Three years ago, Cat Cohen was lying in a hospital bed feeling despondent. She’d suffered a small stroke — terrifying enough given she was only 31 years old — and the doctors discovered that she had a hole in her heart and needed surgery to repair it, and it felt, for a brief moment, like the end of the world. But then Cohen, an actress, podcaster, and comedian known for her blend of cabaret and standup, had an epiphany: This was incredible material. “It really was a spark,” she says. She started taking notes on her iPhone about what was happening to her, things the doctors were saying, how her family was reacting — all elements that, trauma aside, she says were genuinely funny.
While she was on her phone after the stroke, she also saw a piece of reassuring news. “I read that Hailey Bieber had the exact same kind of stroke that I had, and it was my first flash of, I’m going to be okay,” she says. “She was already okay! She had a baby, she had her shit together. I was looking through her Instagram like, this is going to be me.”
The experience eventually became the fodder for her new one-woman show Broad Strokes, which she’ll perform at New York’s famed Lucille Lortel theater from July 14 to Sept. 5. Though she’s a veteran of the stage, and the show will include a half-dozen songs in her signature style, it’s her off-Broadway debut and her first foray into work with a specific narrative thru-line.
“The show begins with me discussing that I’ve always wanted to be exceptional, to be the main character, until something so intense and story-defining happened and I was like, fuck this shit,” says Cohen, who first performed the show during a monthlong residency at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “I discuss my healing, too, and the ending is open because I’m really still processing it.”
Cohen has had dreams of being on Broadway (and “in the movies,” as she put it) since the very beginning. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and though she’s half Jewish, went through the traditional Southern experience of attending Christian youth groups. The east coast eventually beckoned, and she went to Princeton; she found her way into comedy after graduating and moving to New York without a clear path to a career onscreen. “When I was starting out, it was like I don’t know what auditions are, I don’t have an agent, I don’t know anything,” she says. “But you can write stuff and then get onstage anywhere in New York.” She studied the work of comedians she was inspired by, did time at Upright Citizens Brigade, and started doing standup, later settling into regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and Club Cumming (co-owned by the actor Alan Cumming).
That work earned her a manager, and the chance to start auditioning in earnest. Her first “real” (Cohen’s words) job was a 2019 episode of the HBO dramedy High Maintenance, which kicked off a steady flow of guest roles: Search Party, What We Do in the Shadows, Girls5eva, and then a larger arc on season four of Only Murders in the Building. At the time, she says, the wait felt interminable. “You’re watching people in your circle pop off right away, and you’re going on Instagram thinking, I want to do that, I want to go to that, why am I not? And then you realize, okay honey, why don’t you sit down and write something and then maybe someone will care. Stop being a bitch.”
After leaving the hospital in 2023, Cohen couldn’t stop writing. It mostly flowed, but she was mindful of the tone. “Since I’ve never dealt with material that is more serious, my fear was being maudlin,” she says. “I feel maudlin every day! I felt it in the hospital, too. But onstage, I’m like, who cares? I was desperate to keep it light.” She went on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast Working It Out and told him she was scared of introducing something upsetting in her comedy and alienating people. “He is the master of the one man show — Sleepwalk With Me was just so fucking good — and he was really encouraging that I would be fine.”
Once it became clear that she had something special — and very specific — on her hands, she started looking for collaborators. She teamed up with producers Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia, who produced Oh, Mary! as well as standup specials for Colin Quinn and Mike Birbiglia. The pair suggested Alex Timbers, the Tony-award winning director of Moulin Rouge!, also known for David Byrne’s American Utopia, Gutenberg! The Musical and Nick Kroll and John Mulaney’s Oh Hello!, to helm the show. “Timbers had reached out to me years ago just to say I like your work and we should know each other, which was a dream come true, and it was one of those things where there wasn’t much for us to talk about work-wise but it was nice to know him,” she says. “But then we met again for Broad Strokes and the connection was instantaneous.”
Cohen has released two comedy specials, 2022’s The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous, with Netflix, and the 2024 VEEPS hour Come For Me. But this is her first time developing her work with someone else in such close collaboration. “I’ve never had someone to talk through structure, and storytelling. He changed my life, because the end of the show really wasn’t clicking for me. He pointed out there should be a song, and then I went and wrote it and it was literally fixed.”
At the same time that Cohen was developing Broad Strokes, her onscreen career was popping off. Her audition strategy is, in her words, to put herself on tape for literally everything. “I’ll fly across the country to do an audition, I don’t care.” That strategy scored her a small but memorable role in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, playing publicist to Elle Fanning’s Rachel Kemp. Her time in the film even brought her to the Academy Awards for the first time, an experience she describes as both magical and more nuanced than it may have appeared on her Instagram posts. “I want people who saw that I went to know, by the way, that I was there by myself and that it was awkward,” she says with a laugh. Trier pushed for the entire cast to get tickets to the big event, and the invite came through last minute (and with no plus-one). After missing out on Sentimental Value‘s Cannes Film Festival premiere (“I was invited, but I would have had to pay for my own flight”), she decided to go despite the occasionally-humbling circumstances.
“The Oscars were like, ‘You can do the red carpet, but you’re going to have to come at 1:30pm,’” she says, which meant she was the first to arrive and then waited for hours for the show to start. When they won best international feature film, she watched from the nosebleeds. “Elle made sure to tell me that I won, I should come onstage with everyone, because she is the best, but I was up in the mezzanine and would have had to repel down,” says Cohen. “I was like, ‘That’s so sweet of you to think I’m sitting that close.’ Honey, I’m repelling.’”
After the Oscars, she shot a romantic comedy for Prime Video, alongside Kiernan Shipka, Cole Sprouse and Megan Mullally (who Cohen says has her dream career), and she’s shopping a few pilot ideas to networks. She hopes to get the chance to film Broad Strokes for a wider release on a streaming platform, and that its iconic venue lures in a few local celebrities. “I would love for Sarah Jessica Parker to come and then I want her spreading the word,” she says. And, ultimately, Cohen is searching for new material for the next show. As her personal circumstances improve — her career is blossoming, she’s planning a wedding — her standup ideas tend to dwindle. “For so long comedy has been about men just fucking around, and I don’t want to have to be a disaster just for material,” she says. “The real question is, how do I make sure my life is going well, and keep one foot in things that are interesting and funny?”
