Le ‘Citizen Brain’ de Josh Kornbluth cherche à répandre une contagion de gentillesse.
Josh Kornbluth’s ‘Citizen Brain’ seeks to spread a kindness contagion.
From my fast-fading database of college memories, I recall an ad hoc rock-and-roll comedy group comprised of smart lefties. It was called Derek and The Dialectics. David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The New Yorker, played guitar. Despite their campus appeal, they split up after just two performances, and went their own ways. Remnick pursued a life of letters, while singer/songwriter Josh Kornbluth continued his political comic antics while writing and editing for left-wing magazines. Eventually, he quit his day job. In 1992, he debuted in New York on Upper Broadway – the bohemian West Side – with a new kind of solo storytelling. His first show was called Red Diaper Baby, blending comedy with sober reflection to illuminate a socialist childhood growing up with card-carrying parents.
Thirty years later, Kornbluth is still at it, performing his latest autobiographical monologue, Citizen Brain, which is completing a short run at the legendary SF venue, Club Fugazi. Ten months from the presidential election, he is hoping – comically and somewhat seriously – to spark an « empathy revolution » that might help to create a better and kinder nation.
I say « somewhat seriously » because the comic grandiosity of Kornbluth’s vision is a consistent thread in all of his work, weaving topical and historical ruminations with parallel stories about his parents and their dream that someday he’d lead a socialist revolution. In Citizen Brain, for the first time, he gives mother Bunny a protagonist role by narrating her transformation from a wife in loveless marriage to the first love in her life, after her husband passes. The story takes a sorrowful turn when her new boyfriend, Frank, succumbs to Alzheimer’s Disease.
All the while, Kornbluth is telling the story of how he came to be selected for an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the University of California in San Francisco. During the one-year-long fellows program, he and his cohorts are advised on how to positively impact the world. After learning that a normally functioning brain has an « empathy circuit, » which can be shut down as dementia takes its toll — and that the circuit can be reactivated with certain stimuli — he informs his program mentor the has found the subject for his project: to reactivate that circuit for people who are not only the victims of dementia but people whose empathy circuits are blocked by the political divide in our country. He imagines the collective intelligence of the US as a brain — a Citizen Brain — like the data visualizations you see on MSNBC that Steve Kornacki uses to explain to mere mortals why their favored candidates are in trouble.
[Spoiler alert!] Then comes one of the best comic sets. After he shares his dream with his mentor, he’s asked to say what geography he’s chosen for his experiment. He answers, Berkeley, his hometown. The mentor admonishes, « go bigger. » Timidly, Kornbluth replies, « the East Bay. » The mentor says, « go bigger. » The schtick goes on and on until Kornbluth shouts that his audience is the entire planet. The mentor concedes, « that’s big. »
It reminds me of my favorite scene in the original film version of The Producers, by Mel Brooks, where Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder go back and forth, with Wilder increasingly wound up to the point he breaks down (« I’m in pain! And I’m wet! And I’m still hysterical! »). Kornbluth’s skill in performing two characters – deftly paced by director David Dower, who has worked with Kornbluth for decades – is a tribute to modern solo storytelling technique as well as Depression-era Jewish comedy, which aimed to leaven social commentary with lots of laughs. When Red Diaper Baby premiered, I was tickled to see in the playbill that the director was Josh Mostel, son of Zero, who first honed his chops doing comic lectures on serious topics for The Public Works of Art project, a New Deal program that employed hundreds of artists.
Were our government the welfare state it once was, perhaps Kornbluth would have the foundation to scale his effort to fulfill his dream. Instead, he will need to practice the methods of viral marketing to super spread his « empathy persuasion, » a concept that helps to explain why people tend to learn and mimic the behavior of others (like when babies in a hospital all start crying when just one of them cries). Kornbluth’s digital lessons in empathy might be good for that. But there’s no place like a live meeting space to begin the buzz. Throughout the show, I noticed how when one person would utter « hmm, » a random network would hmm sequentially. It was as if the audience was a micro Citizen Brain with our empathy circuit switched on.
So, can a comic storyteller spark a global empathy revolution? Perhaps, with the help of others. It was only deep into the story that I realized that Kornbluth’s method is not to try to persuade people across the aisle (in one bit, he shows how disastrous that can be). Instead, he is training, not preaching to, the choir – theatergoers who spend their lives in their own bubbles. By helping us see the world in another person’s shoes (for those who caan’t), he can help us take action to bridge the divides, with our angry uncles at Christmas, and with the opposition on Election Day. Could the 2016 election have gone differently for Hillary had she and her team were more empathetic? Would she have won the battleground states that she flew over? Who knows? But with a better-functioning Citizen Brain, we can pause and breathe, as Kornbluth does, before we engage with our enemies.
French