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Josh Kornbluth
 
Josh Kornbluth writes and performs full-length original monologues.
In 1991 he quit his day job and turned it into art. His monologue
about working as a temp, "Haiku Tunnel" later became a full-length independent
film.
What do you really like about being a performer?
Geez, um. Well, I feel relatively passive in my life. Generally, I feel I'm
acted upon, a great deal. I don't often act on the world or have an effect on
other people.
So anyhow, when I perform I'm acting, I mean literally I'm acting, but I'm
doing something, I move around, I get sweaty - I guess the most important part
is that there's an audience and that there's a response. A response to what I
do, that I'm actually - I'm able to test my perceptions and my guesses about the
world, and about myself and about other people, against how the audience responds.
I'm able to answer the question, "Am I crazy or -" and the answer is often, yes,
I am crazy but it also is often, "and also, other people feel that way." In one
word, what performing gives me is community.
When did you quit your day job to perform full time?
My job before I did this was a copyeditor - from '80 through '85. Then I was
a secretary, from like '85 through '91. Then I went full-time to performing. I
performed my first monologue in '89 and I quit my day job in '91.
Tell me about your lift-off, the period where you were doing the day-job
thing, and then you decided to quit your day job and perform full time.
It was the summer of 1991. It was really scary, my brother was either graduating
from college or hadn't yet, or was here for the summer, whatever, visiting me
in San Francisco. I got a gig, two or three weeks of shows outside of San Francisco.
Was that every night?
Not every night, but it was a bunch of shows. It wasn't that high paying, in
fact, it was based on how the audience was gonna be, how many people were gonna
be there. But it felt like a step. I had been performing in San Francisco, and
now I had three pieces. I had done a new piece every year in '89, '90 and '91
and I was bringing those three pieces to L.A. and I was performing in little places.
I was gonna get reviewed in L.A. and stuff, and L.A. is, you know, the place where
all the center of entertainment evil is, and it all seemed sort of promising,
but it seemed sort of like a gamble. I kind of just wanted to GO, like as if that
was gonna be the beginning. Like just saying "that's when I'm gonna start supporting
myself is starting that week." You know, I had enough money to go for a few weeks.
So I just thought, well, that's what I'm gonna do. And then, I always knew I could
type. As a temp, I could go back… you know. I could. I had a particular job -
I had the job depicted in the Haiku Tunnel movie. So I had a particular job, but
I could get another particular job. But, I didn't want to. The previous three
shows I'd done, at the end of each run I'd gotten into this really deep depression.
Part of it was just me, but part of it was also that I knew that it hadn't lifted
me out of having to work [laughs].
Right. And you wanted to.
Very much so. You know, of course, you know. I'd say, of course. It's a great
- are you Jewish?
Yeah. My parents are from New York, too.
OK, cool [laughs]. It's a great mitzvah to be able to do what you love
as the thing that you do. It has structural challenges as well.
What are the structural challenges?
The structual challenge is that you have to make your own structure. That's
tremendously draining. A friend of mine, Scott Rosenberg, a really great journalist,
writer, editor friend of mine, when I met him I was a copyeditor and he was a
freelance writer and he wanted to be on staff somewhere at a newspaper, and he
eventually was, but he had this thing from when he was freelance, he had a Zippy
comic strip on his refrigerator. It was about the problems of being freelance.
About making your own structure. And that you always feel you should be working.
It's this terrible thing. As a secretary and even as a copyeditor I had concrete
tasks to do and I knew what they were. And they were challenging, you know, at
a newspaper, they were intellectually challenging as well as you know, challenging
work-wise.
So how do you solve that structural challenge?
Oh it's just incredibly hard. The short answer is I make sure that I put myself
in situations I can't get out of. So what I do is, I've always had, for shows,
I've had an opening. For my very first show that I did in '89. I was still working
as a secretary but I decided I was gonna do a monologue. There was a space, and
I was gonna do it.
So you signed up for it before-
Yeah, I didn't have a show. And I never had had a show. I'd never done a show
or anything! I just signed up for it. I just sort of kamikazied it. What happened
was that I had to deal with whatever it is I had to deal with. I intuitively knew
then, and then I knew after that experience for sure, that I need to put myself
in situations where something must happen.
