Reviews:

Family dynamics can be quite interesting. And Sophie Comes Too is about a very interesting family dynamic. This entertaining show deals with three sisters and their comatose mother. The three sisters love and care about their mother but are also involved in their lives. Barbara, the eldest sister, wants to adopt a Chinese girl; Rose, the "perfect" one, is having troubles at home; and Sandra wants to become a man. Rose has figured out a plan to get a new medication that will hopefully bring Sophie out of her coma. The first shot is unsuccessful but the second shot seems to do the trick. Sophie comes out of her coma—and then everything changes for the family.

And Sophie Comes Too is a very entertaining and touching play. I really enjoyed the way that it unfolded, and all the characters that inhabit the world created by Meryl Cohn. The play has a lot of great moments both comic and poignant. Cohn has done a great job in developing her characters and giving each one a moment to shine. My only concerns are that the play seemed to drag a bit at the end, and the ending seemed a little too perfect. But these are only minor things—on the whole, And Sophie Comes Too is a great play.

The cast is absolutely amazing! Elizabeth Whitney is so engaging and endearing as Barbara, the eldest sister wanting to adopt a baby. Whitney has a great quality about her that really shines on stage. Birgit Darby is brilliant as Rose, the "perfect" sister who is coming undone. Katherine Williams is really funny as Sandra/Ray, the gender-bending sister. Whitney, Darby, and Williams work really well together and are very believable as sisters. Jacqueline Sydney's Sophie is terrific; she brings a great deal of energy to the role. Susan Barnes Walker gives a great comedic performance as Patricia, Sandra's girlfriend who has taken a vow of silence. She is a sheer delight!

Rounding out the cast are Lué MacWilliams as Lucy, the social worker helping Barbara with the adoption, and Karen Stanion as Martha, Barbara's girlfriend. Both Williams and Stanion do great jobs in their parts and are also both quite funny.

And Sophie Comes Too is beautifully directed by Mark Finley. Finley uses the space well and his actresses to their best abilities. This is another hit for TOSOS! It is one show that shouldn't be missed.  (reviewed by Roger Nasser - Aug 18, 2009)

Interviews:

Meryl Cohn is known for both her good advice as syndicated columnist Ms. Behavior and for her plays, which highlight Women’s Week in Provincetown, Massachusetts, each fall. New Yorkers can get a taste of Cohn’s plays this summer, starting with a reading of her Jane Chambers Award-winning play, The Siegels of Montauk, at the ATHE Conference on August 10, and her first full-length production in New York with the TOSOS production of And Sophie Comes Too.

United Stages: How long have you been writing plays? And is this your first New York production?

Meryl Cohn: And Sophie Comes Too is my first full-length play produced in NYC. I’ve had one-act plays in festivals like Homogenius and Estrogenius [at Manhattan Theatre Source]. I started writing plays when I was in college [at Smith], and then I ended up getting an M.F.A. in playwriting at NYU. I took a ten-year hiatus then started writing plays again in 2000. I’ve had seven plays produced at the Provincetown Theater; my eighth play coming this fall is a musical comedy starring Lea Delaria.

United Stages: How did you end up in Massachusetts?

Meryl Cohn: I spent a summer in Provincetown in 1996 and never left. That’s a thing that happens in Provincetown: people go for vacation and never leave. I love New York because my family is here, many of my dearest friends, and I always go back to NY for the theater. But Provincetown is a beautiful and creative place, and Massachusetts is very good in terms of healthcare and gay and lesbian rights. I was very happy to be living in the first state in which you could get legally married. My partner [author Mary Beth Caschetta] and I got married on the very first day that you could do it. We were on line at Town Hall at the crack of dawn to get our license.

United Stages: How did you start writing plays again?

Meryl Cohn: I got involved with the playwrights lab at Provincetown Theater. It was more helpful than I could have imagined to have a group of playwrights reading each others’ work and getting or giving feedback. There’s something great, having people who get what you are trying to do, knowing that you have an audience, and you are their audience, is amazingly helpful. First I had a couple of staged readings and productions of short plays. Then, while I was writing a full-length, Funny Sexy Smart (a comedy about the quest for love which takes place almost entirely on a bed), I realized there wasn’t any real theater going on during Women’s Week in Provincetown, which takes place every October and attracts women from all over the country. So, I pitched my play to what was then the Provincetown Theater Company as something suitable for Women’s Week. It worked out well, and they ended up asking me to write another one. I’ve been at it for eight years now.

United Stages: Your work is very family-oriented, frequently about the relationships between sisters and their mothers. And Sophie Comes Too takes off from there.

Meryl Cohn: Family relationships is a recurrent theme in my work. With Sophie, I started out by writing a short play called Awake. The scene focused on the dilemma of having a mother in a coma in the living room with three sisters trying to decide how to cope. Two of the sisters want the oldest sister to take responsibility for their mother. Awake was done first in Ptown and then at Estrogenius in Manhattan. I quickly had the feeling it was meant to be a longer piece and immediately started writing it as a full-length comedy.

United Stages: How did the full-length Sophie end up in New York?

