On Monday, Feb. 27, I’ll be performing my comic monologue Ben Franklin: Unplugged at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley — with all proceeds going to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. (The LLS runs Team In Training, the wonderful organization that is whipping me into shape to bike the Solvang Century next month.) As far as … Read more
What I do on stage is called “solo performance,” and people sometimes ask me (with real sympathy), “Isn’t it lonely up there?” And I tell them, emphatically, No, it isn’t! There’s my crew — up in a booth (possibly knitting during the long stretches between cues). There are all the characters in my monologues — … Read more
This was really fun! I was conducting a storytelling workshop with a group of theater students in Bangalore — in the lobby of the magnificent Ranga Shankara theater, where I had performed Citizen Josh the night before — and one of the students mentioned that she’d had to give a presentation on the evolution of … Read more
Here’s a little video from a workshop I conducted with theater students at a public university in the southern Indian state of Kerala. They had first served lunch to me and my stage manager, Bob, and had laughed a lot over my inability to pick up their style of eating. You mix the rice, at … Read more
Here’s a tiny video teaser from Chennai, the first stop in my current tour of India with Citizen Josh. (Right now I’m in my third city, Bangalore, and about to set off for Mumbai.) My guide is the charming Ratna Mukherjee, of the very hip U.S. Consulate in Chennai, which is the capital of the … Read more