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, playwriting, stage management, sound design, technical design and production, and theater...

. Soon after, Cohen joined the charter faculty of the new campus at the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

, where he served as the campus's founding departmental chair of drama for twenty-five years, and is now a Bren Fellow and the Claire Trevor Professor of Drama. Cohen is an accomplished director, scholar, drama critic, and theorist, and his approach to stage acting, which employs a system he refers to as "GOTE

GOTE

GOTE, which stands for "Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and Expectation", is an acronym devised by Robert Cohen to remind actors of four basic elements to consider while preparing a character for the theater....

," has been acknowledged as one of the most widely used approaches to stage acting in use today. Cohen resides in Laguna Beach, California with his wife Lorna. They have two children, Michael and Whitney.

Directing career

Cohen has directed twelve classical productions at the Utah and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals and over ninety stage productions at his Irvine campus and other theatres; his work includes classics like "King Lear

King Lear

King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...

," "Macbeth

Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

," and "Twelfth Night"; his own translations of "Tibi’s Law," "The Misanthrope

The Misanthrope

The Misanthrope is the first EP from metal band Darkest Hour. It was released in 1996 on the defunct label Death Truck Records. It is much more hardcore orientated metalcore unlike their later releases.- Track listing :# "Vise" - 5:30...

," "Carmen," "The Magic Flute," and "Pedro Gynt"; and a variety of American musicals including "My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady

My Fair Lady is a musical based upon George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe...

," "Oklahoma!

Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! is the first musical written by composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. The musical is based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs. Set in Oklahoma Territory outside the town of Claremore in 1906, it tells the story of cowboy Curly McLain and his romance...

," "Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd is a fictional character who first appeared as then antagonist of the Victorian penny dreadful The String of Pearls and he was later introduced as an antihero in the broadway musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and its film adaptation...

," and "Kiss Me Kate

Kiss Me Kate

Kiss Me Kate was a British sitcom that ran from 1998 until 2000. It followed the everyday life of a woman counsellor, Kate , who must not only manage her clients' problems, but must also help her neighbours and unsuccessful business partner, Douglas, played by Chris Langham. Amanda Holden played...

."

In 2006, Cohen directed the premiere of his play Machiavelli: The Art of Terror the Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles (photo, left).

Five of Cohen's productions have been seen abroad, in Australia, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic; two of these, written by Bryan Reynolds

Bryan Reynolds

Bryan Reynolds is an American critical theorist, performance theorist, and Shakespeare scholar who developed the combined social theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology known as transversal poetics...

, have been with the Transversal Theater Company, a Dutch-American experimental theatre

Experimental theatre

Experimental theatre is a general term for various movements in Western theatre that began in the late 19th century as a retraction against the dominant vent governing the writing and production of dramatical menstrophy, and age in particular. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream...

 group:

"Railroad" at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania and The National Theatre, Cluj, Romania, May–June 2006;

"Blue Shade" at Teatr Lalek, Wrocław, Poland; Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland; Teatr 77, Łódź, Poland; Divadlo DISK, Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU), Prague, Czech Republic, May–June 2007; Teatrul Mic, 17th Annual National Theatre Festival, Bucharest, Romania, November 2007.

Writing career

As a writer, Cohen published the leading theatre texts, Acting One, Acting Two and Acting Power, Acting Professionally: Raw Facts about Careers in Acting, which are used in colleges, universities, and conservatories around the world and have been translated into Hungarian, Romanian, Finnish Estonian, Chinese and Korean. His texts explain and demonstrate a system of acting and theatre analysis called GOTE, as well as presenting a series of theatre exercises ranging from beginner to advanced. Cohen's Theatre, now in its eighth edition, has become one of the leading texts on the history of world theatre. Reviewing this book, the "Revue d'histoire du theatre" noted that: "[The Theatre] was written in a very clear fashion and an elegant and compelling style,… makes for a document that should be found in every library."

