Project Participants

Alice Eve Cohen ’76 is a playwright, solo theatre artist, and author, whose work has been performed for over 200,000 people on four continents. Her play In the Cervix of Others, winner of the 2019 Jane Chambers Feminist Playwriting Award, will be a featured selection of the 2022 Women Playwrights International Conference Montréal. Cohen’s play An Unexpected Life will be produced in February 2021 by the Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York. Her memoir, What I Thought I Knew (published by Viking) was honored with the Elle Grand Prize for Nonfiction andOprah magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer. She is currently writing a new play, Hotel Limbo, about a neighborhood in crisis around homelessness during the pandemic.

She has written television for Nickelodeon and CBS, and her books, plays, and monologues are published by Penguin, Algonquin Books, NoPassport Press, and Applause Theatre Books. A recipient of fellowships and grants from NY State Council on the Arts, the NEA, Voice and Vision Theatre, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, she is a proud member of New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects, Ensemble Studio Theatre, EST Playwrights Unit, and Honor Roll!, an advocacy and action group of women+ playwrights over 40.

Cohen received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. She is on the faculty of Augsburg University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, and she teaches undergraduate playwriting and creative writing at The New School, where she is honored to have received the 2020 Distinguished University Teaching Award.

At Princeton, Alice studied anthropology and theatre and wrote her thesis on Contemporary Experimental Theatre as Ritual of Social Change—a subject she has continued to explore ever since. She co-founded the Princeton Jewish Theatre, traveled cross-country with Princeton’s Story Theatre Company, and loved performing at Theatre Intime, where she made life-long friends. In 1976, she was one of the first two recipients of Princeton’s certificate in theatre. Alice’s two daughters have also studied at Princeton — Julia Keimach ’12 and Eliana Cohen-Orth ’21, who interviewed Vera Marcus as part of this project. www.AliceEveCohen.com

Tina deVaron ’78 cut her musical teeth as a founding member and later music director of the Princeton Katzenjammers, whose first album she produced, and also as the very first performer at the newborn “Café” under Murray Dodge. Of her debut Café performance: “I looked out at the place was full. There were people lining the stairway. That was the lightbulb moment for me: maybe I can do this. Sing and play music, and people will listen.”

She is currently at work on several musicals and song cycles, among them Perfect Mothers/The Motherhood Songbook and an adaptation of the prize-winning novel Somebody Please Tell Me Who I Am by Peter Lerangis and Harry Mazer, about a GI who returns from Iraq/Afghanistan with TBI. Perfect Mothers was dubbed one of the New York Musicals Festival’s Top Ten shows in 2013 and signed to a Broadway producer.

Song placements include #1 on the national Gospel charts and #2 on the Billboard Club/Dance charts, Hotel “steady” jazz gigs have included the Waldorf (Cole Porter’s piano) where she sang a duet with Frank Sinatra, and the Carlyle, where she accompanied Billy Joel. Her sellout 15h season at the Carlyle “Madeline’s Tea” has just been extended. This past December a review in the NYT called Tina a “terrific musician and genius kid wrangler.”

On Spotify/itunes/Bandcamp: IF MAMA AIN’T HAPPY, hailed by Anne Lamott as “brilliant, funny, wise;” WATER OVER STONES, called “the soundtrack of my life!” by Lisa Belkin; and TUCKERMAN’S RAVINE of which Tulis McCall writes: “deVaron is making a joyful noise unto the Lord, which in this case, is LIFE. All the mundane bits turned into magic…” www.tinadevaron.com

Theatre topped Vera Marcus ’72’s interests from the time she took one African Dance class at Princeton University in 1969, where she graduated in three years becoming the first African American woman graduate who fully matriculated there. Vera participated in Princeton’s Theatre lntime, and in the community, Harambee House, a student founded Black theatre group. Vera returned to her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and founded “Black Fire Theatre” which included the Black Flames, a group of children as young as four to teenagers, who like her, had never been exposed to theatre before. Among Black Fire’s honors, two of the students accompanied Vera to Brazil for six weeks and brought back Brazilian dance to Birmingham’s Festival of the Arts, winning the Silver Bowl Award for dance that year. The group toured throughout the South for the three years. Vera was their director and was rewarded by appearing in the National Geographic Magazine.

