Stan (Squeaky) Cohen has been banned from every Old Country Buffet in the Baltimore area for stealing cake. He can’t remember where he lost his car, and he refuses to move from a ramshackle house in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. His son Jeff Cohen is a writer living in New York City. True or false?
Change the tense of the verbs, and it’s true as far as it goes. Mr. Cohen’s latest play, “Squeaky,” which will have its premiere via Zoom on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. courtesy of Guild Hall and Baltimore’s Creative Alliance, is indeed about his late father.
“My dad had such a profound influence on me,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview. “The way that he lived, and his stubbornness and eccentricity, and writing the play allowed me to remember stuff and spend time with him. He was a really cool guy.”
Directed by the award-winning actor, director, and producer Bob Balaban, “Squeaky” stars Harris Yulin, a celebrated film, television, and theater actor, in the title role. When he brought the play to Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, Mr. Cohen said, knowing the actor lives in Bridgehampton, “I think Harris Yulin is made to order. I think he IS my father.”
Once Mr. Yulin signed on, it was easy for Mr. Cohen to get through to other actors, and everybody he approached agreed to participate. Marc Kudisch, who has starred in a dozen Broadway shows, will play Jeff Cohen, while Ben Shenkman, a multiple-award nominee for “Proof” and “Angels in America,” will play Rob, Jeff’s libidinous older brother. The siblings battle over what is best for their father.
Other cast members are Latanya Richardson Jackson, a Tony nominee for “A Raisin in the Sun” opposite Denzel Washington, as Squeaky’s longtime roommate and caretaker, and Jessica Hecht, a Tony nominee for “A View From the Bridge” with Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber, as Jeff and Rob’s estranged mother.
Mr. Cohen did not know Mr. Balaban, but once he put the cast together, he approached him and “he was generous enough to read it. Talk about an icon! He’s sort of the Zelig of popular culture, having done everything from ‘Close Encounters’ to ‘Seinfeld’ to ‘A Mighty Wind.’ ”
“Squeaky” isn’t Mr. Cohen’s first theatrical portrait of his father. His 2006 play “Men of Clay,” set in the 1970s, captured not only summers on the clay courts of Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park, where his father and three friends played tennis, but also the era’s Jewish culture and the city’s racial tensions.
His two subsequent plays left both his father and Baltimore in order to explore larger social, cultural, and historical issues. “The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller” imagines what might have happened to Nelson Rockefeller’s son when he disappeared off the coast of New Guinea, while “The Soap Myth” is about a Holocaust survivor on a mission to prove the Nazis made soap from the corpses of their victims.
Mr. Cohen said they were slated to bring “The Soap Myth” to Broadway and were in discussions with the Schubert Organization when the pandemic shuttered theaters. The play has had a number of readings, including one through the Lincoln Center Library.
For that performance, “I just thought, I’m going to see if I can get hold of Ed Asner.” Mr. Asner not only did the Lincoln Center reading, he traveled by car with Mr. Cohen over a three-year period doing performances across the country. “He’s everything you want Ed Asner to be and more. He’s this extraordinary human being, and one of the great American actors.”
“Squeaky” will be prerecorded, edited, and streamed via Zoom, so the characters will be in separate frames. The cast and crew will spend one day rehearsing and will record it the following day. “It will be very impromptu, but how can you go wrong with this cast? One of the benefits of doing these virtual readings is that you don’t have to gather everybody in one room.”
Creative Alliance, a grass-roots multidisciplinary art center in Baltimore, premiered “Men in Clay.” When “Squeaky” began to take shape at Guild Hall, Mr. Cohen thought it would be ideal if the people in Baltimore had an opportunity to see it. “Creative Alliance seemed like a great group to get the word out.”
