Interview: Josh Kornbluth of CITIZEN BRAIN at The Marsh Berkeley Explores Our Collective Dementia in an Effort to Foster Empathy

Here’s a fun fact: a recent study at Columbia University found that one in ten older Americans has dementia. Lucky for us, autobiographical monologist Josh Kornbluth is on the case to help us parse the implications of that startling statistic. Kornbluth’s beloved stepfather developed Alzheimer's around the same time a certain narcissist from Queens became president of the United States, leading him to a jarring realization: both his stepdad and our nation's politics were suffering from dementia. And that led to the creation of Kornbluth’s new theater piece, Citizen Brain, running at The Marsh Berkeley on Saturday evenings through July 29th.   
 
Inspired by events happening both in his personal life and society as a whole, Kornbluth began to provide a helping hand in the study of brain disease at the Global Brain Health Institute. As he investigated whether or not society was suffering from political dementia, Kornbluth came across the discovery of the “empathy circuit” in the brain, which may be the ultimate cure to uniting divided groups and solving the world’s problems. In Citizen Brain, Kornbluth asks whether a neurotic storyteller who flunked every science class can spark a science-based revolution of empathy. 

Kornbluth has been an enormously successful solo performer for decades and is a mainstay of The Marsh in particular. He is perhaps still best known for Red Diaper Baby, a show about his having been raised by committed communists that enjoyed long runs in the Bay Area and in New York Off-Broadway before being turned into a feature film. His more recent projects include a video series on brain health also called “Citizen Brain” and a newsletter on Substack called “But Not Enough About Me.”

I spoke with Kornbluth last week by phone from his home in Berkeley two days after the first Marsh performance of Citizen Brain. We had a lengthy chat about his joy in returning to live theater after a 3-year pause due to COVID, the show’s circuitous path to reaching The Marsh, some downsides to growing up as the child of communists, and his thoughts on his own mortality. Lest any of this sound bleak or wonkish, I can assure you it is not. Kornbluth is an inveterate monologist who can’t help but respond to even the simplest of questions with a full-on monolog full of introspective wit and quirky turns of phrase. He is also one of those naturally warm and open individuals who instantly seems like the best friend you somehow never met. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You had your first performance of Citizen Brain two nights ago. How did that go?

It was really amazing to perform in a theater again, which like is what I do. Where I found myself creatively is performing monologs in a theater, a lot of those performances being at The Marsh. I told the audience at the end that every performance is important to me and every audience is important to me, but I’ll really remember this one.

The show has had quite a long and twisty development process, hasn’t it?

Yes. It was commissioned by The Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Patrick Dooley, their artistic director, had asked me to do a piece that would lead into the presidential election in November of 2020 and then continue after it.

In our initial conversations, Patrick was talking about wanting a piece that addressed the enormous anxiety we were all feeling about what was going to happen. Was Trump gonna win again, you know? It felt very existential and it still does. I was a fellow at the time at the Global Brain Health Institute and I had been starting to develop in early improvisations at The Marsh this idea of doing a monolog about how the brain stuff for me had connected with the political stuff. I told Patrick about it and he got all excited and then commissioned it. So I started working on it – I develop my shows in improvisation, in front of audiences - and in March of 2020 everything shut down.

So then we were in the period where we were locked down, but the Shotgun people told me they wanted to put a truncated run on Zoom. So we did that and that was really cool. So I did more improv, and you know a lot of when I’m improvising it’s feeling how the audience is responding – when they laugh, but also all the other things that you pick up on in terms of people’s interest, their posture, their expression and all sorts of things. So in these improvs I could see some of the people in the Zoom audience but I couldn’t hear them – it was muted. And it was also slightly on delay, so it’s just this really strange sort of hybrid medium. I mean, it’s a theater piece, but I’m sitting in my living room – and it’s all in closeup. So there’s just so many things that were weird about it. Not just the jokes and stuff, but like how do you deliver it?