Vera spent her middle years championing the environment. At the start of her California state government career, Vera obtained her Master’s Degree in Environmental Planning. She served as Assistant Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown’s cabinet secretary for natural resources. During those years, Vera headed the state­ federal task force that achieved the federal designation of California’s Wild and Scenic Rivers, which will remain protected by the designation forever. Vera headed the first solar energy program in the State of California and spent her early years lobbying for environmental issues in California State government. Vera started her lobbying experience as Legislative Director at the California Commission on the Status of Women that resulted in the first hearings on “women in poverty” in the United States. She received the State Senate Rules Committee Commendation for Achievements in State Government for that work.

Ultimately, Vera became a lawyer. Upon her graduation from the Martin Luther King School of Law, she served as an apprentice to the California Appeals Court, Third District, drafting appellate opinions for Judge Rodney Davis.

Art never left Vera Marcus’s mind. So when at age 40 Vera had her son, Robert Vail, she was ready to support him on his journey. Robert started dancing at the age of five and later graduated from New York University. Robert is a professional dancer and actor in New York City, having also trained in acting at the William Esper Studio. Robert recently appeared on “The Marvelous Ms. Maisel,” and had his fourth appearance on the Tony Awards Show in 2019. Robert’s lengthy film and television works include appearances on, or commercial work for, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live, America’s Got Talent, Neiman Marcus, Subway, Bank of America ‘MLB Stories,’ Vogue, Sotheby’s, New York Fashion Week, American Museum of Natural History, Swarovski Crystal Holiday Campaign, Childish Gambino MoCap: New Zealand, and many others. His commercial work for Estee Lauder is shown overseas at Heathrow Airport in London and for the Gap in Paris. From very humble beginnings in Alabama, Vera’s passion has come full circle through her only son.

Debra Meloy Elmegreen ’75 is Professor of Astronomy on the Maria Mitchell Chair and Department Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Vassar College, there since 1985. She was the first female Astrophysical Sciences major at Princeton, a member of Quadrangle Club, and intraclub ping pong gold medalist. She received an Astronomy PhD from Harvard, and was the first female Carnegie Observatories Postdoctoral Fellow. She is President-Elect of the International Astronomical Union and Chair of the AURA Board. She is Past President of the American Astronomical Society. She received the George van Biesbroeck Prize for service to astronomy, and she is a National Associate of the National Research Council, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. She researches the structure and evolution of galaxies at optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths. She is married to astronomer Bruce Elmegreen *75 and has 2 children, Lauren Rafelski ’05 and Scott ’07, and two grandchildren.

I’ve followed my lucky stars that took me through a whirlwind of a life, life of survival, life of service, life of much learning about the world, about myself and others. My first world was behind the Iron Curtain, happy and fruitful thanks to my wonderful parents and family. Princeton and the family Billington introduced me to the Free World that gave rise to my now uninhibited mind; my teaching profession that followed my MAT from Stanford took me around the physical world and led me to almost all continents and a variety of cultures, presenting their beauty, their differences as well as similarities, their joys and also struggles.

I now live in Miami, Florida, a city that my children call the closest city to the United States. Indeed, it pumps with excitement of different cultures, musical tunes, colors and opinions. I am in my second service-oriented career, this time as a financial advisor hoping that my efforts equal the many kindnesses I have received over the years.

Carla Gail Wilson ’71’s mother was Jewish and her father was African-American. She was one of twelve black women admitted to Princeton the first year of co-education. Carla was a member of the Association of Black Collegians. “It’s only through education that a person who wants to do good and help people can figure out how to do good and help people,” she says. Carla went on to law school and writes poetry.

Helen Zia ’73 is a writer, activist and Fulbright Scholar. Her latest book, Last Boat out of Shanghai, which chronicles the 70-year-old exodus from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US and elsewhere, was an NPR Best Book of 2019 and longlisted for a 2020 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her other books include Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, and My Country Versus Me. A longtime journalist, Helen was Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine. Her ground-breaking articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, books and anthologies.

The daughter of immigrants from China, Helen was born and raised in New Jersey. Her activism in the 1980s landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin? In 2010, she was a witness in the federal marriage equality case decided by the Supreme Court.

Helen is a graduate of Princeton University’s first coeducational class and holds honorary degrees from the University of San Francisco and the City University of New York Law School. She attended medical school for two years, then worked as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.