Hunger in Bed With Roy Cohn

Barry Pearl as Roy Cohn in “Hunger: In Bed with Roy Cohn”; photo by Michael Lamont

Joan Beber received a B.A. in English from Northwestern University at age 21 — and an M.F.A in playwriting from the University of Southern California 46 years later, at age 67. The premiere of her first fully produced play, Hunger: In Bed with Roy Cohn, which she wrote at age 73, is about to open at the Odyssey Theatre, directed by the award-winning Jules Aaron.

Described as a fantasy play with music, the plot centers on the life of Roy Cohn, the attorney who helped prosecute Ethel Rosenberg for espionage and then became famous as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, where he helped his boss Sen. Joseph McCarthy look for Communists. He later became a celebrity attorney, but he was disbarred for ethical lapses shortly before dying from AIDS in 1986.

Director Jules Aaron

“How I think of it as the director,” Aaron says, “is that we’re in some kind of purgatory in Roy’s mind.  The play actually takes place in a 24-hour period where we move in and out of different time periods, ranging from the ’50s to the present day.  Part of the fun of the play is that since we’re in his mind, it allows us to make different leaps that we wouldn’t be able to in a strictly biographical play. It starts with him as a young attorney and moves through his death from AIDS. What Joan has created is a kind of fluid structure that allows us to move through time and place in a very unusual and theatrical way.”

The historical characters in the play include not only Cohn, played by Barry Pearl — but also  Ronald Reagan, G. David Schine (the Cohn friend whose Army service became a point of contention in the Army-McCarthy hearings), Julius Rosenberg and Barbara Walters.

“Julius’s wife Ethel appears as a shadow in the doorway,” Aaron adds, “and is mainly someone Julius is talking to.”

Beber says of Barbara Walters, “Evidently, she and Roy were friends and they dated. And I believe they were engaged to be married at one time, but it didn’t go very far.  I don’t know the exact details of it, how long they were engaged, but apparently he was more interested in men. I heard recently that Roy’s mother was very much against their dating, which would stand to reason because she was a very dominating woman.  She didn’t want anyone to have Roy. She wanted to dictate every bit of his life.”

Playwright Joan Beber; Photo by Gary Guidinger

Aaron continues, “For the sake of our play, Barbara remains kind of an iconic figure as she travels through time with Roy. So we see her in a variety of different periods.”

Beber discusses her play’s two Roys.  “There’s young Roy who appears on stage with the older Roy. There’s a strong emphasis on the contrast between the two of them.  The younger Roy wants to push older Roy in a certain direction, and the older Roy is resisting. And you see this push-pull throughout the whole play.”

Aaron adds, “Young Roy becomes what Roy might have been had Dora, his mother, not been as strong as she was.”

Beber continues, “Besides Dora there’s Lizette, his housekeeper.  He actually had two housekeepers that he was very close to.  Since he was an only child and often left alone, these housekeepers mothered him.  I just picked one housekeeper for the play.”

Aaron interjects, “Lizette is someone who is very close to him throughout the play, kind of a major domo who is running his household.”

Barry Pearl, Presciliana Esparolini and Jeffrey Scott Parsons

Regarding actors who play historical characters, Aaron warns, “you have to be very careful of not doing an impersonation, particularly with characters as well-known as Ronald Reagan and Barbara Walters. You need to try and find a way of suggesting what we know about them in terms of speech patterns and behavior without doing imitations of them.  I found two actors who were able to bring psychological insight into them and suggest who these people were.  It’s tricky because to do an imitation of a character is a cheap way out.  But you need to suggest what an audience knows about them, so that there’s some identification of who they are.”

When asked what the “hunger” in the title of the play refers to, Aaron replies, “Well, for one thing, it deals with Roy’s enormous appetite for life and all the things that he’s done both politically as well as his appetite for sex, and for power and for domination and control.”

Beber adds, “It has many meanings including his appetite for and relationship with food. He had digestive problems. Constantly, throughout the play, he’s having stomach aches and cramps.  His housekeepers were always there to make sure he was eating exactly right.   Also, he had to have his food prepared just so. Like when he had toast, all the crusts had to be cut off.”

Barry Pearl and Jeffrey Scott Parsons

“We even have little tuna sandwiches at the top of the play,” Aaron continues, “that Lizette cuts the crust from.”

