‘Prince’ Holds Court on UCI Stage

Robert Cohen enjoys a reputation as a Renaissance man of the theater. Now the UC Irvine drama professor wants the playgoing public to enjoy Niccolo Machiavelli, a Renaissance man of the Renaissance.

“The Prince,” written and directed by Cohen, is playing through Feb. 3 in a student production at UCI. It tells the story of the man behind the notorious name--the 16th-century Florentine statesman, comic playwright and political philosopher whose main legacy, for the general public, is an adjective.

“Machiavellian” denotes the use of scheming, treachery and raw displays of power--the belief the ends justify the means--to achieve one’s goals. “The Prince” combines fact with Cohen’s informed speculation to show how Machiavelli became a Machiavellian--and how his ends were noble and the means he advocated understandable.

At 62, Cohen is a soft-spoken, solidly built man. His small office on campus is outfitted with a nondescript institutional metal desk. Posters for plays he has directed take up what little wall space isn’t claimed by bookcases. Nothing indicates this is the workplace of a teacher who holds the university’s highest honor--the UCI Medal, awarded in 1994--or a career-achievement award conferred two years ago by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, a 1,800-member national organization of theater professors.

When UCI opened in 1965, Cohen, fresh out of the Yale School of Drama, was a founding faculty member. “The Prince” is the 51st play he has directed on campus; he has directed 10 times for professional Shakespeare festivals in Colorado and Utah.

Cohen’s books on acting and “Theatre,” an introductory survey text, have become standard works used in classrooms around the country. His influence began in the 1970s with the books, “Acting Professionally” and “Acting Power, “ even though Cohen, himself, has not done much professional acting and never taught an acting class until 1980.

“It started getting embarrassing,” he said. “People would come to Irvine and say they wanted to study acting with Robert Cohen,” only to find that they couldn’t. Cohen taught courses in directing, dramatic literature and acting theory, but not hands-on acting. But that changed, and for 20 years now he has been hands-on, guiding students in the art of bringing roles to life on stage.

“I’ve seen a lot of great actors who want to teach and don’t have much of an idea of how to go about it,” he said. “Most acting pedagogy is the student does some acting and the teacher says, ‘That wasn’t good because. . . .”’ Cohen said he doesn’t critique students’ performances but tries to help them “reconfigure what they’re thinking about while they’re doing it.”

He started writing texts on acting to meet UCI students’ needs. When they seemed too starry-eyed about their career prospects, he researched and wrote “Acting Professionally,” a practical guide that is subtitled “Raw Facts About Careers in Acting.” When students were confused over conflicting techniques and terminology being used by different acting teachers, Cohen wrote “Acting Power” to establish some common-ground thinking about the art.

“He is one of the few master teachers of acting in the United States,” said J. Michael Miller, a longtime New York University theater professor who now heads the Actors Center, a Manhattan school for professionals and acting teachers. Miller has brought Cohen in to teach acting teachers how to teach acting.

Blending Politics, Literature

Cohen grew up in Washington, D.C., read voraciously (including “The Prince” while still in high school) and decided he wanted to be a lawyer like his father. He acted in college productions for pleasure, harboring no illusions that he had the talent for a stage career. Cohen was a political science major at UC Berkeley when, hospitalized for a collapsed lung, he had a week to rethink his life. That is when he decided he wanted to be a theater professor.

“I love literature and I love politics. What I loved about drama was that it was literature and politics in action.” Academia seemed a much safer harbor for indulging that love than the chancy world of professional acting or directing.

“I’m a very bourgeois person,” Cohen said, making an admission rare for anybody in the arts. “I didn’t ever want to have my livelihood dependent on box-office income or play reviews.”

All along, playwriting has been in the mix for Cohen. Opportunity came with two 1960s works, “The Death of Morris Biedermann” and “The Mobius Strip,” but staged readings in prominent theaters--including the Roundabout in New York for “Mobius”--did not yield productions beyond UCI and a few other campuses.

