The Latest: ‘Falling’ for theater; Means show mettle

Falling Into Theatre...and Finding Myself

Robert Cohen

Fithian Press; 232 pages

Actor Steve McQueen famously said, “I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on Earth.”

Robert Cohen may have that spirit as well. When the young theater director got a lucrative offer to preside over a Broadway venue, he turned it down — wanting instead to call his own shots as a drama professor. Later, given the choice between a faculty spot at UC Berkeley and another at a fledgling university, he opted for the latter to avoid being low on the totem pole.

The fledgling university was UC Irvine, which Cohen entered as a charter faculty member and teaches at to this day. Of course, one of the stages on campus — the Robert Cohen Theatre — bears his name. When I attended UCI a decade and change ago, the popular joke was that its name stood for Under Construction Indefinitely. For one who helped to launch the campus, that construction must feel like an accolade of its own.

“Falling Into Theatre ... and Finding Myself,” Cohen’s genial new memoir, adopts the tone of one who has accomplished a great deal and still feels jazzed by the experience. A few mixups with book publishers and faculty colleagues aside, there isn’t much here that a play aficionado might call “dramatic conflict.” For the most part, it’s a tale of steady success — albeit one that, in Cohen’s own words, shows “how a relatively untalented political science major became a college theatre professor.”

That self-effacing tone dominates “Falling Into Theatre,” which tracks Cohen from his slightly wayward childhood (in the eighth grade, he writes, he was repeatedly ejected from class because he and his friend “would pretend to be Australian platypuses and say ‘gloop gloop’ to each other”) to his early initiation into theater and his increasingly focused career as a teacher and theorist. As a privileged child of Washington, D.C. parents, Cohen became a theater hound at a young age, and he later cut his teeth directing summer camp productions.

It’s a long trek from that camp to a prestigious university, and Cohen is quick to deflect credit for his success; by the time the book ends, he’s identified no less than 17 “lucky breaks” that furthered his career. Only fleetingly, though, do we glimpse him at work as a teacher — one who, however unlikely his journey, proved innovative enough that Wikipedia attached the words “acting theorist” in parentheses after his name. For Cohen, the study of acting intertwines with the study of human behavior, and in one memorable passage, he mentions buying a lie detector to research how people use artifice offstage as well as on.

Still, “Falling Into Theatre” tells more than shows when summarizing Cohen’s work with actors. At one point, the author describes a UCI summer course in which untrained actors — “poets, plumbers and novelists” — became credible performers under his tutelage, but we don’t see the process play out; a few detailed accounts of students’ transformations would bring Cohen the instructor more alive on the page.

Surprisingly, the acting gurus who stand out most vividly in the book are Cohen’s colleagues, whose wildly disparate theories — and backgrounds — sometimes lead to department friction. For eccentricity, none tops Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish maverick who taught at UCI briefly in the 1980s and led students in tribal exercises to tap into the roots of performance.

Grotowski did much of his teaching in a campus barn whose existence predated UCI itself, and Cohen’s department spent a hefty sum renovating it. The structure, as Cohen proudly notes, still survives, and “we follow Grotowski’s mandate that anyone entering the Barn must first take off their shoes and leave them outside.” A campus may be under construction indefinitely, but sometimes those old ideas stand.

— Michael Miller

*

Other Animals

The Devious Means

Self-released; 10 tracks

There’s just something infectious about blues rock, with its tense, fuzzy guitar riffs and warm, soulful vocals. When I want to get my fix of that, I typically listen to the Black Keys or Band of Skulls, but now I have to throw the Devious Means into that mix.

The Huntington Beach-based band recently released its first album, “Other Animals,” and it showcases this up-and-coming band’s strengths.

The opening track, “Tell Me, Mama,” starts with a mischievous tone, with soft keyboard notes playing under mesmerizing guitar fills. By the time you hit the chorus, your ears are treated to the soulful, harmonizing voices of keyboardist Rachel Anderson and guitarist Christopher Faris. You can find the two trading off lyrics and harmonizing on most of the tracks on this album, and it never disappoints.

The vocals may be great, but what’s even more ear-catching are the guitar riffs. The lead guitar on “Rusty Little Scissors” sounds like something the Black Keys, the breakout Grammy-winning duo from Akron, Ohio, would have played on their recent albums. It’s incredibly fuzzy, almost like an electrical buzz that immediately grabs your attention.

The guitars on “Tearing Down the Walls” tone down the fuzz and replace the tone with something a bit more ear-splitting and bluesy, like something the great B.B. King would play. This song is a lot slower than others on the album, but it’s incredibly moody and dark.

Then there’s “Holiday,” which has turned out to be my favorite song on the LP. The verses have a rockabilly, upbeat rhythm with a wall of sound hitting you while the choruses are more stripped down. What I love the most about this track is the bridge, which builds up a lot of tension, and the outro, which relieves the tension with punchy vocals. “Devil get back / Devil go away / We ain’t gonna do this dance again” are the lyrics emotionally repeated by Anderson and Faris.

Like I mentioned earlier, “Other Animals” highlights the band’s strengths, but it also brings to light their weaknesses — actually, more like areas where they can improve. While the ending bridge and outro from “Holiday” are solid, the same can’t be said about other tracks on the album.

Leading up to the bridge on “Rusty Little Scissors” is a powerful and ear-grabbing chorus; however, when the song reaches the bridge, it’s like all the hot air was let out of a hot air balloon. It has an almost too quiet tone that deflates the energy from the track. It comes back around to playing the chorus again, but at that point, I was already looking forward to the next track.

“Tearing Down the Walls” has an almost-epic outro, but that’s my problem about it. It’s almost epic. The nearly three-minute instrumental outro continues to build up and add layers onto itself, but it doesn’t quite reach a climax. It would be like if Rocky Balboa had just stopped halfway up the stairs in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and turned back around.

The Devious Means are by no means a bad band; they’re far from that. They have the right elements to make it big in the music scene, but it’s going to take a bit more work for them to break into the mainstream.

—Anthony Clark Carpio