As it happens, sitting in the audience was a young actor named Oliver Platt. After the performance, Platt introduced himself to Josh and suggested that Josh audition for a theatrical revue called "The Gramm-Rudman Act," which was then forming in the basement of the Boston Shakespeare Company. Josh's audition -- in which he sang an original song based on the "Phoenix's" personals section -- landed him a spot in the revue.
A short time later, an actress in the revue introduced Josh to her boyfriend, a comedian named Tony V. Tony, in turn, invited Josh to try his hand at stand-up, at the Open Mike Nights that Tony V. hosted at the Comedy Connection. Josh gave it a shot, and over the course of many months developed a five-minute routine about growing up communist. Perhaps needless to say, this subject matter was not a natural fit with most of the other Open Mike routines -- but the experience gave Josh valuable stage time as a solo performer, even as he realized that comedy clubs were not his ideal venue.
The next year, Josh -- though no longer a copy editor -- followed many of his former "Phoenix" colleagues to San Francisco, where many of them had gotten jobs at the "Examiner." Now supporting himself as a legal secretary, he continued to do Open Mikes at comedy clubs -- predominantly the Other Cafe and the Holy City Zoo -- and eventually stretched out his five-minute growing-up-communist routine to ... oh, maybe 10 minutes.
Approaching the age of 30, Josh felt himself to be stagnating in his nascent performing career. But one of his "Phoenix" friends, Scott Rosenberg (then the "Examiner" theater critic), urged Josh to continue looking for opportunities to tell his stories in the theater, rather than at comedy clubs. At the same time, Rosenberg introduced Josh to an old high school friend from New York, Charlie Varon, who was also interested in developing a solo show. Varon invited Josh to join him at one Sunday afternoon at the Modern Times Bookstore in the Mission; each of them could spend about 45 minutes trying out solo material before a group of Charlie's friends and family.
This experience was a revelation for Josh: the attentive, leftie audience at Modern Times proved themselves far more receptive to Josh's stories than the comedy-club crowds. In fact, freed from a strict time limit and the need to compete with baskets of nachos for people's attention, Josh found himself roaming further into the storytelling rhythms that he'd always hoped to explore.
A short time later, as he waited miserably at a comedy club to do yet another short stand-up bit, Josh was approached by another Open Miker, Ed Crasnick, who excitedly reported that a theatrical space had just opened up in North Beach.
The space was in the basement of a bar on Broadway that was then called Banducci's. (This was in 1989.) As it turns out, though the legendary Enrico Banducci had lent his name to the bar, he was (because of chronic tax problems) not actually the owner. In fact, technically, Enrico was just the chef -- but the owner had allowed him to open a little performance space in the basement, called Enrico Banducci's hungry id. (This space was subsidized by another room in the basement, filled with fake grape vines, that was mostly used to host stag parties.)
During his secretarial lunch hour, Josh ran up to Banducci's one afternoon to audition for Enrico. In the empty little theater, Enrico sat down and lit a cigar, as Josh took the stage. Josh had determined that this was where he was going to draw the line -- no stand-up, no one-liners; he was going to tell stories. And the stories were going to be about his communist childhood -- told lovingly, not sarcastically. For about 20 minutes Josh riffed on his family and their radical friends. The audition went well -- Enrico was laughing and clapping throughout (though it was sometimes hard to see him through the cigar smoke). Afterwards, Enrico called Josh over to his table. "Kid," he said (and you can never underestimate how enjoyable it is to be called "kid" when you're pushing 30), "I'm gonna make you a star! I see in you what I saw in a young Bill Cosby, what I saw in Mort Sahl, what I saw in Lenny Bruce. ..." It was the single most gratifying moment in Josh's performing career, to that point.
As it turns out, Banducci's was not to last much longer; within months, Enrico would be out of show business entirely (reputedly as a hotdog vendor in another city). But in those few months Josh put together his first autobiographical monologue, "Josh Kornbluth's Daily World," using tickets that Charlie Varon (also a secretary in those days) had helpfully laser-printed at his day job. The audiences weren't huge -- on one occasion, faced with a completely empty house, Josh trotted over to the nearby City Lights Bookshop and corralled a group of confused book-browsers, practically pushing them to the theater. But Josh was thrilled to finally be doing what he had dreamed of, back when he'd first seen Spalding Gray. The next step was to move the show to a real theater.
The opportunity came soon after that, when Evy Warshawsky, who then booked the New Performance Gallery in the Mission (she's now at the Napa Valley Opera House, by the way), invited Josh to move his show to her space, which was empty for the summer. And once Josh was at this "legit" theater, he got his first reviews. The day before the Chronicle review came out, there were 15 people in the audience; the next day, there were over 150. A career was launched.
Earlier, a key moment during the New Performance Gallery run had come late in one performance. At that time, Josh was ending his show with, essentially, a song-and-dance routine about his communist upbringing. But on this evening, he was feeling particularly close to the audience, particularly comfortable -- so on the spur of the moment, he announced that he was going to end the show differently from before: rather than tell the usual jokes, he was going to describe, as best he could, his father's catastrophic stroke and subsequent death. For the rest of the performance, Josh told stories to this audience of strangers that he had never shared with anyone since his father's passing; these stories, like the ones that Josh's dad used to tell, were both horrifying but also cathartically funny. And Josh learned, to his great excitement, that theater audiences \ul wanted\ulnone to be taken deeper into the emotional and intellectual heart of a narrative. In the Bay Area's theater community, Josh had finally found a home for his stories -- and an audience (and critical community) that would keep challenging him to bring his work to a higher level.
