A Long Overdue Tribute

I have always been able to trace my interest in theatre to one man: Jim Amberg. Mr. Amberg was a 6th grade math teacher by school day, Shakespeare enthusiast and elementary school theatre director by extracurricular activities afternoon. It only took one production in Pacific Elementary cafeteria to get me hooked. I may have only been five years old, I may have been sitting on the cold tile floor, I may have had to crane my neck around Brett Viker just to see the stage, and I may not have any idea what show I saw that day, but I knew immediately I would be up on that stage one day. And inevitably I was, and I have performed on countless stages since, from Hollywood to London, and Mr. Amberg opened the world as stage to me.

This post isn't about Jim Amberg. This post is about the man who was there beside him the whole time, the man who was never in the spotlight, who stayed behind the curtain and out of the public eye of Manhattan Beach. I'd like to give him his due now.

On a warm, awkward night in Palm Desert in late March, after performing a handful of numbers from our college production of Into The Woods for a group of... hardly enthusiastic USC donors, I returned to our ballroom cum dressing room and found a voicemail from Calvin. It wasn't the sort of thing I wanted to hear after the rush of performing in costume for the first time -- his father, Don Cohen, had passed away earlier that day.

Don always kept very busy. He played a big role in Calvin's childhood life, and by proxy, meant a lot to our whole elementary school gang. Apart from making a living as a lighting and sound designer for various events around Southern California, he was always more than happy to make Calvin's birthday party the event of the year. He filmed us and edited, making videos that thrilled us in grade school delight -- parodies of Godzilla, James Bond, Mystery Science 3000. They were all extremely silly, and hardly worth watching to anyone who wasn't directly involved, but they meant so much to us, a bunch of kids looking to push and explore our creativity in any way possible. Don also volunteered an extremely generous amount of time to the Pacific drama program, designing sets, lighting plots, and sound designs for those very Shakespeare plays that had me enraptured year after year. When it was finally my turn to don the ass's head in Midsummer Night's Dream, Don went all out (it probably helped a little that Calvin was in the production); his set was multi-storied, and the show utilized flash paper that created stunning bursts of flame in blackouts and evoked more than anything us kids could imagine the absolute magic of those woods in which the fairies prowled.

I wrote Don's name on my mirror in the Into The Woods dressing room, ensuring that he would be the last thing on my mind before I entered every night. I was holding tightly a relic of my childhood acting days, days before I was educated in acting's power to change people, to teach them, or to remind them of something that they had forgotten, but I didn't really know what was happening until I looked up to the ceiling of the theater one night. It was a miniature yet bizarre ritual I had adopted before every entrance, a quick glance in hopes that Don would remember to look down and see what I was up to. I stared up that night, at the lighting grid looming magnificently at least 100 feet above me, and heard the music in a way I'd never heard it before -- and all the values of the theatre that I hold so dearly, the credos and tenets I had spent the last four years of theatre school honing into an ideology of near-pretention, melted away. All that was left was the magic. The magic that had been right under my nose all those years of grade school, the pure magic of the theatre that could thrill anyone, the innocent child and the skeptical adult alike. The magic of entertainment and storytelling that was and always will be the reason I knew I wanted to stand on that cafeteria stage more than 15 years ago.

Into The Woods ends with a simple phrase: "Children will listen." I've found that they will. I did. I couldn't be prouder of what I do or happier that I was graced by the presence of two men who knew that children needed to see theatre. Working hand in hand, though not everyone realized it. Don was happy to stay behind the lighting board, watching the children from afar. Seeing the way his work touched them without ever asking for thanks. As far as I'm concerned, he'll never hide behind it again.