And that was – I forget how long – a couple of weeks, like before and after the election. And then last fall there still weren’t opportunities for me to perform in the theater so I did a few backyard performances. I have some neighbors just down the block here in Berkeley who have this really great backyard where they put on events and stuff, and they offered for me to perform in their backyard.

So I did that a few times and invited some people. It was outdoors so people didn’t have to worry about COVID, and there was a sort of makeshift stage and some bushes. At one point somebody brought a dog and the dog like wandered upstage of me and that was alright - I mean I love dogs - but then the dog paused to piss on a bush and stuff, and I just said to the audience, “This is unconscionable upstaging!” [laughs]

So I did that in a few other people’s backyards as well, and that was cool, but I really wanted to be in the theater and then also we had to stop for the rainy season, which as you know was unbelievably rainy, And then I was sort of monitoring “Is it relatively safe to perform in the theater? What are people doing?” and I checked with friends of mine who run theaters, including Stephanie Weisman who runs The Marsh. She said, “It’s happening. People are doing it.” And I had another friend who runs a theater who said he wasn’t getting reports that his performers or audience members were getting COVID so I texted Stephanie to see if I could maybe do this [at The Marsh] and she said, “Yeah.”

And so – to get back to your first question - there I was onstage on Saturday, and it was mind-blowing. It wasn’t just people’s response - laughter and stuff like that. It was that they were in the room. Performing a monolog to me – it’s a dialog with the audience. Sometimes you can see them better than others, depending on the lighting and the setup, but it was just so different [from being on Zoom]. It was just really emotional, and I also found nuances were coming into the performance that hadn’t been there before, because I hadn’t been in a theater with an audience. I just sort of came back home, you know. I felt like I’d returned to myself.

That’s really interesting to me. During the worst of COVD, I spoke with a lot of stage performers and most of them were claiming that they really could “feel” the audience over Zoom, but I was skeptical. Maybe they were just putting on a good face, but I couldn’t believe that performing over Zoom is the same thing as performing in front of a live audience.

No, it isn’t. And I think for all of us it’s like thank goodness that we had that way of telling our stories, a way that we could still perform. It also opened up accessibility to people in a very powerful way so I think there still should be some hybrid versions and stuff like that.

But it just isn’t the same; it isn’t. It’s not live theater. It’s a Zoom meeting, you know? And I don’t think there’s any way around it. It’s the uniqueness of people in a theater space sharing in the telling of a story. We’re still obviously in incredibly fraught, dangerous and scary times. Both political times and ecological times, and that’s just a constant as well. So that’s also something that I think is really important and powerful to share in person.

My show has different aspects to it that I tie together, but one of ‘em is what I came to see pretty early on as a brain fellow based at UCSF - kind of the dementia of our national politics. But it’s also about the dementia that my stepfather came down with. My mom had remarried, for the first time since I was a baby. It was a beautiful relationship that she had late in life, and then tragically her husband who was just a wonderful man got dementia.

I deal with that and my lifelong quest to try to be closer to my mother, to get my mother to among other things admit that she needs me, that I can be helpful to her, that I’m an important part of her life. And so those things are in it as well, kind of tied in together. I’m 64 now and I was talking to people after the show on Saturday, people my age and younger as well, but a lot of people are going through this, or will go through this, or have gone through this, which is having a parent, a loved one, sometimes a spouse, with dementia.

It’s a thing that just weighs so heavily and can make you feel so helpless. It’s overwhelming, the human anxiety, fears and hopes that are all bound up in our closest relationships and in our fear about losing people and losing parts of people.

Citizen Brain is about some really complicated and heavy things. How did you work with your director Casey Stangl and your dramaturg Aaron Loeb to turn that into a show?

