Nicki Cochrane. (Photo by Catalina Kulczar)
The interruption occurred 15 minutes into the staged reading.
Inside Art Cake, a cavernous Brooklyn venue where whispers carry as they would in cathedrals, the boisterous swinging of the front door eclipsed the drama onstage. Confused chatter spilled into the house, and then she entered: Bucket hat on and shuffling in front of performers at music stands, Nicki Cochrane took a front row seat when any other would have called for less thunder.
But gods are seldom silent. They are also all-seeing.
“I see more than the critics combined,” Cochrane told American Theatre.
Cochrane, 86, has attended about 10 shows per week for decades, totaling 500 performances each year. She loves theatre, but the term devotee falls light-years short. Traveling from Broadway marquees to far-flung, outer borough pop-ups to catch shows, her city footprint rivals a campaigning mayor’s. And, like a politician, she’s divisive.
“She’s a force of nature,” said David Dillon, a retired box office treasurer.
“Like a hurricane,” said Elis C. Arroyo Jaime, a retired stage manager.
“You see that bucket hat, you know you’re in for a ride,” said Akia Squitieri, a producer with box office experience.
Dillon, Arroyo Jaim, and Squitieri have all encountered Cochrane—and the methods she can employ to see a remarkably high volume of shows. She said she budgets $10,000 annually for tickets but often requests comps through community groups. And if tickets aren’t available?
“I do hound people,” Cochrane freely admitted. She’ll ask patrons if they have spares and stand with a sign reading “one ticket please.” But her tactics can get craftier.
“She went around to four staff members, told everyone a different story—that her friend had her ticket, she had made a reservation and wasn’t sure why her seat wasn’t in the system,” said Squitieri, who didn’t name the theatre. “My box office person was like, there’s nothing we can do. Then she snuck in through an elevator.”
If a seat is unpurchased, Cochrane said she’d use it “if no one’s going to. When a show’s sold out, I get very anxious because I’m overly enthusiastic to see it. I’ll use any means necessary.”
Cochrane attributes her determined character to her upbringing in Mumbai. Her mother had “severe mental illness—compulsive obsessive,” Cochrane said, which made her incapable of parenting. “One of the reasons I have a difficult personality is because I never had the tender nurturing. But in a way I’m grateful because it made me very, very tough. I can now sort of tolerate any kind of abuse, which I get from a lot of theatres. It’s made me resilient.”
Around 1949, Cochrane said, she came with her father to America and saw her first Broadway show, South Pacific. “I’ve never forgotten one syllable,” she said. “Since then, it’s all been diluted versions.”
A purist, Cochrane dislikes changes to an original creation’s intention or script. Poor Shakespeare adaptations rile her. “My deep antipathy!” she said. “I worship Shakespeare with a reverence unmatched by any other human being in the world.”
Cochrane studied under Abraham Maslow at Brandeis before earning graduate degrees from Harvard and Oxford. She married and had three children, then, following a divorce, moved with them to Queens, over a landlord’s objections. “He said, ‘It’s a one-bedroom, you’re four people.’” Cochrane recalled. Are we surprised that she prevailed? “I have very good gifts of persuasion,” as she put it. She’s been in the same apartment since.
Hardscrabble as this upbringing for children seems (“It wasn’t difficult for me, but for them, yes—and I’m no cook,” Cochrane conceded), she made good money working as “the best legal secretary in New York,” she said. The income let her treat her children to ski trips—and Broadway.
“She took us to Equus when we were kids,” said Brendan Cochrane, her son, now a filmmaker. “That was really provocative.”
In addition to theatre, Nicki seeks out enrichment in various ways: opera classes via Zoom, free lectures at NYU, and a comedy class with Jo Firestone for which she performed an ode to her iPhone at the Red Room. Brendan, the only child Cochrane still speaks with, acknowledges that his mother’s priorities—including skipping necessities to afford tickets—are idiosyncratic.
“If it’s a choice between her seeing theatre and eating, she’ll see theatre,” he said. (Performing in Firestone’s short film about a singles retreat for elders, his mother sits alone eating dessert as septuagenarians dance around her.)
This zeal has carved for Cochrane a specific niche in New York theatre. Box office workers have dressed as her for Halloween, paying homage to her powder-blue bucket hat (purchased in Bonaire). She was also parodied on Jack In A Box, Michael Cyril Creighton’s web series about his days as a harried box office employee; Jackie Hoffman cameos as Ricki, a woman who tries buying a student ticket with a credit card that’s actually a fridge magnet.
“When I texted Michael, he said Ricki was a composite of many avid theatregoers—Nicki was one of them,” Hoffman said. “I wish I was as dedicated to getting work in the theatre as Nicki is to seeing the theatre.”
“She’s kind of a mythical figure,” said former Playwrights Horizons house manager Emily Witham. “Everyone who’s worked front of house has interacted at least once with Nicki.”
Staff may have to handle upset audiences complaining that Cochrane rifled through her bags midshow, as was Witham’s experience. Playwright/performer Kev Berry told me that Cochrane once “pulled out a very large deli container of mozzarella and tomato and ate it during a performance.”