Does having to support yourself with your own creative self-expression provide
that impetus?
Yeah, I remember something Gary Larson did when he was at the height of his
Far Side writing. He was writing a genius comic panel every day. Someone asked
him where do you get your inspiration, and he held up his contract. It's like,
you don't want to go back once you've gone. You want to keep doing just what you
do. So it's a challenge. In my case, the way it progressed; at first I did these
shows and I was still working as a secretary, and then in '91 I quit, I went to
LA for a few weeks, I performed, then as it happens, I got a gig lined up for
the following spring. My New York break, performing my piece Red Diaper Baby off-Broadway
in New York. So that was set up and then I was able to do this thing, Josharama,
those three monologues that I'd done in LA, I did back in San Francisco so I was
actually able to go from gig to gig to gig.
How did you manage to set that all up?
I just sort of called people. People started calling me. The Josharama was
set up by Joe Bullock and Marsha Crosby who ran the Climate then in the Solo Mio
Festival. They also, by having the Solo Mio Festival, that set up the structure
for me to do my second and third pieces. And fourth pieces. They always had it
in the fall. So I knew, well, I have to do - that's another thing - "Will you
do a show for the fall?" "Yes!" So then I had to have a show for the fall. And
I knew when it was going to be.
Were these were friends of yours who booked you?
They were producers who I was friendly with, and they first had invited me
to do a new piece for the Solo Mio Festival after I had done one piece. So in
1990 I did "Haiku Tunnel" then it extended beyond the festival in their theater.
And then I did at the next festival with my brother and this other guy, John Bellucci,
I did this piece, "The Moisture Seekers" as a third piece also for the Solo
Mio festival, and that extended beyond. Then we were able to do this "Three Faces
of Josh" thing. I had some sort of momentum too, because I had a few well-reviewed
shows in a row that had been attended and stuff. I went to LA and came back. People
always think when you go to LA or New York that you actually move there - maybe
people usually do but it never even occurred to me to move to these other places.
Some sense of momentum. It worked out that way. It did, and then in 1992 I was
performing in New York and through my exposure there I got a couple pieces optioned
by movie studios including Haiku Tunnel and then Red Diaper Baby.
Were you trying to option those?
No, I had no concept of it. There are people who go around looking for properties
to option for films.
Did you think you were going to make a movie out of Haiku Tunnel?
No, no, no. No. What happens is, you put your work out there. And stuff happens.
Sometimes it's good stuff, sometimes it's bad stuff. It often is unexpected. In
my case unexpected. What I thought was gonna happen, ideally, when I performed
Red Diaper Baby in New York, was that HBO was gonna want to film it for a special
or something like that. And then I would have a filmed version of my monologue.
But they weren't interested in doing it. They didn't feel like people would -
in the HBO stations around the country - would book it, you know, the show about
growing up Communist or whatever. So that didn't happen. Then this feature film
company did, at Universal pictures, so that was a real surprise to me. But it
also became a challenge, too because then I had this new stuff, which was to try
to convert my monologues - in which I'd had total control - into these movies
for these studios in which I did not have total control. But I fought for it.
It was a very trying experience, and also it took away my momentum. I'd been able
to do a show a year, and then I stopped being able to do a show a year. I missed
a year, because I was working on these movies. That was really hard on me. If
I could do a new show every year, I would feel really good. Just emotionally,
psychologically, I'd feel really good.
What obstacles did you - or do you still - have to overcome to define yourself
as an artist?
Well the question that you always wonder about yourself is do you have creativity
left, do you have more to offer? In fact, in the last monologue that I did, in
part, - Ben Franklin Unplugged - I talked about it in the monologue in a large
part came from my frustration that I had already covered all the ground I had
to cover as an autobiographical monologuist, that I had my obsession, which is
with my dead father. And so, in Ben Franklin Unplugged, I think about that. I
talk about it. "Well, what am I gonna do?" I've run out of life, you know, to
talk about. So I sort of try to adopt someone else's life, Ben Franklin's life,
but in doing that I actually come back to my own life. Anyhow, it was trying to
deal with that. There's the problem, how do you keep doing that? How do you keep
- so one of the challenges for me to being an artist is do I have more material
to explore, do I have ways in which to grow to keep it interesting for myself?
