Washington Post Staff Writer
February 19, 2000; Page C5
"Red Diaper Baby," the name of Josh Kornbluth's smart one-man show, is not a description of an infant with some gruesome disease but a Newyorkism for the baby boomer children of avowed American Communists. Speaking to us without props or costume from the stage at Theater J, Kornbluth explains that his late father "believed there was going to be a violent Communist revolution in this country and I was going to lead it. [Pause.] Just so you understand the pressure." Kornbluth's father was a major-league eccentric. Indoors, he wore nothing except talcum powder sprinkled on areas where he was likely to chaff. He held a series of teaching jobs that always terminated with his deciding his bosses were evil and telling them impolitely what he'd like to do to them. He referred to JFK International as "the Bay of Pigs Memorial Airport."
Kornbluth is very funny about his father and appreciates his charm, but the audience can hardly miss the pain at the center of this portrait. This is a show about getting through a childhood dominated by a nutty parent.
"Bunny," Kornbluth's mother, is quieter, limiting her oddities to acts such as penning an erotic novel called "Sci-Fi High." But she, too, keeps the radical faith. When young Josh finds himself, through a somewhat complicated series of events, a student at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, she relieves his concern about having to cross himself by instructing him to say as he does: "There. Is. No. God."
The evening is full of terrific jokes. Communists don't do well playing Monopoly because "everyone wants to Go Directly to Jail." A member of his mother's amateur writing group "never took buses because people were on them." If Lenin's Tomb were in America, it would feature "an animatronic Lenin" a la Disneyland.
Kornbluth also chronicles his first love affair, a worn subject that he makes fresh, funny and graphically sexy. You'd be surprised at some of the uses to which those math classes at the Bronx High School of Science can be put.
Kornbluth was an adolescent in the 1970s, yet "Red Diaper Baby" feels out-of-time. The devoutly revolutionary parents and their friends live in a time capsule where "The International" is still the great hymn. There is only one reference to Israel, and none to the Holocaust--possibly because, as Communists, Kornbluth's parents classified that atrocity as an act of the fascism they were actively engaged in fighting: They were in the struggle to ensure "never again!"
Audiences probably won't be able to help thinking of Woody Allen, mainly because Kornbluth's hesitant delivery, as if he were uncertain whether telling a joke is really a good idea, and his urban Jewish angst are very similar to the Woodman's. But unlike Allen, Kornbluth has a heart and is interested in someone other than himself.
"Red Diaper Baby" is a tender portrait of Kornbluth's impossible father. At first you may think this is going to be one of those memoirs that, under a surface of humor, bitterly skewer the dead parent. But Kornbluth seems not to have been embittered, only bewildered. He's trying not to score points but to make some emotional sense of his youth. This isn't even a show that's about forgiveness; it's about filial love.
Red Diaper Baby, written and performed by Josh Kornbluth. Directed by Josh Mostel. Lights, Mike Daniels. In the Cecile Goldman Theater at the D.C. Jewish Community Center today and tomorrow.