With Robert Cohen, you connect what your character wants to the person who can affect it. Your goal has a direction. Your partner has the power to resist or answer. Your tactics change through the encounter. Your expectation gives you a reason to keep trying. Those relationships make the familiar acronym GOTE useful in an actual scene.
Life and work
Robert Cohen (1938–2024) was an acting teacher, director, author, and founding chair of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. You can study his teaching in Acting One, Acting Two, Acting Power, and writing on performance and collaboration. His textbooks connect elementary acting questions with substantial work on voice, body, scene structure, and theatrical style.
Your goal needs a world around it
A goal tells you what you want to bring about. It becomes playable when you understand the circumstances and the people involved. Wanting approval is broad. Needing your partner to endorse a plan before the meeting begins gives the desire a time, a relationship, and a possible result.
In Acting One, goal and obstacle appear together early in the progression. The obstacle gives you something to meet. It might involve a refusal, a practical limitation, or a conflicting need. Your work begins to develop when the difficulty affects your behavior. You have to do something to improve your chances.
The other person makes it an exchange
UCI’s memorial account expands GOTE as Goal, Other, Tactics, and Expectation. The publisher’s contents also give acting with the other person its own lesson. That emphasis places your partner inside the method. You cannot fully prepare the scene as a private sequence and merely wait for someone else to deliver the cues.
What does the other person want from you? What do you believe they will accept? What surprises you in their response? Those questions help your goal meet a real exchange. You may learn that a planned tactic has already failed before you use it, or discover an opening you did not expect.
Your tactics change while your need continues
A tactic is an attempt to affect the other person. You might encourage, pressure, bargain, flatter, or confront. The choice needs to fit the role and the present circumstances. You are trying to accomplish something with someone whose response you cannot simply dictate.
This creates a useful distinction between intensity and variation. You can repeat an action more forcefully, but you also have the possibility of changing the means. If persuasion fails, a new fact might help. If pressure creates resistance, an offer might alter the relationship. These are interpretive examples of tactical thinking, rather than reproductions of Cohen’s numbered exercises.
Expectation keeps the attempt alive
Cohen’s progression includes expectation and the possibility of success. Your character may face severe odds and still perceive a route worth trying. The actor knows more about the story’s outcome than the character does. You need to keep that knowledge from draining the immediate attempt.
Expectation can be specific and changeable. You may believe the next explanation will work, then revise that belief when it fails. You may recognize a small opening after several refusals. The performance gains movement through those discoveries. Your hope does not have to guarantee success to give your action force.
Your instrument and your technique carry the scene
Acting One/Acting Two reaches well beyond the acronym. The contents include voice, speech, the body, their integration, imagination, phrasing, the beginning and completion of verbal actions, and scene construction. You need the means to make your choices audible and visible.
A clear objective may remain hidden if you lose the important word. An expressive voice may become disconnected from your partner if you attend only to its sound. A scene can contain strong individual moments while losing its overall development. Cohen’s range of subjects gives you ways to examine those different problems without expecting one piece of analysis to solve them all.
Your craft can travel across styles
Acting Two extends the work into historical, literary, and heightened forms. You encounter Greek tragedy, commedia, Shakespeare, Molière, Restoration comedy, and later theatre. Commedia refers to traditions of physically vivid, character-based Italian comedy. Each form changes the demands on language, movement, and the audience relationship.
Your goal and partner still matter within those forms, but the means of expression may be unfamiliar. Cohen’s contribution helps you carry a practical acting process into that variety. You develop enough clarity to know what you are doing, and enough range to do it in the theatrical world the play requires.
Connect the work to Objective, Obstacle, Tactic, and Craft.
Source for further study: Acting One/Acting Two, publisher’s description and contents.