And you have a very pragmatic question, which is starting around 1994, 1995 I
got a booking agent, this woman named Kathie Russo who also happens to be Spalding
Gray's partner, whatever, you know, life partnerperson. She became my booking
agent. I had performed in LA a little bit, in New York that time. What she did,
is she had this whole circuit of places that she booked. All around the country.
And the movie stuff didn't pan out. So just when the movie stuff stopped panning
out, what I had there was an opportunity through Kathie to go to other places
where people hadn't seen me yet which was pretty much anywhere, and perform monologues.
And by that point I had four monologues.
Were you performing the same monologues that you started with in 1991?
Some of them. I combined two of them. I combined my first and third into Red
Diaper Baby, my second one was Haiku Tunnel. Then I did one called The Mathematics
of Change, which I did while I took time out from working on the films. Then I
did Ben Franklin: Unplugged a few years ago. So I tour with them. And I go around.
What that created was all of these actual places where I could work, where I could
bring my stuff and where people could pay. So I could make a living by travelling.
So how often do you perform?
It varies. Sometimes I perform all month.
Sometimes I don't perform at all or almost not at all for a couple months.
And I took a lot of time off when we made the film. See, that's the ramification
of it because you need to keep creating the material. Because eventually you max
out on those places. You have a circuit. I always start here in the Bay Area,
it runs as long as I can run it here, and then, I go on the road. But there are
a limited number of places on the road that are gonna book someone like me, you
know, who isn't super-duper-famous, or famous, at all really. Who's just good.
So they have to sell it really well. They have to work hard at it. I have to keep
generating new material. New monologues, whole new monologues, in order to have
more meat to feed, you know, the dragon. Then what did I do? I made a film. It
was gratifying. It was super gratifying.
Did it take some of the pressure off?
No, well, it was just what we wanted to do. We made the film. But the thing
is, it didn't make us rich. It's making its money back, but it didn't make us
rich. It's a great accomplishment, actually, to make your money back. But it's
like, so I still have to work. And I still want to, but during that time when
I would be developing a monologue, I didn't.
How long does it take you develop a monologue?
It depends. During Franklin we had a child, and a lot of things happened. That
took the longest. That was over the course of two years, the development of it,
on and off. Usually if I just work straight, directly on a monologue maybe it
would take nine months, about what it takes to make a baby. It really depends
on the material, too. For the Franklin piece I had to do a lot of research on
Franklin. For the math piece I had to relearn Calculus to where I hit the wall
in it. But my other pieces are totally autobiographical. It was a question of
invention, but not a question of research.
Are you doing these all by yourself, these monologues…?
No. I'm doing them always with someone else.
Tell me how it is for a solo performer, developing it, do you need somebody
else there?
Well, my first piece I did totally by myself.
Was it hard?
It's all I knew. I just didn't even know what a monologue was, or what my kind
of monologue was, when I did Josh Kornbluth's Daily World. That was my first one.
But, starting with Haiku Tunnel, I started working with other people, with a director/collaborator.
And it's everything for me. It's hugely important. I have two collaborators, always,
and one is my director. Which has changed. I've worked with four excellent directors
so far.
So working with another person is obviously really important to you-
It's really great because I have a sounding board. Again, it gives me a structure.
Would you recommend that?
It works for me. It's what I found. You know, what you do is, you find what
works for you. It's like, what do you need. Some people don't need it. I don't
write my shows in advance, okay? I improvise them, and my other collaborator is
the audience. So I improvise a million times, disastrously often, you know, because
I don't want to have any plan. But what I learn is, I learn these things that
only seem to come out when I improvise, in the pressure of improvising in front
of an audience. So I have the audience, and then I have my director/collaborator.
Those are my colleagues as I develop the show. But of course it's my impetus,
it's my story. You know, David Ford and I came to sort of a crossroads and we
stopped working together because he really wanted to make the next show that we
did after the first one, he wanted to make it something in which we were equal
in determining what would happen to this character. And I was like, well, it's
a story about me, it's about my life, it's about my sex life, you know. I tried.
And I was miserable. So you learn stuff. I learned I have to work with people
who allow me to do what I wanna do and just help me get there, rather than imposing
their own thing on it.
Do you have to pay them?
Yes. I mean, you should.