Well, that’s the challenge and the adventure of it. I’ve found the way I’m wired is that I think in terms of stories and I just sort of strive towards gathering my experiences into like these 90-minute stories that I can tell. It’s about taking these things that don’t have a shape when they’re happening and which frequently I don’t feel like I have any control of, and then with the help of my collaborators have sort of the agency to tell as a story that goes from one place to this other place, and that hopefully takes the audience and my character through this experience and through some sort of transformation and catharsis. It is the main challenge, so your question gets right at it.

It's like how does it go from being a set of stories, a sequence of stories even, into a play? That is what we worked on a lot together, my collaborators and I, through phone conversations, in person when we were able to be in person, and then after COVID over email and Zoom. How do we make a structure?

Because I don’t build stuff as a script that’s a special challenge to people who are working with me. [laughs] I worked with a collaborator named David Dower for like 20 years just working from an outline. The outline would become more and more elaborate as we worked on the show, so by the time it opened or during the first run of the show it’d be word for word, but there wouldn’t have been a script.

It presents challenges, like what do you tell the technicians and the lighting people? [laughs] David talks about it, like we opened one of our shows, Love and Taxes, and basically the so-called script was two pieces of paper for the stage manager who was running the show. It was like two pieces of paper with all these post-its on it just saying like “When you hear the word ‘lightbulb’ press the…”

That’s sort of a technical thing, but then in terms of how does it become a play that tells an overarching story, that’s a big challenge. It takes a lot of improvs in my case and conversations, trying different things, moving stories around, bringing stories in that didn’t exist before, and editing, lots of editing. Because you know I can improvise on a subject for like ever!

I’m really proud of the work that we did on this show. And that’s one of the things I just wrote to Casey yesterday. I was talking about how proud I was that with this live I audience now I could feel that the structure really worked, that I could feel they were with me. As it happens at The Marsh in Berkeley, I can see everybody, so I can tell if people are asleep or their mind’s wandering, whatever. They’re also very responsive, and there’s a particular key moment where people applauded and I was like “Omigod!” It wasn’t an applause line necessarily, but it was something that was a really important moment to me, and so the fact that it registered that way, but also that they were tracking it…

Although Citizen Brain delves into some pretty serious science, you’re not really a science guy, right?

I’m very much not. I went to the Bronx High School of Science and was really good at science and math, and then when I entered college I hit the wall at freshman Calculus. So, no, I am not a scientist at all. [laughs]

I’m just curious what it’s like to perform a show like this that has real science underpinnings.

Well, one of the things that’s been really exciting to me that I discovered in my career so far is that I have frequently found myself in situations where I am kind of the opposite of an expert in the subject of a show. But I have immersed myself in those subjects with people who are experts and then tried to be for the audience kind of an everyman, a conduit. And so my work in theater in terms of science is like if I can get these scientists to tell me something and then I repeat it back to them in a way that I understand, then the audience will understand it, too.

I think one of the things that maybe appealed to Dr. Bruce Miller and the others at GBHI was that I communicated to audiences, and audiences would follow me through these stories that I told. And that I was entering into this area of brain science, dementia and brain health from the outside. They thought that people like me who are on the outside, that I could help bring others in.

I mean, the only thing I’m slightly expert at is being myself. But as myself, if people come along with me, then the stuff that I care about I hope I can make them care about as well.

You and I are almost exactly the same age. We were both born in 1959 –

When’s your birthday?

Not until November, so I’m still 63.

Ah, so you’re still a kid! You lack the wisdom and gravitas of those extra months. [laughs]

But my upbringing was very different from yours. I grew up in a conservative family of staunch Republicans so I’ve always fantasized what it would be like to be brought up in a more progressive household like you were. I mean, what did you have to rebel against?

