His father, David L. Cole, the son of Russian immigrants, was one of the early pioneers in arbitrating labor disputes, serving under every US President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.

He was responsible for describing American farm machinery to visitors and was an observer at the impromptu Kitchen Debate, between Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon and Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev.

The story of Dwight H. Johnson, an African-American Vietnam War veteran who had won the Medal of Honor for valor in combat and was shot and killed by police in 1971 while holding up a Detroit convenience store, became the impetus for Medal of Honor Rag, a two-character play that fictionalized the story as a confrontation set at an Army Hospital in 1971 between Dale Jackson, a troubled African-American war hero and a white psychiatrist who specializes in "impacted grief".

"Dead Souls" had full-scale productions at the Milwaukee Rep and Trinity Square in Providence, and was published by the Theatre Communications Group in its anthology New Plays USA 1, in 1982.

[4] About Time debuted in 1990 at the John Houseman Theater, a two-character play about an elderly couple, identified only as Old Man and Old Woman, arguing about matters around the subject of death.

The long and the short of it is that whatever the longeurs and other shortcomings of Cole's play, you care for these people; you wish them solace in their sexual games and even paltrier verbal scurrilities".

[6] Cole's collaboration with Joyce Chopra in film began in 1970 with "Present Tense", adapted from Thomas Mann's "Disorder and Early Sorrow" and televised nationally on WNET Playhouse.

In this age of movies designed to satisfy teen-agers' fantasies about themselves, Smooth Talk has the shock value of The Grapes of Wrath seen among a bunch of not-great screwball comedies of the Depression era.