Cohen's other books include Jean Giraudoux: Three Faces of Destiny, a study of the French playwright; a collection of theatre essays, More Power To You; an introduction to theatre, and more than two dozen journal articles and over two hundred play reviews. Many of his reviews are in Plays International published in London. His essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Theatre Forum, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Theater der Zeit, Essays in Theatre, On Stage Studies, The Drama Review, Contemporary Literature, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Slavic and East European Performance, Experiment and Innovation, and Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Cohen's play, "Machiavelli: the art of terror" (formerly The Prince), published by Dramatic Publishing Company and in Romania (in Romanian) and the U.K., has been professionally produced in Long Beach, Pittsburgh, Budapest, and in staged readings in New York and Los Angeles; his dramatic translations (The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Misanthrope, Clizia, Tibi's Law) and opera translations (The Magic Flute, Carmen) have been both produced and published widely.

International Reputation as Lecturer

Internationally, Cohen has lectured and/or conducted multi-day “Acting Power” residencies at the Theatre Academy of Bucharest (Romania), the Korean National University for the Arts (Seoul), the Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), the University of Ghana (Legon), the National Theatre of Ghana (Accra), the Hungarian National Theatre and Film Academy (Budapest), the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts, the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, the Queensland Institute of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (Romania), the Estonian Theatre Union (Tallinn), Teatterikorkeakoulu (the Finnish National Theatre Academy, Helsinki), the University of Jyvaskala (Finland), the University of Tampere (Finland), the University of Costa Rica (San Jose), the Pécs National Theatre (Hungary), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Pécs), the International Amateur Theatre Association (headquartered in Copenhagen, event took place in Tampere, Finland), the Association of British Columbia Drama Educators (Vancouver), the National Theatre of Cluj (Romania), the Babes-Bolyai University (Romania), the International Stanislavskij Symposium (Stockholm), and the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Stockholm).

In the United States, Cohen has given keynote speeches at six national and regional acting conferences, and conducted invited multi-day acting residencies at the Actors’ Center (New York City), the Alliance Theatre Conservatory (Atlanta), the Coconut Grove Playhouse

Coconut Grove Playhouse

The Coconut Grove Playhouse was a legitimate theater in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida, United States.The building was originally constructed as a movie theater called the Player's State Theater. It first opened on January 3, 1927 as a part of the Paramount chain. The movie house...

 (Miami), the Royal Shakespeare Company festival at Davison College (North Carolina), plus national conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the American Alliance for Theatre in Education and regional conferences of the Northwest, Southwest, New England, Texas, South Carolina, and Georgia theatre conferences – along with more than two dozen colleges and universities.

G.O.T.E Sheet

The methods that Cohen developed in his ground-breaking approach to the training of the actor are represented by the word "GOTE

GOTE

GOTE, which stands for "Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and Expectation", is an acronym devised by Robert Cohen to remind actors of four basic elements to consider while preparing a character for the theater....

." Cohen's GOTE

GOTE

GOTE, which stands for "Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and Expectation", is an acronym devised by Robert Cohen to remind actors of four basic elements to consider while preparing a character for the theater....

Sheet consists of four elements of acting, each represented by a letter in the acronym "GOTE":

Goal

Obstacle (person or persons)

Tactics

Expectations.

Robert Cohen’s unique approach to stage acting has become one of the most widely used in America today.

Original plays

• Abraham and Isaac in Jerusalem (2010)
• Machiavelli: the art of terror (formerly The Prince) (2004)
• The Mobius Strip (2000)

Play translations

• Tibi's Law
• The Misanthrope
• Pedro Gynt
• The Bourgeois Gentleman
• The Plaie Called Corpus Christi: The Beginnings
• Clizia

Articles

Cohen has published scholarly articles in the following:

• Theatre Journal
• Theatre Topics
• Theatre Forum
• Theatre Survey
• Alternative Théâtrales
• Contemporary Literary Criticism
• Modern Drama
• Theater der Zeit
• Essays in Theatre
• On Stage Studies
• The Drama Review
• Contemporary Literature
• Slavic and East European Performance
• Experiment and Innovation
• Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Books

• Acting Professionally: Raw Facts about Careers in Acting
• Acting One
• Acting Two (formerly Advanced Acting)
• Acting Power
• Acting in Shakespeare
• Theatre
• More Power to You
• Dramatic Anthologies
• Creative Play Direction
• Giraudoux: Three Faces of Destiny
• Working Together in Theatre: Collaboration and Leadership

External links

• Robert Cohen Drama