Beber comments on writing a play whose protagonist already has been portrayed on the stage many times. “I took poetic license with the play, and I tried to approach it from a different standpoint, because I had studied some of the other work that had been done, like Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. I wanted, without pardoning him for the terrible things he had done, to approach the story from his point of view. To show the awful time he grew up in, and what he had to contend with. And yet I really felt that he had done unforgivable things.  I didn’t, in any way, say that wasn’t so.”

“I feel, as a director,” Aaron continues, “that we get to know his psychology better and learn about him from the inside out. Without diminishing what he did politically, I think we get to understand his relationship with his mother as well as his relationship with G. David Schine, which is debatable.  Certainly there were rumors that Schine was kept out of the Army through Roy’s intervention, even though ultimately Schine did go in.”

Described as a play with music and choreography, Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn is not a musical.

“In a musical, songs are traditionally used to further the plot,” Aaron explains, “and to let us know about the character. The music in this play is used in a little bit more of a Brechtian way in that it comments on the characters. And so while there is a sense of illumination of who they are, it’s more in a commentary kind of way.”

Choreographer Kay Cole

“The pre-recorded music is all original by Max Kinberg,” Aaron continues, “and includes a wide variety of styles from standards to disco, to cover the time periods in the play.  And choreographer Kay Cole has certainly worked with behavior and dance to illuminate who the characters are and also to suggest elements of the periods.”

“The choreography is throughout the entire show,” Cole contributes. “There are six to seven really sturdy, strong dance pieces, mostly performed by young Roy and Lizette. The other sections are performed by the entire cast and include Latin dances, modern, jazz ballet and a little tap.”

“And a wonderful disco number,” Aaron adds.

Beber talks about her inspiration for writing the play. “I originally wrote the play called Ethel Sings about Ethel Rosenberg, because my father had tried to exonerate her. Ethel was a relative of his. Ethel had always been portrayed in a particular way, and I discovered a lot of things about her that people didn’t know. For example, that she was a fantastic singer, a wonderful actress. So that’s how it started. And then as I did the research on that play, I became more and more fascinated with the character of Roy Cohn, because he was a Jewish man and he was probably more responsible than anybody for sending Ethel to be executed. The more research I did, I began to wonder about a Jewish, gay man growing up in that time. What he had to contend with.  The more I saw things that were happening today, the focus on gay rights and the hate crimes, the more I got interested in Roy’s personality.”

Ethel Sings is a companion piece to Hunger: In Bed with Roy Cohn and is slated to be produced in 2013.

Cheryl David, Tom Galup, Liza de Weerd, Jon Levenson, David Sessions, Jeffery Scott Parsons and Presciliana Esparolini

Aaron’s involvement came later. “I got a call from Madeline Puzo, dean of the University of Southern California School of Theatre, saying that they had this wonderful playwright in the program, Joan Beber, and that she had two new plays and they thought I might be a good person to collaborate with her.  Joan and I seemed to hit it off well, in terms of what the plays were about. I was equally interested in both plays but I thought we’d do Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn before Ethel Sings because of timing — next year is the anniversary of Ethel’s execution. I find both plays enormously theatrical and psychologically provocative.  Also I loved the fact that in a so-called straight play there were songs and dances which helped develop who the characters were in a different way than your standard musical.”

Beber comments, “In view of what’s going on in our country today, I hope that after seeing the play, people will be more willing to listen to each other. Not to take such black and white positions.  And not to see people as either very bad or very good, because often people who appear to be very bad are doing the best they can in the times they’ve got, under the circumstances they’re living in. There’s a very positive message in that.”

Jon Levenson

“I, as a director and a gay man,” Aaron adds, “would hope that the audience would look at how much things have changed and not changed since Roy’s time, and to question what society’s values are and how one functions accordingly. The fact that Roy had to cover his sexuality is not that much different from public figures today.  We’ve created a very honest and a very theatrical play through the use of original music and dance, projections, and lighting and sound, in which we explore the life of a person in a way that, perhaps, you’ve not seen it portrayed before on the stage.”

Aaron concludes, “Bottom line — I think this is a terribly exciting new play.  And Joan Beber is a very exciting new voice in the theater.”

Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn, presented by Linda Toliver, Gary Guidinger and Undercover Productions. Opens on Jan. 21. Plays Fri. and Sat. 8 pm; Sun. 2 pm. Through March 11. Tickets: $25-30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 South Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. 310-477-2055. www.odysseytheatre.com.

***All photos by Michael Lamont, except where noted.