"Daily World" ended up running for about six months at various theaters -- surviving even the '89 earthquake to make it through the end of that year. In 1990 Josh premiered his second piece, "Haiku Tunnel" (a monologue about what was still, at the time, his day job as a secretary) at the Solo Mio Festival; that show ran even longer. And the year after that, Josh brought his third show, "The Moisture Seekers," to Solo Mio; it, too, was a hit -- enough so that Josh, tremulously, heeded his little brother Jacob's advice and decided to try monologuing full-time.
His faith was soon rewarded with an unexpected call from New York. The artistic directors at the Second Stage, an Off-Broadway mainstay, had been getting reports about Josh from several of their subscribers who had seen him in the Bay Area. They invited Josh to send tapes of his shows, and the next year ('92) they flew Josh to New York to perform "Red Diaper Baby" -- which combined "Daily World" and "The Moisture Seekers" into the very mixture (communism and sex) that he'd begun with back in the bar in Cambridge, Mass.
"Red Diaper Baby" did so well in New York that Josh came to the attention of Hollywood Studios -- and by the time he returned home to the Bay Area, he was under "option" by Universal Studios and Miramax to adapt (respectively) "Red Diaper Baby" and "Haiku Tunnel" into feature films.
Neither deal worked out. Universal kept pressuring Josh to make his "Red Diaper Baby" screenplay more accessible, more multiplex-friendly, and less ... well, communist. And Miramax -- seemingly on the verge of making the "Haiku Tunnel" film -- was sold to Disney; soon afterwards, Josh received a call informing him that Miramax would no longer be making "small films" (a promise they've kept).
Fortunately, Josh had continued doing what he loved the most -- creating theatrical monologues. And, having hooked up with a booking agency, he was now supporting himself by touring the country with his pieces. But it is no exaggeration to say that he still longed to see his work on the screen. Especially "Red Diaper Baby." Josh had been blown away by Jonathan Demme's concert film of Spalding Gray's masterpiece, "Swimming to Cambodia." More and more, as he thought about it, a beautifully filmed stage performance seemed like the best way to present his deepest, most heartfelt monologue -- "Red Diaper Baby" -- as a motion picture.
And after he and his brother Jacob were able to make a narrative-film version of "Haiku Tunnel," Josh felt that perhaps his longstanding dream of a "Red Diaper Baby" movie might really be possible. "Haiku" producer Brian Benson arranged a low-budget three-camera shoot of Josh performing the piece at his current theatrical home in San Francisco, The Z Space, and they sent off the resulting video to the Sundance Channel, where "Haiku" had a number of fans. The Sundance Channel quickly came back with their answer: Yes, they'd love to broadcast this video! Josh and Brian responded, "Wait! That was only our audition tape!" What they'd sent out was a bare-bones tape: no set, no lighting cues, no music -- just Josh against a black background. What Josh and Brian envisioned as the real concert film would still be very low-budget, but (as with "Haiku") it would bring together the talents of many fine artists who would be basically donating their services. The result, they hoped, would be a real film -- not just a videotaped record of a performance.
Presented with this idea, the Sundance Channel again said yes! Neither Josh nor Brian could have anticipated how well -- or how quickly -- all the elements would now come together. David Fuchs, executive producer of "Haiku," supplemented the Sundance Channel's funds with his own, so "Red Diaper Baby" could be shot on (16 millimeter) film, rather than on video. David Dower, artistic director of The Z Space, arranged for Josh to perform the piece at San Francisco's storied Magic Theatre and restaged the show to make it more camera-friendly. Marin-based Marco d'Ambrosio, composer of the original music for "Haiku," created a hauntingly beautiful score for the film. Tracey Gallacher, whose brilliant art direction had been such a vital component of the success of the movie "Trainspotting," designed a wonderful set. Bay Area lighting designer Jim Cave -- a frequent collaborator of Dower's -- created a series of looks that would work well both for the live audience and for the movie's viewers. And most important, the documentarian Doug Pray came on to direct the film.
As with many of Josh's collaborations, his connection with Pray came about through happy serendipity. As Benson had started arranging for the "Red Diaper Baby" shoot, Josh and Dower were spending three weeks in Utah, working on a new monologue ("Love & Taxes") at the Sundance Theater Lab. By coincidence, Pray was also there -- making a short documentary about the Lab for the Sundance Channel (!). Pray happened to be staying at the same guest house as Josh and Dower, and while Josh was talking on the phone with his brother Jacob -- learning that Jake (because of preparations for his own feature film, "The Best Thief in the World") would be unable to direct "Red Diaper Baby" -- Pray and Dower were drinking beers and chatting outside on the porch. As Pray came in to get another beer, Josh was sadly hanging up the phone after talking with his brother. Doug asked Josh what was up -- and, one very long conversation later, they found that they both were extremely excited about the possibility of Pray directing the concert film.
Having seen Pray's documentaries "Hype" and "Scratch," Josh had no doubt that Pray would bring his usual grace and sensitivity to this project. But after the filming, as Pray (a gifted editor as well as director) began cutting the footage, Josh was stunned by how empathetically the film had taken the spirit of the stage piece and created a work that seemed to stand by itself as a movie-going experience.
Now -- with "Red Diaper Baby" completed, and with the tremendous honor of having the film accepted into the Mill Valley Film Festival -- it feels to Josh as if his life's work has been brought in its finest form to the very Bay Area community in which he has been allowed to find his voice. For everyone involved in the movie, it is a case where a labor of love has been richly rewarded.