Meryl Cohn: I haven’t had time to send my plays out very much because I’m always getting started on the next play. I did manage to send Sophie to the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, where it was named a semifinalist; and to the Lark, where it was also a semi-finalist; and then it was time to move on to writing my next play, so I totally stopped submitting it. But, an amazing playwright named Kathleen Warnock (whom I’d never met before) had come to see my second Provincetown full-length play Almost Home during Women’s Week in 2003, and invited me to do a reading of it at TOSOS as part of the Robert Chesley/Jane Chambers Playwrights Project. That went really well, and she asked for more plays. We read Sophie in November, 2008, and Mark Finley, the artistic director of TOSOS, asked if they could submit it to the Fringe. I was thrilled by the idea. And here we are!

United Stages: You’re also working on your project for this year’s Women’s Week as Sophie goes into production. How did you happen to write your first musical?

Meryl Cohn: A long time ago, I wrote an article about Lea Delaria for The Village Voice. This was in the early ’90s. After that, I would sometimes run into her on Commercial Street in Provincetown, where she’d be hawking her shows. She’d come to my plays every year, and often she’d come up to me and say, "Why don’t you write a role for me, Bitch?" Finally, I decided I should really write a role for her. She has such a beautiful singing voice that I decided that it should be a rock musical comedy. Last winter, I emailed her, and said: "I’ve got a role for you, so I hope you really meant it."

United Stages:  Can you tell us a little about the piece, and who’s doing the music?

Meryl Cohn: Lea stars as a washed up, drunken ’80s rocker, whose band had only one hit called Hungry for You. A series of comical events leads her back into a position to save her long-ago abandoned daughter’s life—if she can get herself together, which is kind of questionable in the play. I hooked up with some incredibly talented musicians, Billy Hough and Susan Goldberg, who wrote the music and lyrics. Their versatility and talent just blew me away. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would write a musical! It’s called Insatiable Hunger and will be produced by Counter Productions at the Provincetown Theater in October.

United Stages - www.UnitedStages.com

TDF and TKTS fostered a lifelong love of theatre for playwright Meryl Cohn.

by Linda Buchwald

Meryl Cohn is about to have her New York debut at the Fringe Festival with her play And Sophie Comes Too. It is a homecoming of sorts. Growing up in New York (raised in Brooklyn and then moved to Long Island in the sixth grade), her parents exposed her to theatre from a young age, with a little help from TDF.

Cohn's mother's cousin was a teacher and a member of TDF and Cohn's family would benefit from her TDF offers. "The earliest shows I remember seeing were Pippin and a revival of Fiddler on the Roof," Cohn says. "I remember the feeling of excitement more than I remember the details of the plays, but I loved it."

She would also frequent the TKTS booth with her parents. "We'd argue about what show to see. I wasn't allowed to see cool shows like Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar because I was pre-teen and Jewish. Plays featuring nudity and Christ were generally discouraged," she says. "But I had the cast album to Hair and played it 30 times a day."

Eventually, Cohn was able to take the Long Island Rail Road into the city by herself or with a friend and had more flexibility in what she could see. "It felt like my salvation. One of the first shows I took the train to see was A Chorus Line. I was in love," she says.

It was in her early teens that Cohn realized her love of theater could turn into a career. Two Off Broadway musicals in particular moved her to reach this conclusion, I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road by Gretchen Cryer (music by Nancy Ford) and Runaways by Elizabeth Swados. "I knew I couldn't act or sing or dance, so that was out. But it finally dawned on me that someone actually wrote these shows, and maybe I could do that," Cohn says.

At this early stage, the playwrights that most inspired her were Beth Henley, Lanford Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, and Harvey Fierstein. ("Torch Song Trilogy really just blew me away.") Cohn notes that she prefers straight plays to musicals. "The distinction, I think, is that the feeling of excitement that I had as a young audience member first happened when I saw musicals-but musicals were really all my parents took me to see." Funnily enough, Cohn is finishing up her first musical, Insatiable Hunger, with music and lyrics by Susan Goldberg and Billy Hough.

Cohn originally studied psychology at Smith College, but ultimately switched to playwriting. Her interest in the human psyche has carried over to both her playwriting and her column, "Ms. Behavior," now on its 17th year. "Writing an advice column has a lot in common with writing plays. Both involve examining human behavior, motivation, and relationships, and the impact caused by each person's action," she says. After graduating from Smith, she received an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

And Sophie Comes Too, running at the Fringe from August 15 through 29, is a comedy about three sisters who are each dealing with their own desires as their mother awakes from a coma. "I'm never quite sure where my ideas come from, but I've been very intrigued in my work with the three-very-different sisters theme," Cohn says. "My partner, MB, thinks that the idea of waking to a different level of consciousness-which happens to Sophie in a literal way and to each of the characters in the play in a more subtle way-was a metaphor from my own life at the time. I was starting a series of injections for a rare, chronic illness that I have. I guess I hoped that the shots would be life-changing in terms of my own health. I hadn't realized the connection between the injections in the play and the ones in my real life. It's funny how reality creeps into the scripts in ways that often aren't obvious."

And Sophie Comes Too is produced by TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence). After a reading of the play in the fall, they decided to submit it to the Fringe. "I thought the Fringe would be a good forum for my play because there's a lot of interest in new work and in new voices," Cohn says. "The challenge is getting your play noticed amid the other 200 plays that are also being produced during the Fringe."

Perhaps someone sitting in the dark theatre watching Cohn's show will be inspired, just as she was as a teenager.