ALICE EVE COHEN
Author, Playwright, Solo Theatre Artist

Cohen's award-winning play, premieres in Dec 2025 at La Mama, directed by Eric Nightengale! Winner of the National Jewish Playwriting Contest and a 2025 NYS Council on the Arts Individual Artist Theatre Commissioning Award, it has had workshop productions in NYC and in Oklahoma City. Winner, Midwest Jewish Playwriting Contest, Silicon Valley Jewish Playwriting Contest, Midwest Jewish Playwriting Contests 2021.

Tag Line: In 1887, two Latvian teenagers, Jake and Hattie, flee the Russian Army and become the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Rush. A hundred years later, their ninety-year-old daughter Sylvia reinvents their story of five generations in a Jewish pioneer family, traveling East to West and then West to East, staking their claims in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Coney Island, putting down roots and digging graves, embodying their own Jewish variations on the mythologized and turbulent American Dream--an utterly human and absolutely unique American story, based on real events.

Synopsis: Oklahoma Samovar begins with the unlikely meeting of two women whose worlds are literally and figuratively miles apart. Emily is a college student from NYC whose mother has just died. Sylvia is an old Oklahoma farmer at the end of her life. Carrying her mom's ashes, Emily has come to rural Oklahoma to find out why her mother wanted her ashes spread on Sylvia's farm, when her Mom never mentioned Sylvia or Oklahoma. She's impatient for an answer, but Sylvia won't give it to her. Emily will first have to go back five generations and a hundred years, peeling away layers to confront her ancestral history. Guided by Sylvia, Emily sees her ancestors flee from violence against Jews in Europe to a place where they are the only Jews. She witnesses their complicity in the exploitative and violent Oklahoma Land Run. To understand the posthumous request that brought her to Oklahoma, Emily fully enters the past and takes on the role of mother to her own mother.

Oklahoma Samovar examines the shifting identity, traditions, and culture clashes that shape five generations in a Jewish immigrant family. It wrestles with themes of immigration, assimilation, generational trauma and the transcendent power of mother-daughter love. It is a play about storytelling: stories that change with each reliable and unreliable narrator, joyful stories and family secrets filled with shame and despair. In Oklahoma Samovar, five generations put down roots and dig graves, embodying their own Jewish variations on the turbulent and mythologized American Dream. It is an utterly human and absolutely unique American story. Running time, 95 minutes.

The play is based on the playwright's family history: Cohen's ancestors were the only Jews in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run.  

AWARDS

Winner, 10th Annual National Jewish Playwriting Contest, 2021. NYSCA Individual Artist Theatre Commissioning Award 2025. Semi-finalist: O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Ashland New Play Festival 2025, Premiere Stages New Play Festival 2025, ThinkTank Playwrights Festival 2025.

DEVELOPMENT

Staged reading, 2022 Festival of New Jewish Plays, NYC. Workshops and readings at Jewish Theatre of Oklahoma, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and 78th St Theatre Lab.

"This play is such a treasure! Themes of Jewish identity are in the bones of Alice Eve Cohen's work. This work features a buoyant spirit, unreliable narrators and a ton of fun theatricality to rope audiences in." — David Winitsky, Artistic Director, Jewish Plays Project

HOTEL LIMBO

"A beautiful and ambitious project, and the story is so needed." Bill Rauch, Artistic Director, PAC NYC

Tag Line: HOTEL LIMBO is a tale of family love and looming loss, a neighborhood in turmoil over housing the unhoused, a talking building, and a deep dive into affordable housing and homelessness – all told through the lens of the Hotel Belleclaire. Combining drama, humor, and magic realism, and based on actual events.

HOTEL LIMBO has been developed with New York Theatre Workshop, The Orchard Project, Ensemble Studio Theatre, University of California Irvine, Plays for Us reading series. Semi-finalist for the 2023 Premiere Stages New Play Festival.

Synopsis

HOTEL LIMBO is a tale of family love and looming loss, a neighborhood in turmoil over housing the unhoused, a talking building, and a deep dive into affordable housing and homelessness – all told through the lens of the Hotel Belleclaire. Combining drama, humor, and magic realism, and based on actual events, it is set in New York City at the height of the pandemic. When Abigail's home, the Belleclaire Hotel, is turned into a homeless shelter, she's terrified – torn between her fierce drive to protect her immunocompromised husband, and her commitment to social justice. Should she join the neighborhood fight to shut down the hotel shelters? Or can she welcome her new neighbors and reject the community's rage? Her soul-searching leads her to Kelvin, a Belleclaire shelter client. Abigail and Kelvin become friends through their collaboration as housing activists. But Abigail makes a mistake that jeopardizes their friendship, and she realizes she's not as enlightened as she would like to believe. Characters include Kelvin, Abigail, her husband Daniel and their 20-year-old daughter Zoe; the talking Building (the Belleclaire is Abigail's alter-ego and confidante); Maxim Gorky, who stayed at the Belleclaire in 1906; and the Architect who designed the Belleclaire in 1903. The magic realist characters serve as a comic trio throughout the play. The Facebook Greek Chorus animates verbatim social media posts from this time and place.

HOTEL LIMBO interrogates privilege – racial, financial, and housing privilege – and brings us into the heart of the homeless crisis, inspiring audiences to question their own biases and privilege. It is an important story that needs to be told.

