Theater -- Tom Titus

When the doors of UC Irvine first opened in the fall of 1965, one of

the first people to walk through them was Robert Cohen. Fresh out of the

Yale School of Drama, Cohen had come west to take up his duties as a

professor and director of theater.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of firsts in theater that year.

That was when I began covering all things theatrical for the Daily Pilot,

and a couple of other young fellows in their mid-20s named David Emmes

and Martin Benson set about starting their own theater. They called it

South Coast Repertory.

Well, 37 years have passed, and those careers that began in 1965 are

still humming along. Emmes and Benson remain at the helm of SCR,

overseeing the fifth phase of their regional theater showplace, and Cohen

-- after heading the UCI drama department for a quarter of a century --

now carries the title of Claire Trevor professor of drama.

Thirty-four years ago, Cohen mounted a Bertolt Brecht drama called

“The Good Woman of Szechuan” at the only theater the university had at

the time, in the Humanities building. This weekend, he’ll bring it back

at UCI’s newest and showiest venue, the Irvine Barclay Theatre, under the

title “The Good Person of Szechuan” (the title hasn’t been changed, just

the translation, Cohen explains).

The title difference, however, isn’t the only switch from UCI’s 1968

version to the one that opens Friday at the Barclay. The alterations in

the current production, the director points out, necessarily begin with

the changes at UCI.

“Instead of the little 150-seat studio converted from a Humanities

Hall classroom,” he notes, the play will unfold in the 750-seat Barclay.

“Instead of an all-white, all-undergraduate, all-locally recruited

student cast,” Cohen said, there will be “a multicultural and interracial

mix of graduate and undergraduate students selected at auditions and

interviews from around the country and abroad.”

The central theme, of the search for a “good person” from the squalor

of rural China, remains intact, as does Cohen’s ideas of Brecht, which he

maintains haven’t changed much over the years, though “the theater world

has absorbed them,” he said. “Indeed, since ‘68, Brecht’s notions have so

entered the mainstream that ‘epic theater’ has essentially pervaded

everything from Broadway to the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Cohen

explained. “People are always addressing the audience, going back and

forth in time, introducing Asian theater forms, projecting words and

images, grabbing microphones and singing their ideas, etc. So the novelty

has worn off.”

What is different in the 2002 production, Cohen said, is primarily a

much more powerful (and more Brechtian) acting style, a seriously

evocative design in all areas, a profoundly sensual musical score

(written and conducted by Yung Wha Son) and the more global reach of the

production, in which Szechuan more truly represents the entire human

universe.

Cohen has kept in touch with most of his former students over the past

decades and notes that, from his 1968 production of “Szechuan,” Susan

Bedsow is an Emmy Award-winning television producer, Bob Currier is now

artistic director of the Marin Shakespeare Festival, Bruce Bouchard and

the late Michael van Landingham each were artistic directors of the

Capital Repertory Theater in Albany, N.Y., and Charlie Hutchins, Kathy

Donovan, Anne Bloom and Steve Nisbet all have enjoyed fine professional

acting careers.

“And, of course,” Cohen added, “Cameron Harvey, the lighting

technician for our 1968 show, is now the producing artistic director of

the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespeare Festival, as well as being the

present UCI chair of drama.”

Cohen himself may have remained at UCI from day one, but he hasn’t let

much grass grow under his own feet. Apart from teaching, he directs

regularly at the Utah and Colorado Shakespeare festivals and has staged

plays in a variety of professional and academic theaters here and abroad.

He has written several notable textbooks on acting, directing and

general theater history, and his original plays have been presented

around the country and in Europe. He also has published articles in most

scholarly theater journals in North America and is the Southern

California drama critic for the London-published Plays International.

The university awarded him its highest honor, the UCI Medal, in 1993,

and conferred on him the Claire Trevor Endowed Professorship in Drama in

2001. In 1999, Cohen received the national Career Achievement Award in

Academic Theater from the Assn. for Theater in Higher Education.

His insights on Bertolt Brecht are born of a global career that has

included conducting lectures and workshops both in the United States and

abroad, including national professional gatherings and conservatories in

Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Costa Rica, Hong Kong and Australia.

“Brecht intended ‘Szechuan’ simply as a metaphor for oppressed

humanity,” Cohen points out. “He had never visited China, and apparently

didn’t even know, when he wrote the play, that Szechuan was a province,

not a city, in China’s Yangtze heartland.

“And so,” he concludes, “it’s appropriate that our cast and staff

represent a great spectrum of multicultural America, and the world at

large, as does this play. That certainly wasn’t true in 1968 -- although our Shen Te, Kathy Donovan, whose mother was Chinese, was UCI’s first

actor of known Asian extraction.”

“The Good Person of Szechuan,” in its new translation by Douglas

Langworthy, will be presented this weekend and next at 8 p.m. Fridays and

Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and next Thursday at 8 p.m. in the Irvine

Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Ticket information is

available at (949) 824-2787.

* TOM TITUS writes about and reviews local theater for the Daily

Pilot. His stories appear Thursdays and Saturdays.