Stronger Than a Fleeting Ballot

Election Year or Not, Actor Is Super 'Citizen'

Monologuist Josh Kornbluth's more recent works have examined his own transformation from a "passive-ist" into a citizen activist who doesn't just sulk for four years after his favorite presidential candidate loses.

His "Citizen Josh" comes to Arena Stage's Crystal City venue Oct. 9-26. Associate Artistic Director David Dower will direct and is Kornbluth's dramaturge. Dower, who came to Arena from San Francisco, where his Z Space company nurtured new works, had also worked with the Berkeley-based Kornbluth on "Ben Franklin: Unplugged" and "Love and Taxes." He views the three plays as a trilogy on Kornbluth's growth as a citizen.

Kornbluth says he originally approached Dower to help him broaden his autobiographical style: "I was really kind of desperate to get away from my navel." Together they explored "how autobiography can also mean being part of society. It's not just what my parents did to me. . . . It's about being a citizen and about our history, and once that opened up for me . . . that gave me permission to take my monologues in the direction of history and politics."

Dower describes their collaboration on the monologues: "We write them together. . . . He cannot write at a table or at a computer. . . . He stands on his feet before a roomful of strangers and starts to tell stories." Then, Dower figures out how to "map his theoretical ideas to his autobiography" and puts Kornbluth's stories and ideas into a narrative shape.

The seed that became "Citizen Josh" sprouted on the day John Kerry lost to George W. Bush. "I really kind of hit rock bottom right after voting in the 2004 election," Kornbluth says. He was tired of feeling powerless. "It seemed so limited to have only that particular choice every four years. That's the only way I can affect the world?" So in "Citizen Josh," he recounts how he got involved -- clumsily at first -- with neighborhood activists in Berkeley to fix up a local playground.

But Kornbluth found himself bellowing at a neighbor with whom he disagreed. "I went to my neighborhood park and I couldn't have just a productive discussion with people who disagreed with me," he recalls. "I didn't have the habits of citizenship. How do you disagree with people?"

The 49-year-old Kornbluth's earlier monologues were strictly autobiographical, including "Red Diaper Baby," about growing up the child of ardent communist parents in New York, and "The Mathematics of Change," about his brief time as a math major at Princeton. In 2000, Theater J presented Kornbluth in both works plus "Ben Franklin: Unplugged."

In that piece, Kornbluth riffs on his epiphany one day while shaving that he looks rather like a Jewish Ben Franklin. He talks of the estrangement between Franklin and his son William, Kornbluth's delight in his own young son, and his complicated relationship with his late father. "Love and Taxes" is about Kornbluth's trouble over owing back taxes and finally paying them. And "Citizen Josh" explores his revelation about the importance of grass-roots democracy.

"We have to liberate our democratic impulses all the time, because obviously it makes a big difference who's president, but that can't sustain democracy," he says. "Doing stuff-- doing stuff that you can do . . . seems to be what makes democracy go."

"Citizen Josh," which Kornbluth and Dower began to develop in earnest in 2006, will go through some changes before it opens at Arena. "The circumstances have so dramatically changed" in American civic life, Dower says, that the show needs updating "for us to feel like it's breathing with the times." Kornbluth will hold post-show panels on citizenship and democracy Oct. 10, 12, 19, 22 and 23.

The Nuances of Chitchat

In the plays of Daniel MacIvor, ordinary conversational patter -- a line such as "no yeah but no yeah" -- are fraught with nuance and meaning, secrets and lies. The Canadian actor-playwright-filmmaker says he is "fascinated by the way we speak, the way we use language."

MacIvor's "A Beautiful View" opens Oct. 8 at Studio Theatre's 2ndStage and will run through Dec. 2. He is here to direct Jennifer Mendenhall and Kathleen Coons in the two-character piece, about a relationship between two women who never quite settle on the nature of their connection -- even in the afterlife. They often address the audience from Limbo, between reenacting moments from their lives.

"The big arc of the play is that those two women have to tell us their story in order to resolve their story," MacIvor says. Their struggles to understand their sexual and emotional identities reflect an odd feature of modern life, he says: "The tendency for us to want to label every experience. . . . It's all about branding." The women are "soul mates" but modern society offers "no paradigm" for their relationship, he says. "That's not society's problem" but rather one people create for themselves. "We don't have to fit into a box," he says, ". . . it's just easier."

Mendenhall and Coons acted in MacIvor's "You Are Here" at Theater Alliance three years ago, and the playwright suggested them for the new work. "We're so far ahead of the game, because they walk in with a history, and potentially, baggage," says MacIvor with theatrical relish. At a rehearsal last week in Studio's rough-hewn space, called Stage 4, it was clear that all three see every second of the play, every sidelong glance at the audience, every "no yeah," as something to be explored and fine-tuned.

"In the play, the language is very casual -- and harder for the actors," he notes. "Once they get it, it feels very authentic and as though they're making it up as they say it."

MacIvor sees "A Beautiful View" as "kind of a companion piece" to his earlier "In on It," a two-hander featuring male actors. Both contain "this element of playing out the past and what I call the show element" of actors addressing the audience, he says.

In staging "A Beautiful View," the playwright says, his main challenge is to "not to make it too fancy . . . to trust that the complexity of this relationship is enough, and I don't have to have a lot of bells and whistles." In other words, he concludes, he needs "to keep my ego out of it."

While he's in town, MacIvor also will workshop "Confession," a three-character piece that's part of an in-progress trilogy about the "search for something we might call God." Studio will hold two staged readings of "Confession" Oct. 18 and 19 at 4 p.m. Call 202-332-3300 to reserve seats.