In a way it’s one of the main questions of my life, right? Like what do I have to rebel against? Because my father wasn’t just a communist and a leftie and all that, but he was also incredibly warm, so I never rebelled against him, like I just wanted to make him happy. So that’s a sort of emotional thing that doesn’t really have anything to do with politics. But in terms of the politics, that actually comes up in this piece. At one point I talk about how can I empathize with people who have different politics, and I specifically think about the case of people who support Trump. How do I empathize with that? It’s of concern to my character because he wants to lead this revolution of empathy, at least in brain science. And he’s going “But how can I lead a revolution of empathy if I can’t empathize with people who support Trump?”

My parents were ideologs, and a lot of their ideology I still basically agree with - the movement for social justice and fighting racism and fascism. There’s a lot of problems with capitalism, especially when you don’t have any controls and safeguards and stuff like that, but they also were Stalinists, right? They grew up in the Depression as maybe your parents did, and in their milieu (in my father’s case the Bronx, my mother’s case Brooklyn) in the 30s and 40s, the big social thing was to be in the Young Communists League in their neighborhood.

So they developed this whole ideology, which also included that the Soviet Union was great, and even that Stalin was great. When people would try to tell them, or even yell at them, “But – the purges?! The Gulag?!”, my parents would yell back, and they wouldn’t hear it. [To them] this was all just the capitalists trying to tear down socialism.

So I grew up with that, and that was still something into my 20s that I hadn’t resolved. My father had a stroke when I was 20 and so I was particularly I think trying to hold onto everything that I could from him. And so basically that involved living in an ideological bubble. It’s like you have blinders, you have to stop thinking, you have to cut off a lot of information. And that’s when people become dogmatists and get stuck in an ideology. When they get to the point that new facts won’t change their picture, that to me is a horrible situation to get into, and that’s something I had to rebel against.

But I’m very sympathetic to it because I went through it. I mean, what a horrible thing to think that Stalin was good, you know? What a horrible thing. That kind of thinking is so toxic and so terrible, but it’s also so comforting. You have a view, you know who’s right and you know who’s wrong. And my parents, my mother was never able to give it up. My mother died earlier this year at the age of 95, and she herself got Alzheimer’s towards the end, but she never gave up on that view.

So that’s a rebellion for me against the way I was raised. Even though I’m still proud of so much of it. I’m still a democratic socialist or progressive or whatever I am now, but I’m not a dogmatist in that way. And then it also makes me feel like people who have these different views, people who are Republicans or very conservative, even people who support Trump – which to me in so many ways blows my mind that they could do that – I understand it, because I supported Stalin. And my parents did too, and they were good people who did good things.

So that’s I think a big one, in answer to your question.

As you said earlier, there’s so much scary stuff going on in the world these days – and in fact your show is about some of them. So given all that, where are you finding joy right now?

Wow, that is such a great question, and it’s an important one.

I find joy in my family. My wife retired from 35 years of school-teaching a couple years ago, and our son who graduated from college has been living with us. As much as we know it can’t be forever and stuff, he has been staying with us right now and that’s just like mind-blowingly great.

And my wife has introduced me to birding. We go out on our bicycles and we go birding. At first I was just supporting her cause well … it’s very creepy to quote Woody Allen these days, but he had that great line “I’m at two with nature.” You know? But I’ve really just gotten into birding, like I really enjoy it.

But – since you ask, one other thing really surprises me, which is I’ve gotten into writing a newsletter on the Substack app. Just this past January, before it seemed like I could get back in theaters, like it seemed too COVID-y, I was thinking “How do I tell stories now? How do I express myself?” And I checked out Substack and started this newsletter in mid-January that I call But Not Enough About Me.

The thing is - since I was in my teens, I really wanted to be a writer, a writer of fiction, especially. My first jobs were in newspapers as copy editor, but I wanted to be a writer except I could never meet a deadline and I found I just had this writers block, like just writing stuff down for publication or for any kind of public dissemination defeated me. That’s why when I had booked myself to do my very first monolog in ’89 and had planned to write a script but I just wasn’t writing it, I ended up going “Well, I’m going to improvise.” So, out of desperation, that’s how I did my shows.

