At Arena, a Comic Cry for a Politics of Civility

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, October 13, 2008

Theater is seldom as in tune with the news cycle as "Citizen Josh" is just now.

Josh Kornbluth's amusing, hopeful meditation on voter anger opened late last week at Arena Stage's Crystal City location -- right as McCain/Palin crowds were drawing headlines for exhibiting streaks of mob behavior.

"I'm scared," Kornbluth says at the top of his solo show. "It's getting ugly."

That's both lucky and predictable for Kornbluth, who began exploring his inner voter fury after John Kerry (or "my guy," as the generally affable Kornbluth sweetly puts it) lost in 2004. Losing stinks, and coping is tough when people on both sides pitch their hopes at such a high emotional level.

Whatever happened, Kornbluth wonders, to civility? Were we ever really any good at it?

What Kornbluth is into isn't the latest instance but rather the long-term trend, and his carefully written show takes in decades of personal and national history (mostly personal, but with a purpose) rather than the past five minutes of the current campaign. Still, it's disarmingly on point in its exploration of the irreconcilable polarities of American politics, even as it investigates in Kornbluth's typically winding, self-deprecating storytelling style.

Kornbluth's lefty roots were comically explored in his "Red Diaper Baby," and his relationship with government was the subject of "Love & Taxes." Now, for him, the only way to discover democracy's essence is via a therapeutic trip down memory lane. In that sense, "Citizen Josh" was literally decades in the making, if you include the political-science thesis that this self-confessed procrastinator never finished while at Princeton nearly 30 years ago.

And of course he includes that; why throw away all those foundational lectures and offhand conversations? His mentor was brilliant, and he gives us a taste of the great man's thinking in funny reminiscences, one of which ends with the awed young Kornbluth helplessly telling the sage, "You just blew my mind!"

"Citizen Josh," like most Kornbluth projects, works in an unhurried, circular fashion; his anecdotes feel like shaggy digressions before finally landing on target, usually with force. Significant time goes into the tale of Kornbluth's baby brother, born into intensive care and nearly given up on by the doctors. His father's intervention is detailed with deep passion and soft concern, and audiences might be surprised with the moral that comes around: Don't leave everything up to the experts.

So, too, the chronicle of the life-threatening playground equipment in Kornbluth's Berkeley neighborhood. What civic action, Kornbluth wonders as he shares a projection of a lethal-looking climbing structure, might lead to positive change? And how could anyone be opposed to improvement?

Someone is, of course, which leads to the theme of screaming disagreement, the emblem of which becomes Hazel Bryan, the white student famously photographed haranguing Elizabeth Eckford as that black student tried to walk to her Little Rock high school in 1957. It's still a startling photograph, and Kornbluth and his collaborator, director David Dower, use it convincingly.

Political junkies might want more immediate conclusions from the show, but Kornbluth and Dower are more interested in promoting cool-headed dialogue than in scoring of-the-moment partisan points. To that end, they survey each audience and share the demographic portrait at the end of each evening; 81 percent of Thursday's opening-night crowd at Arena's Crystal City space was white; 4 percent were Republicans; and 43 percent believed that people who disagreed with them are wrong.

The survey, like the show, nimbly raises issues while never straying far from an inquisitive comic tone. It's a valentine tossed into a cyclone, of course, which might account for Kornbluth's signature expression: an optimistic grin undermined by a body tensed with fear.

Citizen Josh, written and performed by Josh Kornbluth in collaboration with director David Dower. Production design, Alexander V. Nichols; composer, Marco D'Ambrosio. About 90 minutes.