Alice Eve Cohen

Playwright
she/her/hers

Alice Eve Cohen is a playwright, solo theatre artist, and author, whose plays and solo works have been performed for over 250,000 people on four continents. Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Contest for her play Oklahoma Samovar. She won the 2019 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award for In the Cervix of Others, which is a finalist for the 2022 Ashland New Play Festival and an official selection of the 2022 Women Playwrights International Conference. Montréal. Her new play Hotel Limbo has been selected for development as an audio play by the Orchard Project's Audio Lab 2022. Her solo play What I Thought I Knew, an O’Neill finalist and nominee for 5 regional Broadway World Awards including Best Play, is adapted from her memoir—published by Viking, winner of the Elle Grand Prize for Nonfiction and O Oprah magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer.

Cohen’s plays have been produced/developed at theatres including: The Kitchen Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop (Just Add Water and O Solo Mio festivals), The New Georges, Minnesota Jewish Theatre, Dance Theatre Workshop, Here Arts Center, EST, All for One Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, Theatre for the New City, 78th Street Theatre Lab, Ko Festival, Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western NY, The Women’s Project, The Performing Garage, Philadelphia Women’s Theatre Festival, LA Women’s Theatre Festival, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Hudson Opera House, KiMo Theatre, Theatre for the New City, RVCC Arts, Artscape, Proctors Theatre, University of Michigan, Barnard, Fordham University, University of Baltimore, Smithsonian Institution’s Discovery Theatre, Bayview Women’s Correctional Facility; and internationally at Galway Theatre Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Trinidad’s Astor Theatre, Jerusalem’s Theatre Bama.

Cohen has written television for Nickelodeon and CBS, and a collection of her plays is published by NoPassport Press. Her memoirs, published by Penguin and Algonquin, have been honored with the Elle Literary Grand Prize for Nonfiction and Oprah magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer. Her monologues are published by Smith & Kraus in The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2022, and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2022; and by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, ­in Best Monologues for Women 2020 and She Persisted: 100 Monologues by Women Over 40. A member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, EST Playwrights Unit, New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects, Honor Roll!, the Dramatists Guild, and the Author’s Guild. She received a BA cum laude in anthropology and theatre from Princeton University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School.

The founding Editor of Play by Play, Theatre Development Fund’s theatre journal by and for teens, she is on the reading/adjudicating committee for the Bridge Playwriting Contest sponsored by Arts in the Armed Forces. A proud member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, EST’s Playwrights Unit, New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspects, and Honor Roll!, she has received fellowships and grants from the NY State Council on the Arts, the NEA, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Poets & Writers. Cohen holds an MFA from The New School, a BA from Princeton University, and a screenwriting certificate from the School of Media Studies. Alice teaches playwriting at the Augsburg MFA Program and in the Creative Writing Program at The New School, where she received the 2020 University Distinguished Teaching Award. Visit her at www.AliceEveCohen.com

Highlights

RECENT AWARDS, PRODUCTIONS & DEVELOPMENT:

National Jewish Playwriting Award winner, 2021

Jane Chambers Playwriting Award winner, 2019

Play production and development:

HOTEL LIMBO, development as audio play, the Orchard Project Audio Lab 2022

WHAT I THOUGHT I KNEW, workshop production by Interplay Theatre, Cleveland Ohio, May 2022

OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR, workshop production by Jewish Theatre of Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Oct 2022

OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR, workshop production by Jewish Plays Project at JCC Manhattan, NYC, Nov-Dec 2022

THE YEAR MY MOTHER CAME BACK, production by Bema Productions, Victoria Island, BC, CA, Feb 2023

Selected quotes:

“A little show, but with such a big, embracing heart,” The Guardian (London).

"Gripping..." The New York Times

“So vivid, so immediate, so complex, so full of compassion… This is what theater can be.”—Tompkins Weekly, Ithaca

“This play takes us on a gripping ride."—Minnesota Star Tribune, BEST OF THE WEEK

"While filled with Cohen’s characteristic warmth and humor, What I Thought I Knew indicts the health care system."—Jewish Week

“Joyful, heart-breaking, moving”—Cherry and Spoon, Minneapolis

“Throws the insanity of the American health care system into sharp relief…sobering and thought-provoking.”—City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul

"Profound… [a] darkly comedic reframing of iconic feminist questions around choice, parenting, and women's health… Challenging, beautiful, and defiantly funny "—Jane Chambers Award judging committee

“Hilarious, heartbreaking, hopeful and devastating all at once.”—Minnesota Post, THE PICKS