Bern Cohen Discusses ABBIE, the play
http://offbroadway.broadwayworld.com/article/Bern_Cohen_Discusses_ABBIE_the_play_20101210
December 10, 2010
Decades ago, the late-Abbie Hoffman went underground to avoid a jail
sentence on a trumped-up coke bust for which charges were eventually
dropped when he surfaced over ten years later as Barry Freed. Prior
to Hoffman's arrest, actor Bern Cohen was constantly stopped in the
streets by Abbie-fans due to his remarkable resemblance to the
sixties activist.
When Hoffman was underground, the resemblance resulted in Cohen's
arrest and near death when he tried to escape trigger-happy rural
Ohio police. They thought they'd found the underground Hoffman when
they met Cohen in a diner with others they thought were Patty Hearst
and Bobby Seale, two also underground at the time.
"It was more than harrowing to get a personal taste of how police
treated Abbie Hoffman. They threw me around, trying to get me to
strike back. They separated me from friends and put me in a car with
four cops being physical. The claustrophobic trap was overwhelming
and when I could, I made a run for the woods. Cops lifted guns aimed
at my back and one of my friends tackled me before any shots were
fired. It was a long night and, believe it or not we were eventually
saved by the FBI."
Cohen then felt intrinsically linked to Abbie, read his three books
and felt that nobody knew the real Abbie Hoffman and what he endured.
Now, decades later, Cohen stars in a one-man show, ABBIE, at The West
End Theater on January 6th in which he plays Hoffman, using only
Hoffman's personally-revealing words, emphasizing his emotional
challenges rather than the festive side of Hoffman which brought
attention to anti-war protests.
Cohen will be using projections of historical footage and stills to
create an environment "that brings emotional reality to an historical
figure in American activism, rather than me standing there reciting his words."
Because Cohen based the entire script on Hoffman's writing, he had to
submit his script to Hoffman's wife for approval. "I honestly thought
she would balk at scenes in which Abbie loses it, but she was happy
that people will see what he had to go through, especially
underground where she and Abbie met. And, as she said, he wrote it
for people to know."
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