Alice Eve Cohen
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"Gripping... engaging... observant."
--The New York Times 
"A little show, but with such a big, embracing heart. It is as if the thin walls of the apartment block are giving up their secrets, and in the process ghosts walk."
--The Guardian, London "Ms. Cohen has created and performs the most exciting, touching and beautifully developed one-person show I have seen in a long time. In the course of 37 scenes she creates an entire world, virtually melding her imagination with the audience’s such that the experience of this play is consistently much more than meets the eye." --Gay City News "A beautiful show... The rich, humane quality of the writing, and its final moving tribute to the all-embracing energy of New York life, is enough to hold the audience spellbound, right to the end." --The Scotsman, Edinburgh 
OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR
Gene Gallerano, Cordis Heard, and Leigh Wade photo: Julia Keimach 
A scene from WHAT I THOUGHT I KNEW, at Univ of Michigan
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Thin Walls and other playsTHIN WALLS: One building. A city in upheaval. A solo play about twelve lives colliding. Set in a century-old New York City residential hotel, once elegant and now run-down, the darkly humorous and deeply moving play interweaves the stories of the building’s long-term residents, its recent arrivals, and its ghosts, as the end of the 20th Century approaches. In a tour-de-force performance, writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen portrays a dozen disparate characters, including a fifty-year-old drug dealer and his haunted wife, a beautician from Trinidad, a Polish handy-man, a one-time hippy turned banker and his teenaged son, and a young Israeli cellist. As seen through the eyes of a young woman who has just moved in, the play zeroes in on twelve eclectic neighbors over a ten-year period, as their lives collide in comic, tragic and violent ways. The intimate play draws the audience inside the thin walls of the building to reveal the explosive relationships that are forced when people of such different stripes live together under one roof. "Thin Walls has twelve characters but a cast of only one. Fortunately, that one is not just an excellent playwright but also a brilliant actor... A real play with multiple plot lines and a dozen fascinating characters... she slips from one character into another with absolutely clear transitions that border on the magical." --CultureVulture.net "A mesmeric solo performance... she has brilliantly transformed the story of her life in the Upper West Side building into a play, in which she plays a dozen characters in over 41 scenes." --The Scotsman, Edinburgh "As the play progresses, she allows the relationships and conflicts to gradually emerge... Cohen translates herself from one character to another with ease." --The Village Voice "In this remarkable one-woman tour de force written and performed by Alice Eve Cohen... chance encounters in half-lit hallways and in the lobby add layer after layer to a chiaroscuro of intersecting connections that emerge from the shadows, flicker briefly, then just as quickly melt away to be replaced by another." --Metro, Edinburgh Plays include: Oklahoma Samovar Hannah and the Hollow Challah Philomela’s Tapestry Without Heroes Solo Theatre Works include: What I Thought I Knew (in-progress) Thin Walls Jessica on the Ceiling The Parrot The Balinese Frog Prince Book of Truth, Book of Lies Goliath on 74th Street vs. the Woman Who Loved Vegetables The Animator The Play that Knows What You Want Venues include: (National) New York Theatre Workshop, The New Georges, Dance Theatre Workshop, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Here Arts Center, The Women’s Project, Philadelphia Women’s Theatre Festival, LA Women’s Theatre Festival, Barnard College, University of Michigan. (International) Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Galway Theatre Festival, Jerusalem’s Theatre Bama, Trinidad’s Astor Theatre, Oslo Theatre Festival Awards, grants and playwriting fellowships from: National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Selected Artist - Voice & Vision's Envision Retreat, Dance Theatre Workshop First Night Award, Poets and Writers Awards |
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