Robert Cohen is a university professor, theater director, playwright, and drama critic who has written 20 books on the art of theater and acting.
When did your love for theater begin?I started going to the theater when I was 6 or 7. My parents had to drag me to “Oklahoma!,” but the moment I saw it, I thought, Wow, and from then on, it was duck soup. I just went all the time, any time they would take me—I loved going. For a long time, it never occurred to me to be working in it.
Why did you want to write an autobiography?I began writing this for my children, but I realized how odd it was, the way I came into theater. I was going to be a law student. It wasn’t until I got into the hospital situation [written about in his book “Falling Into Theatre…And Finding Myself”] that I thought, What would I like to do? And I thought, I’ll be a professor, but of what? Of theater, of course! While I had been going to the theater, I had never taken a single class in drama.
How do you approach your career?You don’t know what the future holds, and so you try everything. For example, in my play about Machiavelli, I decided to do a little bit of one of his plays within the play. I included
Leave a Reply