But it had become like something I knew about myself now coming up into my 60s. Here I was approaching 64 in January, and one thing I knew about myself was “Oh, I’m not a writer.” I mean, I can write emails and stuff like that, but [being a writer] was this sort of fanciful thing. Then I just decided to try to start writing a newsletter and see if I could do it, and keep doing it, and I’ve found it has been a source of joy for me. I write about two installments a week on whatever topic I feel like writing about that day.

That’s been something that’s really surprising. One of the things at our age, and even as I entered my 60s, is like “Are there new things to learn about myself? Are there new things to do and find out?” I had this really great psychiatrist who a year and a half or so ago retired, which gave me the opportunity to use the line “Was it something I said?” [laughs] But one of the things that was so great about him is that he was really brilliant at helping me explore things about myself, my identity, and figuring out what is me as compared to “me who’s the son of my parents” and stuff like that.

I learned that I can have this experience and this excitement of growth at this age - and hopefully the other ages I’m fortunate enough to live into. So that’s been really cool, and sort of another way to express myself and to learn about myself. And I wouldn’t have thought of it if not for these horrible things that COVID wrought and made what I mostly really do hard to do.

It’s great to know that life can still surprise you.

Yeah, it is. And I would put the birding part in there as well, it’s like the me of so much of my life would be “Oh, that’s nice. Oh, those birds are pretty.” Or whatever. [laughs] But to find myself getting into knowing actual birds, like we go around in the Berkeley Marina and the Richmond Marina, and there are particular birds, and families even, that we follow. Which also then connects me with nature and with becoming less human-centric in my thinking.

It’s one of the great delights, it always has been in my life ever since I was a little kid, to realize “Omigod, there’s this way of looking at things that I didn’t know existed and now I have an inkling that it exists.” Or that there’s some profound things that I just sort of assumed were other than they are. And so all of that – it gives me a lot of joy in the sense of there’s some version of the line that a deadline focuses the mind, you know?

I remember when Gary Larson was putting out a Far Side every day or something and each one was genius. And then he was giving a talk years ago, I think it was at MIT, and someone asked, “How do you do it? Where do you get your inspiration?” And he said, “I look at my contract.” [laughs]

But in the case of this is sort of non-allegorical, non-metaphorical deadline, as it comes closer, although I don’t know when and I hope it’s still a ways away, but it’s focusing as well. Like there’s a certain aspect of it that feels different at 64 than it did at 24 or 34. It even feels very different from at 54.

In some ways, it feels to me that there’s a permission to maybe not fret about certain things that I’ve always fretted about, or not fret about them as much. There’s a certain like “Well, here’s what’s important, and here is also what gives me joy.” These things give me joy and as I’m fortunate enough to pursue those things that give me joy, to a large extent, I choose to do that now, you know?

Yeah, as I get older, I feel like the phrase that goes through my head these days is “Well, what are you waitin’ for?”

Right, like “So when were you planning to?” It’s the great challenge of knowing our mortality, being aware of it. It’s the great challenge of being a conscious being, but it is also a gift. As long as we’re fortunate enough to have our mental and physical health that allows us to do these things – don’t wait.

At the hospice, there were these five precepts for caregivers and volunteers, and the one that jumps out at me always is a paraphrase of what you just said. That precept is don’t wait. Don’t wait. And it certainly did apply in many ways to the environment of the hospice, to the caregivers and volunteers and to the family members and the loved ones. Don’t wait to say the things that you wanted to say, to do the things you wanted to do. Don’t wait to walk into that room, because there’s a limited amount of time to connect. Don’t wait.

I think of that phrase, and I tell it to myself when I catch myself waiting, cause there’s not an infinite amount of time that is accorded to each of us.

(photos by Chris Hardy)

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Citizen Brain runs through July 29, 2023 with performances at 5:00pm Saturdays at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. For tickets or more information, visit  www.themarsh.org.

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