Decades ago, the late-Abbie Hoffman went underground to avoid a jail sentence on a trumped-up coke bust for which charges were eventually dropped when he surfaced over ten years later as Barry Freed. Prior to Hoffman's arrest, actor Bern Cohen was constantly stopped in the streets by Abbie-fans due to his remarkable resemblance to the sixties activist.
When Hoffman was underground, the resemblance resulted in Cohen's arrest and near death when he tried to escape trigger-happy rural Ohio police. They thought they'd found the underground Hoffman when they met Cohen in a diner with others they thought were Patty Hearst and Bobby Seale, two also underground at the time.
"It was more than harrowing to get a personal taste of how police treated Abbie Hoffman. They threw me around, trying to get me to strike back. They separated me from friends and put me in a car with four cops being physical. The claustrophobic trap was overwhelming and when I could, I made a run for the woods. Cops lifted guns aimed at my back and one of my friends tackled me before any shots were fired. It was a long night and, believe it or not we were eventually saved by the FBI."
Cohen then felt intrinsically linked to Abbie, read his three books and felt that nobody knew the real Abbie Hoffman and what he endured. Now, decades later, Cohen stars in a one-man show, ABBIE, at The West End Theater on January 6th in which he plays Hoffman, using only Hoffman's personally-revealing words, emphasizing his emotional challenges rather than the festive side of Hoffman which brought attention to anti-war protests.
Cohen will be using projections of historical footage and stills to create an environment "that brings emotional reality to an historical figure in American activism, rather than me standing there reciting his words."
Because Cohen based the entire script on Hoffman's writing, he had to submit his script to Hoffman's wife for approval. "I honestly thought she would balk at scenes in which Abbie loses it, but she was happy that people will see what he had to go through, especially underground where she and Abbie met. And, as she said, he wrote it for people to know."
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