UCI Professor Has Own Lines on Acting : Performing arts: Robert Cohen’s books are used in drama programs at many universities.

“Can acting be taught?” asks UC Irvine drama professor Robert E. Cohen, posing a question he has answered with distinction.

It is a question Cohen asks on the first page of his 216-page book, “Acting One,” and answers with lessons on diction, body language, stage fright, approach, memorization methods, cues, techniques and liberation.

It is a question, asked and answered, in his three other books on acting and in 25 years at UC Irvine, where he is the founder and former chairman of the widely respected theater department and where he continues to teach.

Last fall Cohen was awarded the UCI Medal, the university’s highest honor. This summer his influence in academia will be highlighted again by a study to be presented at a national educators’ conference showing that “Acting One” is used on more campuses to teach undergraduate performers than any other text.

Surprisingly, the book is even more popular as a teaching tool than the celebrated “An Actor Prepares” by legendary Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who has long been one of the most pervasive influences in 20th-Century theater.

“Cohen’s book replaced everything we had here,” David Knight, chairman of the theater department and the head of acting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said by telephone. “He has made quite an impact. Acting books come and go. There are a lot of them. But his has lasted because people find it useful.”

According to Joyce Aldridge, who conducted a nationwide survey for a 1992 doctoral dissertation at the University of Colorado, “Acting One,” which was written in 1984, tops the list of all instructional acting books. It is required reading in 113 university drama programs.

By her count, which she says still holds, Cohen’s other books also are used extensively. “Acting Power,” his theoretical manifesto, is required in 54 programs, mostly at the graduate level; “Acting Professionally,” a journalistic analysis of the industry, is used in 61 programs, and “Acting in Shakespeare” in five.

Stanislavsky’s ideas, which gave rise to so-called method acting, gained their greatest fame in this country through such adherents as Marlon Brando and James Dean. But if the Russian master is “the intellectual ancestor” of all modern American acting, to quote Cohen, it is the 55-year-old professor’s own post-Stanislavsky teachings that have invited comparison with Stanislavsky’s and created a new, very different mantle of authority. This, despite the fact that Cohen is not himself a performer, world-renowned or otherwise, and has no famous students crediting him for their success.

“Cohen has codified a system that engages the student very quickly in action with partners,” Aldridge said from Castleton State College in Vermont, where she is an assistant professor of theater.

“He involves the student in what he calls ‘interactive dynamics.’ Stanislavsky asks the actor to think about his past and what has led him to the moment being presented on stage. Cohen asks him to think about the future.”

During a recent interview at his UCI office, a cozy den lined with books and filled with theatrical memorabilia, Cohen said he is not “anti-Stanislavsky” but nonetheless reeled off a litany of differences between their views.

“Stanislavsky is all about the actor getting in touch with his feelings. He thinks the source of a character resides in the actor’s personality. I think it resides much more in the situation.”

“I’m more optimistic. He’s more pessimistic. I’m more future-oriented. He’s more past-oriented. I’m more cybernetic. He’s more deterministic. I deal with tactics. He didn’t deal very much with tactics, and he never dealt with the audience. It was an embarrassment to him.”

Cohen, who came to UCI in 1965 by way of Dartmouth and Yale, speaks in such speedy rhythms that he sounds streetwise rather than Ivy League. He also does not look even remotely tweedy. Dressed in a habitual outfit of drab work shirt and jeans, he gives the casual appearance of someone who has wandered onto the campus perhaps by mistake.

But there is no mistaking the chord he has struck.

Ashley Carr, head of acting at Cal State Long Beach, says Cohen “distills Stanislavsky down to essentials as a starting point,” then shows young actors how to avoid “the sort of self-conscious, self-obsessed performances” commonly associated with method acting.

For his part, Cohen believes his ideas are popular because he emphasizes “non-gloomy, totally goal-oriented acting.” That means “capturing and embodying the character’s hope for victory,” he said.

Instead of having the actor plumb his own history to identify with the character by applying “emotional memory”--one of the chief legacies of Stanislavsky’s early teachings--Cohen asks the actor to apply “positive energy and optimism” toward the character’s goals.

He says that perhaps the easiest way to illustrate the difference in their approaches is to imagine a bear, a man and a cabin. The bear is chasing the man. The man is running toward the cabin.

A method actor playing the man concentrates on what is behind him: the bear, which he understands as the “cause” of the situation. The bear is a metaphor for the past, in other words, a summation of all the circumstances that brought him to that moment.

Cohen, by contrast, would have the actor concentrate on what is in front of him: the cabin, which provides a potential haven and is a metaphor for the future.

“Anybody in that situation would be looking ahead, not behind,” he explained. “He’d be thinking of how to get to the cabin as fast as possible. He’d be thinking of contingency plans. ‘If the door is locked, I’ll climb on the roof.’ The character is pulled by the future, not pushed by the past.”

Cohen says he derives his views on acting in large measure from concepts pioneered by post-Freudian psychiatry and modern communications theory. He mentions such influences as Erving Goffman (“The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”), Eric Berne (“Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy”), Paul Watzlawick (“Pragmatics of Human Communication”) and Gregory Bateson (“Steps to an Ecology of Mind”).

“I’m interested in where performance and behavior intersect,” he said. “We’re giving performances all the time.”

In addition to his pedagogical clout on American campuses, Cohen is making inroads in Eastern Europe, where Stanislavsky has held sway since Stalinist times. “Acting Power” has been published in Hungary, Estonia and Finland.

“I think he has updated Stanislavsky,” Cohen’s Finnish translator Maija-Liisa Marton said from Helsinki. “He brings to acting what modern science and technology have brought to our lives. Stanislavsky is outdated. Cohen speaks a language young people understand nowadays.”

Marton notes that Cohen gives actors “more tools” for absurdist works. Characters in a Samuel Beckett play, for example, tend to be less susceptible to psychological parsing a la Stanislavsky, she says, and more amenable to Cohen’s goal-oriented approach.

“Eastern Europe is in an acting crisis,” said Cohen, who went to Budapest in March to give master classes at Hungary’s National Theatre Academy. “They’re looking for optimism. They’re looking to escape from solipsistic acting.

“With the demise of the Soviet empire they don’t want to go back to the tea-and-saucer drama that existed before Stanislavsky, you know--kneel on your left leg and kiss with your upstage lip. This is true of everyone from the Hungarians to the Estonians, and even to a certain extent the Finns, who were not under Soviet domination.”