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Olympian Sasha Cohen excelled in a movement exercise class at the American Repertory Theatre's six-week Moscow Art Summer Academy program this month in Cambridge.
(MARK WILSON/GLOBE STAFF)

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By Robbie Brown, Globe Correspondent  |  August 24, 2007

CAMBRIDGE -- In a movement class at the American Repertory Theatre, the professor gave her students a basic command -- touch your toes -- and everyone lunged forward on the floor. The class overachiever, a petite brunette seated in the front row, extended her fingers, then wrists, then entire forearms past her ankles. Torso folded against the floor, she looked like a circus contortionist

"You are not normal, Sasha," the professor, Natalia Fedorova, said. The limber brunette was Sasha Cohen, the 2006 Olympic silver medalist and America's top-ranked figure skater. Whenever her record-breaking skating career ends, Cohen aspires to another glittery job in the spotlight: Hollywood actress.

Cohen, 22, a Los Angeles native, enrolled in ART's six-week Moscow Art Summer Academy to study theater fundamentals, but she probably could have skipped the movement classes. After all, this is an athlete who can spin four times in the air and land on one foot -- on ice.

Still, Cohen complies. She brings the same focus and studiousness to acting that she did to figure skating, professors say. Mastering basic stage movements -- by stretching, jumping over chairs, and cartwheeling across the floor -- is part of her new training regimen. And Cohen, who has been competing in skating and gymnastics since preschool, takes training extremely seriously.

Too seriously perhaps, she says. Cohen's main challenge this summer was losing her figure skater's mindset. "As an athlete you need tunnel vision. You can't let anything affect you," she said. "As an actor, you let everything affect you. You have to use your emotions."

After their careers end, most professional figure skaters become coaches or judges. But Cohen wants to continue competing -- and remain in the national spotlight -- even if not as a skater.

Theater offers a new type of challenge. "As a person, I've had to be reserved. I'm so used to pushing away my emotions," she said. "It's wonderful to be here learning to act, to get to open up."

In many ways, acting is a natural choice. Bit roles on the television shows "CSI:NY" and "Project Runway" and in Will Ferrell's comedy "Blades of Glory" -- not to mention years of televised skating -- have given her experience on camera. She also played small parts in the teen flick "Bratz" and the forthcoming low-budget release "Moondance Alexander."

But Cohen wants bigger gigs. "Our goal now is to find good motion picture roles, good roles on television," Cohen's agent, Jeff Witjas, said. "We're beginning the process of finding roles that are right for Sasha."

Cohen is hardly the first professional athlete to contemplate acting. From Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown to wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to Cohen's fellow Olympic skater Evan Lysacek, many sports stars have undergone formal theater training before lending their familiar faces to the silver screen. A-Listers often assume success in one medium will translate into success in another, said Witjas, who represented Lakers star Kobe Bryant and boxer Ray Mancini. "When you're an actor, you want to be a singer. When you're a singer, you want to be an athlete."

But fame in one field and connections in another do not guarantee success, says Moscow Art Summer Academy director Alexander Popov. "My teacher in Russia used to say, 'You get talent from two places: God and your parents,' " he said. "Talent is talent. Either you have it or you don't."

Cohen began skating at age 7. "My mom says I'm very competitive in general," she wrote in her 2005 autobiography, "Fire on Ice." "[E]ven in school, I almost always got A's, and if I didn't I'd go back and ask why not and what I needed to do to improve my grade."

Last year, Cohen won the US National Championships and claimed the silver medal in Turin. The Olympics were spectacular, she says, but afterward she wondered: What next? "I'd been thinking about the Olympics every day for years. I'd lived my whole life for those couple minutes," she said. "I couldn't imagine life after the Olympics."

On a sweltering afternoon recently, Cohen, barely 5 feet 2 inches tall, grabbed a Greek salad at the Veggie Planet Pizza in Cambridge and then walked through the grassy ART campus. This was a more leisurely -- and far warmer -- routine than the skater normally enjoys.

From July through mid-August, Cohen lived in an ART dorm and studied acting five days a week with Russian-based theater experts. Every summer since 1992, ART has been flying in professors from Moscow to teach beginning and intermediate actors. The program is a joint venture with the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. Cohen, whose mother is Ukrainian and who speaks some Russian, learned about the course during a skating show last year in Boston.

Cohen still loves to skate, she says, but the schedule is grueling and inevitably her performances will start to decline. Most professional skaters bow out in their 20s. After the 2010 Olympics, Cohen plans to heavily cut back her time commitment.

The ART course, which includes instruction in character development, theater history, and role-playing exercises, attracts actors with some experience on stage in college or professionally. But Popov says Cohen and her classmates will discover this summer whether they are really cut out for acting. "It's an opportunity to see how far you can progress," he said. "It's an opportunity to see if you can act -- if this is something you want to do with your life."

On the first day of class, Cohen already had a reputation. "The whole of Russia has been watching this half-Russian girl," said Anatoly Smeliansky, the Moscow Art Theatre School dean.

Before she arrived, students chattered about their famous classmate. "There was definitely a buzz," said course member Igor Golyak. "She felt people were trying to judge her, to crack the nut and find out what type of person is this Sasha Cohen."

The flurry of attention caused close scrutiny of Cohen's acting. "Her standards for herself are very high," Golyak says. "In a lot of ways, she pushed harder than anyone because she had a lot to live up to." In class, professors say, Cohen was constantly motivated. She stayed after class many days to ask extra questions. "She's very determined, very goal-oriented," said professor Mikhail Lobanov. "In this group, she was always a leader, the first to jump into the risky exercise."

In different classes, Cohen studied body movement, Russian theater history, and acting technique. When asked to behave like a celebrity during a role-playing exercise, she chose Paris Hilton. The diva just popped into her mind, Cohen said. "As an actor, your body is your instrument," she said. "I'm learning new forms of expression."

On a recent Friday, Cohen and 36 other students performed several abbreviated plays for an audience of friends and family members. In Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters," Cohen played the youngest sister -- a wistful romantic with none of Cohen's drive. Before the performance, audience members whispered among themselves about Cohen and pointed to her name in the program.

In the last act, Cohen had to cry real tears and then deliver the play's final mournful refrain in response to the death of her character's lover. The role was difficult, but her instructors were complimentary. "The technical aspects of her training aren't there yet," acting professor Alla Pokrovskaya said. "But as far as her soul, her heart, she is definitely capable of bringing that passion to the stage."

It was a green light to continue with acting. Not that she needed one. When Cohen sets a goal, she doesn't back down. "This course will open the door," she said, "but I have to step through it."

Robbie Brown can be reached at jbrown@globe.com.