CITIZEN BRAIN Comes to the Marsh Berkeley

The Marsh Berkeley presents Josh Kornbluth's engaging and enlightening autobiographical monologue Citizen Brain, told in Kornbluth's inimitable humorous, intelligent, and forthright style. Inspired to provide a helping hand, Kornbluth began to immerse himself 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. Can a neurotic storyteller who flunked every science class spark a science-based revolution of empathy? Citizen Brain will be presented June 10-July 29, 2023 (press opening: June 17) with performances at 5:00pm Saturdays at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. For tickets ($25-$35 sliding scale, $50 and $100 reserved) or more information, the public may visit www.themarsh.org.

ABOUT Josh Kornbluth

Josh Kornbluth is a mainstay at The Marsh who has developed and premiered his lauded works there for decades, with his performance of Haiku Tunnel being The Marsh's first-ever full-length production. For over three decades Kornbluth has been performing his autobiographical monologues for theater audiences all over the U.S., and in other countries as well. He launched his career as a solo artist with Josh Kornbluth's Daily World, in which he described his childhood as the son of communists in 1960s New York. Thanks to a sponsorship by the US State Department, Kornbluth's monologue, Citizen Josh, toured throughout India. Other works include Red Diaper Baby (Drama Desk Award nomination), The Mathematics of Change, Ben Franklin: Unplugged, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe production of Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan, among many others. For two years he hosted an interview program, "The Josh Kornbluth Show," on KQED TV. He has collaborated with his brother Jacob on two nationally distributed feature films: Love & Taxes, which received a 100% "Fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes," and Haiku Tunnel, which was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. Kornbluth has appeared in several other movies including concert films of Red Diaper Baby and The Mathematics of Change; Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust and Strange Culture, a documentary about artist and professor Steve Kurtz; and Francis Ford Coppola's Jack, starring Robin Williams. His shows have been collected into a book, Red Diaper Baby: Three Comic Monologues, as well as two audiobooks from Audible.com, Red Diaper Baby: Three Comic Monologuesand Ben Franklin: Unplugged ... and Other Comic Monologues. He has taught a course in autobiographical storytelling at Stanford University. Kornbluth was an artist-in-residence at the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco as well as a Hellman Visiting Artist at UCSF's Memory and Aging Center. Since January 2017, Kornbluth has been an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, where he produces the Citizen Brain series of online videos that addresses issues including brain health, loneliness, empathy, and ageism. He also writes an online newsletter, But Not Enough About Me. (www.joshkornbluth.com).

ABOUT Casey Stangl

Casey Stangl is an award-winning director based in Los Angeles. Recent projects include A Few Good Men at La Mirada Theater for the Performing Arts, Steel Magnolias at Everyman Theater in Baltimore, and a workshop of Anna Ziegler's Antigones for the Foundry Project. Stangl creates script adaptation and directs foreign language dubbing for Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and Disney. She was named 2019 Director of the Year by StageScene Los Angeles. Stangl's work has been seen at theaters across the country including South Coast Repertory, American Conservatory Theater, The Guthrie Theater, Arizona Theater Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Jungle Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Portland Stage, and Cleveland Playhouse. From 2015-2022 Stangl was Associate Artistic Director for Ojai Playwrights Conference, and she has developed new plays at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Humana Festival, Pacific Playwrights Festival, PlayPenn, and Berkeley Rep's GroundFloor. She proudly serves on the Executive Board of SDC, the national labor union for stage directors and choreographers.

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