Cohn Gives Writer ‘Behn’ New Life

Amy Beth Cohn’s one-woman show “Aphra Behn: Imagine More Than Woman,” written by Cohn and directed by Craig Noel, illuminates a little-known figure in literary history.

The first English female professional writer, Behn was as famous for the company she kept as for her literary output. Her friends and contemporaries included John Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, and Thomas Otway, who, along with Behn, frequented Will’s Coffee-House, a sort of Algonquin of the day.

In addition to her many novels and poems, Behn authored more than a dozen racy plays that made her the toast--and in many cases the pariah--of Restoration England. Despite her fabled wit and prolific literary output, Behn was plagued throughout her lifetime with charges of plagiarism, leveled by detractors who couldn’t quite believe a woman capable of producing anything besides babies and gossip.

Ably abetted by Noel, a veteran director at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, Cohn displays a mature craft, in both her writing and her performance at Theatre 40, as well as an elegant salaciousness that appropriately echoes the bawdiness of that period. Cohn ingeniously fills the blanks in Behn’s biography by assuming an air of coy reticence at intervals, as though she were deciding at that very moment not to tell you a particularly juicy tidbit. Unfortunately, when Cohn allows her sophisticated lady to slide down the slope of a trumped-up love story, the feminist emphasis goes a-begging and the delightful drollery cloys.

* “Aphra Behn: Imagine More Than Woman,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Sundays-Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Ends April 18. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.