These actions have drawn consequences. Cochrane said she’s banned from Will Call Club, a membership that fills empty seats that did not respond to communications, as well as from Theatre Row, a four-theatre complex on 42nd Street, “after multiple incidents of general disruption of the audience experience and specific abusive behavior directed toward the building’s staff,” a statement from Building for the Arts, the nonprofit that operates Theatre Row, read.
She’s also banned from The Tank, who didn’t comment for this article. An email to her from the theatre’s box office read simply, “Due to repeated violations, including solicitation and entry without a ticket, Nicki Cochrane will not be permitted to enter The Tank’s premises.”
“What cowardly people would send an unsigned note? Unsigned!” Cochrane said. “It came as a brutal shock because all my experiences at The Tank have been wonderful.” (Despite being banned, Cochrane still receives The Tank’s marketing emails.)
“She won’t take no for an answer. I’ve even said to her, ‘Nicki, you need to learn the word no, please add it into your vocabulary.’”
Sean Pollack has worked in box offices across the city, including at The Tank and Theatre Row, and appreciates when theatres take actions that communicate that they “care about the staff and their well-being, their ability to perform their job well, which is handling a lot of people in tight spaces, which isn’t easy,” they said. For Pollack, Cochrane has complicated that. “She won’t take no for an answer,” Pollack said. “I’ve even said to her, ‘Nicki, you need to learn the word no, please add it into your vocabulary.’”
“I’m trying to improve my behavior,” Cochrane said. “I’m really making an ardent attempt to be more civil.”
She does have fans in high places. Pulitzer-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis met Cochrane decades ago. When he took over as a LAByrinth Theater Company artistic director in 2010, he held a Tennessee Williams marathon honoring the writer’s 99th birthday.
“We did it around the clock—readings readings readings. Some had starry casts, some we’d cast right out of the audience,” Guirgis said. “I remember popping back in, like three in the morning, and there’s Nicki Cochrane onstage, acting with these people. It moved me deeply.
“We didn’t have any money,” he continued. “A lot of things weren’t going right, but the purpose was to foster community, and it could not be embodied any better than Nicki on a stage next to Michael Shannon or whoever the fuck was there that night.”
When Cochrane asks Guirgis for tickets to his shows, he obliges. “I’d inevitably get a call from the box office: ‘Did you give your comps to Nicki Cochrane?’”
Box offices don’t always appreciate him doing so.
“Excuse me: The comps are mine,” countered Guirgis. “Nicki is my friend. She’s pushy, she doesn’t have boundaries,” Guirgis admitted. (She once knocked on Guirgis’s door, mid-breakup with a girlfriend, to ask him to read her son’s script.) But “when people complain about theatre, she goes 366 days a year,” Guirgis said. “She’s a dying breed. While Nicki may not be sustaining theatre financially, she’s such an avid supporter, and she knows what the hell she’s talking about.”
Cochrane loves discussing theatre: Brooklyn Laundry? “The best thing I’ve seen in 50 years.” The Tommy revival? “I did not appreciate one moment of it.” The original Les Misérables? “I saw it 72 times.”
Talkbacks are her “favorite activity.” (She is “quite elegant and insightful” during them, per Arroyo Jaime.) Recently, she attended New York Theatre Workshop’s for I Love You So Much I Could Die, in which a computer voice recited creator Mona Pirnot’s monologues.
“I said, ‘I’m gonna wait for this actor. I want to commend him,’” Cochrane recalled. Her neighbor said, “‘That’s not a human, that’s a Microsoft AI thing.’ I was horrified! I’m waiting for him to take his curtain call! No human actor could have outdone him, and now I’m absolutely frightened for the acting personnel, because this is going to put actors out of business.”
Equally frustrating for her is the prospect of aging even as her mind remains sharp. Cochrane now depends on a hearing aid—Medicaid only gave one, increasing her need to sit closer to the stage—and she cannot walk as quickly anymore.
Her omnivorous taste doesn’t mean she’ll settle for just any theatre. Her selectivity does, in its own funky way, mean that when Cochrane arrives, a show is probably worth seeing—and that front-of-house staff will likely endure a show of their own.
“Theatre is in her blood; you have to admire her chutzpah,” Dillon said. “When Nicki’s no longer around, or is no longer able to do what she does, that’s a little bit of Broadway that dies, and the whole thing about Broadway is legends. We just dimmed the lights for Chita [Rivera], for God’s sake—talk about a legend. Well, in a way, in a very small way, so is Nicki. I know that sounds absurd, but for those of us who have been around, she’s just one of those characters that adds flavor.”
As a parton, Cochrane seeks out a captivating story, even if she inadvertently becomes one for those who cross her path. What must the war-torn ushers think after another grueling battle? Or the bemused strangers in Starbucks that Cochrane has befriended before offering extra comps?
“People are fickle; they stand you up,” she said. “I have no one to share my exuberance with.”
Company, ultimately, is not the point. She told me she recently learned that “the French composer Gounod said he sits in rapture when he finds a good opera to listen to. That’s how I feel when I find something so magnificent and unforgettable: I sit in rapture.”
Billy McEntee (he/him) is the theatre editor for The Brooklyn Rail who has written for Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Them, among others.