“The Prince” has had a similar history, garnering readings at professional theaters in Los Angeles during the early 1990s, but failing to reach the stage until recently. California Repertory Theatre in Long Beach produced it in 1997, and Madach Studio, a small repertory theater in Budapest, Hungary, has made it part of its current season.

Primer on Power Politics

Cohen wrote “The Prince” in 1990 after rereading Machiavelli’s book. At the time, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia threatened the kind of chaos that had prompted Machiavelli to set down his ideas about power nearly 500 years before.

Until the 1860s, when it became a united country, Italy was a crazy quilt of small city-states subject to constant internal turmoil and domination by bullying foreign powers. Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” as a cry from his patriotic heart, hoping that a great leader, using this primer on power politics as a guide, would emerge to bring unity, peace and security to Italy.

“Everybody associates Machiavelli with evil. I don’t,” Cohen said. “He was trying to create order. Disorder terrified him, and he saw the need for strong leadership. His letters certainly indicate a person with great moral guideposts, but ‘The Prince’ is amoral, as scientific fact is amoral. He says, ‘This action . . . creates this result.’ But he didn’t say, ‘But it would be wrong.’ He just let it hang there.”

Machiavelli placed his hope for a unified Italy in Cesare Borgia, a ruthless conqueror and manipulator who became his model for “The Prince.” Borgia had no compunction about deceiving and killing his enemies and making a spectacle of it. Machiavelli describes in “The Prince” how Borgia consolidated power in one city by having one of his former underlings hacked in half and left in the town square. As Cohen puts it, “People realized that Cesare Borgia was not a guy to be trifled with.”

In Cohen’s play, Borgia is a dangerous charmer, bloody but sharp-witted and extremely funny. He leaps from the page in Cohen’s eventful, fast-moving script. Unfortunately, historical accuracy cruelly demands that the playwright kill him off by intermission. Cohen compensates for the premature loss of this scintillating character by bringing him back as a surrealistic apparition.

When Machiavelli is tortured by the Medici after being falsely accused of treason, he fantasizes in his delirium a dialogue with his fallen idol. Later, as Machiavelli watches a dress rehearsal for one of his comedies (Cohen rates him as the greatest Italian playwright until Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Machiavelli goes into a trance and imagines that Borgia has appeared to speak the lines.

Telling an Untold Tale

Cohen thinks he is exploring “virgin territory” in dramatizing Machiavelli’s life, which has not had any prominent film or theatrical treatments (Orson Welles played Cesare Borgia in the 1949 film, “Prince of Foxes”). But so far, apart from Long Beach, Irvine and Budapest, the play has not made its way into the theatrical world. Cohen knows that successful playwrights have to hawk their wares full-time, or engage and keep after agents who will. He just doesn’t have the time.

There are two search committees for new faculty members to chair, and two new books to ready for publication. “More Power to You” is a collection of his essays; “Acting Two” will be the sequel to “Acting One,” which, according to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s career-achievement citation honoring Cohen, is “America’s leading university textbook in acting.”

The professor also has begun writing another play. He lives in Laguna Beach with his wife, Lorna; they have two children, a daughter who is a naturalist and a son who is a Disney corporate-relations executive.

With the greater glory of UCI’s drama department in mind, Cohen yearns for two things: a professional theater company based on the campus, which would cost a bundle, and a superstar to emerge as the famous face of the program. UCI is respected for turning out students who go on to acting or teaching careers, but after 35 years, the department’s alumni list is topped by Tony nominee Bob Gunton and comedian Jon Lovitz, not marquee names.

“We’ve not had a name above the title, and I’m dying for it,” Cohen confessed. “I keep telling Eli [Simon] who does all our recruiting, ‘Get us a Meryl Streep.’ It would just dignify everything to the public.”

Cohen plans to stick around at UCI to see how things turn out. “I’ve told my colleagues they have to get used to the fact I am rapidly approaching the midpoint of my career,” he said with a grin. “I [love] the idea of being in an intellectual, inquisitive environment for the rest of my life.”

SHOW TIMES

“The Prince,” Winifred Smith Hall, Mesa Road and West Peltason Drive, UC Irvine. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., matinees Saturdays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 3. $12-$15. (949) 824-2787.