There are all different ways to do it. When I worked with David, it was all
prospective, it was all speculative based on how the show would do, and the show
did really well. He had a very large percentage, I think it was 50 % of the gross,
or of what I got, it was something like that, for the original run. So it was
something very large, but it was against not being paid during the development
of it, which I couldn't have afforded to pay him.
Do you think your education and your upbringing has helped or hindered your
artistic expression? You were a math major.
It wasn't my education so much as my upbringing because my father was a math
teacher. It was my failure to be educated in math that led to…failure leads to,
you know, most of my stuff.
So, failure could lead to creative self-expression?
Oh, it's necessary. It's the uranium ore of my stories. If I was successful
in life, I wouldn't have anything to talk about onstage. Almost everything I do
in my monologues so far has been predicated on my upbringing - it's either a description
of my upbringing or a response to my upbringing or a response to becoming middle-aged
with the upbringing that I had.
What about your parents, did they support your desire to make a living with
your creative self-expression?
My father would have, but he died before I was working. He had a stroke while
I was still in college and then he died just as I was starting to work as a journalist.
Anyhow, I was a journalist and he died. So I never was expressing myself the way
I wanted to while he was alive. But he was totally into that kind of stuff so
I know he would have loved it. But ironically I wouldn't have done it if he hadn't
have died. I wouldn't have gone into monologues. I might have become a writer
of some sort but I certainly wouldn't have done autobiography. I wouldn't have
done it that way.
Why not?
It's all about my father. His dying. It's all about him. There was no impetus,
it was what shook me up enough to do it. I tend to have to, sort of, be like,
destroyed in order to start a new thing. In the past I have. I can't do that anymore.
It's too dangerous.
Do you consider yourself a successful artist?
I'm proud of what I do. I think… I feel.. Okay, there's two kinds of success,
right? There's more than two kinds of success -
How do you define success?
The one thing is that I feel that I get to do the things that I really want
to do. That's the greatest success to me, regardless of money stuff. The other
thing is I've been able to support myself. I'm less proud of that; it's less of
an accomplishment to me than actually making the pieces. I say that, but when
you ask me that question my mind fills up with, you know, with my failures. Maybe
that's part of it. It's a luxury to be able to think about it and not be destroyed
by it. I found a voice.
How do you define success?
I think that's a really important question for all creative artists. Is it
about money, is it about finding your voice, doing what you want to do, making
creative pieces? It's making stuff. I think you're a successful artist if you
have a voice. Having a voice and trying to develop it as much as you can. If you
do that, to me, your successful.
What's the difference between you, and, say, a performing artist or a solo
performer whose been doing it for years, but who still has a day job?
Nothing. Or everything. The fact that he or she has a day job is meaningless.
I've been fortunate and I've worked hard to have been able to go from one thing
to another thing to another thing. But there, you know, there are so many great
artists with day jobs. And I'm not ruling it out for myself that I'll have to.
I don't have any independent wealth. But the thing is, to me, the creative artist
with a day job who's truly creative, who's not doing something by rote or not
doing something formulaic in his or her creative endeavors, there's a world of
difference between that person and a person who doesn't have to do a day job,
like all these successful hacks. People who write screenplays and make movies
that are formulaic and make millions of dollars and direct things. You know: Chris
Columbus. Those are hacks. Those aren't artists. Those are businessmen, businesswomen,
craftspeople. Sellouts. Having a day job has nothing to do with it. Having a day
job and also pursuing your thing, creatively, demands a great deal of discipline.
Just in terms of the time and energy. I've done it, and keeping on keeping on
seems to be the important thing.
What I'm angling towards is the idea of artists who don't ever do anything,
who are these really creative people, but who don't embrace their potential, because
they think of the stereotypical struggling or starving artist. So they keep their
day job and they put a lot of energy that way. I was trying to ask, that since
you've been able to do this full time, if that's bumped up your definition of
yourself as an artist any.
No, it's just that there are the pieces. I have things that I've done, that
I've made with people. That I'm really happy about, that I made them. And the
desire to make more. The greatest thing about not having a day job is the ability
to make more stuff. Not having that impediment.
Warning, here comes a money question: what components go into your income
right now to keep yourself self-sufficient?