A Note from the Playwright

HOTEL LIMBO is set in the Belleclaire Hotel, my home of many years. In 2020, the Belleclaire was transformed into a homeless shelter as part of New York City's plan to reduce the spread of COVID19. When two more hotel shelters opened nearby, an epic fight ensued, manifesting in a battle for the "soul" of the neighborhood. When the predominantly white and wealthy community group tried to kick out our predominantly black, unhoused neighbors, I found myself in the middle of an escalating war. My building was a homeless shelter for 14 months. In HOTEL LIMBO, I investigate this time of crisis – in my family, in the building, and in the neighborhood.

Development & Honors

New York Theatre Workshop Mondays@3 reading series, 2023; University of California Irvine workshop at Alchemical Lab, NYC, 2023; The Orchard Project Audio Lab 2022; Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights Unit. Finalist, Houses on the Moon, 2025; Finalist, The Civilians R&D Group 2024; Semifinalist, Premiere Stages New Play Festival 2023; Finalist, McKnight National Residency and Commission, 2022. 

IN THE CERVIX OF OTHERS, winner of the 2019 Jane Chambers Feminist Playwriting Award. Featured program selection for the 2022 Women Playwrights International Conference Montréal

THE YEAR MY MOTHER CAME BACK was produced in 2023 by Bema Productions in Victoria, Canada. It was performed at Dobama Theatre in Cleveland, OH, by  Interplay Jewish Theatre. It was first produced as a filmed staged reading in 2021 by Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western NY.

Syopsis: Thirty years after her death, Alice's mother appears to her, and continues to do so, during the hardest year Alice has had to face. A love story. A ghost story. This play will speak to anybody who has ever loved their mother, struggled with their mother, lost their mother, or dreamt of reconciling with their mother. Adapted from Cohen's memoir.

Review in the Buffalo News "Alice Eve Cohen has an almost magical touch in the way she introduces her audience to a character...  heading off through unexplored emotional territory full of fresh questions, surprising revelations and sometimes uncomfortable insights before arriving – ta da! – back at a place that is a lot like where everything started, only much better."

THIN 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, selected quotes

"The play is a haunting, thrilling act of witness. Cohen has a mastery of inflection, cadence and physicality, with an eye for searing detail that rivals that of Anna Deveare Smith, plus a nose for offbeat humor that would delight Lily Tomlin. ....The play shimmers in memory like a hot New York City summer night." - Ithaca Times

"She so thoroughly, yet quietly, becomes each person that not only her stance shifts but her face itself transforms. It's an understated, fascinating performance that brings you quite close to these challenged lives you might otherwise never encounter... This straightforward handling of her material is what makes both Cohen's narrative and performance so compelling." - Ithaca Journal

"One feels, even in the darkest characters, Cohen’s determination to pay homage to what is most human in them. It is, furthermore, a testament to Cohen’s subtle writing that, at its darkest, the play still feels buoyant, and at its lightest, the play still offers weighty fodder for the thoughtful audience member." - Tompkins Weekly

"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 by Alice Eve Cohen include:

Oklahoma Samovar

Hotel Limbo (in-progress)

Fault Line (in-progress)

Days of Awe

In the Cervix of Others
The Year My Mother Came Back

Mrs. Satan & The Nasty Woman
Hannah and the Hollow Challah
Without Heroes
What I Thought I Knew
Thin Walls
Jessica's Cervix
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:
Cohen's plays have presented by (partial list)

The Kitchen Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop's Mondays@3, "Just Add Water", "O Solo Mio" Festivals, Berkshire Theatre Group, Six Points Theatre (formerly Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company), Bema Productions (Victoria, Canada), Jewish Plays Project, Philadelphia Women's Theatre Festival, Dance Theatre Workshop, Cherry Lane Theatre,  The New Georges, Jewish Repertory Theatre of Central NY, Interplay Jewish Theatre, HERE Arts Center, 78th Street Theatre Lab, The Women’s Project & Productions, Theatre for the New City, La Mama, Franklin Furnace, Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Hudson Opera House, Manhattan Punch Line, Proctors Theatre, Smithsonian Institution's Discovery Theatre, Annenberg Center, Rochester Museum, American Museum of Natural History; Foundation for Jewish Culture, Syracuse Civic Center, Artscape, LA Women’s Theatre Festival; and at Bayview Women's Correctional Facility in NYC.

(Colleges) Barnard College, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, University of Michigan, University of Baltimore, Fordham University, Purchase College

(International) Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Galway Theatre Festival, Jerusalem’s Theatre Bama, Trinidad’s Astor Theatre, and Oslo Theatre Festival.

Awards, Fellowships and Grants include:
10th Annual National Jewish Playwriting Contest, Jane Chambers Feminist Playwriting Award, NYS Council on the Arts Individual Artist Theatre Commissioning Award, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship, Fellowship from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Voice & Vision's Envision Retreat, Dance Theatre Workshop First Night Award, Poets and Writers Awards, Jane Chambers Playwriting Award honorable mention, 2-time finalist for the O'Neill National Playwriting Confererence. Multiple grants from Poets and Writers, Meet the Composer. Special Emmy Award Commendation for original film score.