Bay Area icon Josh Kornbluth performs greatest hits — for charity
Bay Area monologist Josh Kornbluth is performing three of his best-known solo shows in Berkeley to benefit TheatreFirst stage company.
For about 30 years Berkeley-based solo performer Josh Kornbluth has been drawing audiences in with his autobiographical monologues, filled with humor and touching introspection, and covering topics from commas to communism, mathematics to music, Ben Franklin to Andy Warhol.
Now Kornbluth is performing three of his autobiographical monologues back to back to back at Berkeley’s Waterfront Playhouse as a benefit for local activist theater company TheatreFIRST.
Dubbed “Josh-a-Palooza,” this three-week celebration features “Ben Franklin: Unplugged,” about the strange journey of discovery spurred by Kornbluth’s slight resemblance to Benjamin Franklin; “Love & Taxes,” about sorting out some long-standing IRS troubles before he could get married; and “Citizen Josh,” in which a renewed interest in hyper-local hometown activism led to an exploration of civic involvement.
Each show has a one-week, four-performance run, punctuated with Saturday afternoon screenings of Kornbluth’s films “Haiku Tunnel,” “Love & Taxes” and “The Mathematics of Change.” Each performance or screening is followed by a Q&A session.
“Sometimes I go two years between performing a piece and then when I’m doing it, I just have to sort of mumble it to myself once, and then it’s back in my head,” Kornbluth says at a coffee shop in Berkeley. “It’s like the world of each piece. With ‘Franklin,’ I’m going to when my son was in utero, when we were developing it in 1997. And with the other pieces as well, they’re from other times in my life and I have all these experiences associated with making them. And so I sort of just enter that world for that time.”
Each having to do in some way with the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship, the pieces were all originally developed with Z Space founder David Dower.
“I think about them as chapters in my life,” Kornbluth says. “I had a therapist at a certain time and she told me that she felt that no matter what the subject matter was of a show, that it was actually dealing with the thing that I was most concerned with at the time, the thing I was grappling with. I’m not sure if that’s true, but they do sort of follow a progression of my life.”
Kornbluth doesn’t work from a script. He develops his monologues through a series of improvs, and none of it is written down until after the first run of a new show at the earliest.
“I remember when we were opening ‘Love and Taxes’ at the Magic, it had a bunch of projections, it had lighting changes and sound cues and stuff like that. But it had been changing enormously every day,” he recalls. “And so the script, such as it was, was a blank piece of paper on which there were like a hundred post-its and our poor stage manager was just going through them, listening for key words because it wasn’t written out.”
His latest monologue, “Citizen Brain,” will be part of Shotgun Players’ 2020 season, opening next October. That piece comes out of Kornbluth’s work with the Global Brain Health Institute in San Francisco, learning about brain health and dementia and tying that in with the current political moment in this country. He’s been releasing a series of online videos as part of that process while working on his solo show.
“The brain thing just gave me this unbelievable new angle on all these things I’ve been preoccupied with — in politics, on what human nature is, on revolution — through this fascinating, totally new subject to me, brain science and brain health,” he says.
“Josh-a-Palooza” is something that Kornbluth and TheatreFIRST artistic facilitator Jon Tracy have been talking about for a couple of years, and only now has their availability coincided.
“It’s going to be really cool being in the worlds of the different monologues, but also mostly in the world of being in a theater telling stories,” Kornbluth says. “That’s my favorite thing, and I get to do that.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘JOSH-A-PALOOZA’
Written and performed by Josh Kornbluth, presented by TheatreFIRST
When: Dec. 5-22
Where: Waterfront Playhouse, 2020 Fourth St., Berkeley
Tickets: $20-$40; www.theatrefirst.com