With Haiku Tunnel, I make a certain amount of money through acting in films.
And through the residuals from acting in films. I had small parts before Haiku
Tunnel and then a larger part in Haiku Tunnel. So I make money through that, and
I hope to make more money through that.
Rather than performing?
Well, in addition to; I'm just giving the components. Not at the expense of
live performing, no. I just like it. It's fast, it's relatively a lot of money
for relatively a short amount of time. As opposed to writing something. So there's
acting in films. Then there's touring. There's an income that I can choose to
draw on because we've created a company, a limited liability company here, to
support our filmmaking projects. So we can draw a salary if we want. We also have
health insurance. Which I'm really happy about.
When did you create that?
We created it in the last couple months. So there's that income if I need it.
I also get-it's mostly the monologue stuff and the acting stuff. At some point
I made money writing, when I was working on developing these screenplays, that
was years ago, for Hollywood-type things. I don't really want to do that anymore.
There's a lot of things I don't want to do, you know, commercials, things like
that. Oh yeah, and then I just got a big grant. It was my first attempt to do
the grant thing, so I got this big grant to work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
You applied for that yourself?
I applied for it with the mime troupe, they invited me to apply for it with
them. I got it-we got it. So I'm going to write their next summer's show. It's
like $25,000. For this year, it's the first time I can say I have grant income
as well.
What would be some words of wisdom you would give to aspiring performers?
My friend Scott Rosenberg, when I first moved here I stayed at his place in
North Beach at the time, and I'd be going trying out, doing these open mics, and
stuff like that. Often not doing that well, not feeling I was developing. Going
to work the next day, going to another day job, getting another temp job, and
I felt I wasn't getting anywhere. Creatively, financially, or anything. What Scott
said to me, he quoted somebody, I don't know who it was, "In doing the thing itself,
is all that you need to do." As long as you are doing the thing, and you are continuing
to do the thing, you are doing exactly what you need to do. So in my case, it
was I was trying to find a voice, just trying to find a way, a style. I kept going
back, with encouragement from friends like Scott. I kept going back. And in continuing
to go back and go back and go back, and pursue it, for me, eventually The Way
opened up. At least, the way so far. So I think - Keep doing the thing. And the
other thing is, avoid the trap of self-recrimination for what you're not doing.
In my case, it's very corrosive. If you go, "Well, I'm not doing this, I'm not
doing that, I haven't gotten to this point, I should have been doing this is the
past month," those are things that serve almost no purpose.
When you say "not doing" do you mean artistically, or practically with your
life?
In both cases. "I should be performing more, I should be writing more, I should
be doing this other stuff," or "I should be making more, I should be doing this
and this and this and this-" Well, there were a whole lot of things I was doing
wrong, but [READY, FIRE, AIM] what I was doing [right] was I was not letting go
of what I was trying to do.
When you had the doubts come up, you kept going.
Yeah, well, I really wanted to quit.
You did?
Yeah. Multiple, multiple times.
Quit performing?
Oh, yeah sure, absolutely.
How did you overcome those doubts?
I just kept going.
But did somebody say something to encourage you?
Yeah, my friend Scott. My brother, my family. "Keep doing it, it's cool. We
believe in you." Oh yeah, I would have quit many times over and not ever have
become a monologuist. I'm surprised that I continued.
Really?
Yeah. Because I never followed through on anything else before in my life,
really, so…
It sounds like the support of your friends and your family really made a
big difference in terms of keeping you going.
Oh yeah, it's everything for me. I don't have much internal will. And there's
something also that I read in the introduction to a David Mamet book where he
said, the thing that he had to find to see what he would do for a living, it was
a combination in which he both was good at it and he enjoyed doing the shitwork
part of it. He didn't feel that way with acting, but he did feel that way with
writing. And do you feel that way with… Monologues. You enjoy the shitwork of
it? I enjoy even the parts that I hate. What are the parts that you hate? You
know, like having to make up new stuff in front of people and brave crowds when
I don't have material. Figure out a story when it's hard to figure out. All the
really hard stuff of creating. But I love that, too. Because what I'm going towards
is a beautiful goal, and it's the goal of discovering what it is that I think
and feel. The only way I can do that is through performing.
To find out where Josh is performing next, check out www.joshkornbluth.com.
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