There are lots of things I don’t know about myself -- but for the past 20-odd years I’ve at least been certain of this: I’m a monologuist.  I am one of those self-absorbed people who stand alone onstage and talk (and talk and talk).  But now! -- well, now I face a new phase in my performing life.  And it’s kind of freaking me out.  In a good way, but still.

It all started when Patrick Dooley, artistic director of the Shotgun Players in Berkeley, commissioned a new piece from me.  I was thrilled, of course, and immediately started dreaming of what my next monologue might be.  And that’s when Patrick added the kicker: He wanted this show -- which I eventually titled Sea of Reeds -- to have other people onstage with me.

And the thing is, I’ve never shared a stage -- ever!  (Not for a full-length play, at least.)  For a couple of decades now, when I’ve performed I’ve looked directly into the eyes of the audience.  What would it be like to look into the eyes of another actor?  In movies, when two actors look into each other’s eyes, I often see their eyes kind of wiggle --  looking at one of their fellow actor’s eyes, then the other, back and forth.  But also I remember seeing an instructional video by the great actor Michael Caine in which he said you should actually look at the forehead of the other actor -- which, magically, will make the viewer think you are looking into that person’s eyes.  I think if I ever tried that, I’d have a breakdown!  I’m so dependent on people reflecting back to me with their eyes -- reflecting kindness, interest, wonder, even perplexity.  What emotional feedback could a forehead give me?

This was only one of many concerns I had as I flew east a few weeks ago with my pal Amy Resnick, who is an amazing and very experienced actor.  We were going to spend a week at Emerson College in Boston, where my longtime director and collaborator, David Dower, now works.  For 16 years or so David and I had made monologues together -- always with the same process: I would improvise and he would take my wild ramblings and help shape them into an actual piece.  This time, for Sea of Reeds, I’d still be improvising with David -- but Amy would be there too, reacting, suggesting, and improvising.  How would this work?  None of us knew what to expect.

We gathered in a rehearsal room, sitting around a table.  And, as usual, I started “downloading” to David about all the stuff I’d been thinking about and reading: different takes, or midrashim, on incidents from the Book of Exodus, especially the Sea of Reeds episode; stories from my trip a couple of summers ago to Israel, where I was bar mitvahed at the age of 52; childhood memories of practicing the oboe (a major element in this story) and of not practicing Judaism, as my family was totally secular.

David nodded and took notes and began his miraculous and mysterious process of finding a shape for my entropy.  And then ...someone else was speaking!  It was Amy!  This totally threw me.

Why did I feel this way?  I mean, I’d invited Amy to come and collaborate with David and me.  In my conscious mind, I knew that.  But in my case, at least, the conscious mind usually has very little impact on my actions.  Underneath -- in a subconscious chamber of my soul -- there was a visceral response to having another voice participate in my storytelling.  This reaction was multifaceted: on the one hand, I realized how much I’d been longing to not just hear myself talk (and talk and talk); on the other, there was a kind of infantile resistance to having anyone else inside my head, so to speak.  And I would alternate between being delighted at hearing this new voice and being terrified that I might lose touch with my own.

I think that one reason I do autobiographical monologues is that this gives me the illusion of having some control over my unruly life.  My general sense of myself, in almost all situations, is that I’m a mess; but later, when I tell the stories of those situations, there is (with David’s help) a shape, a structure to them.  And as I stand alone onstage, there is no one to contradict me -- to suggest that there might be other interpretations of what I’ve experienced.  But there are many dangers to practicing this form, and one of them is that I might start to believe that the stories I’m telling are true -- or, to put it another way, that my perspective is the only legitimate one.

Amy and I were put up in a couple of Emerson’s very nice guest-artist apartments, and our first night in Boston she came over after dinner with some sweets and we watched a bunch of videos that my son had made during the Israel trip.  I had never watched them before.  As we went through video after video -- from the Old City of Jerusalem and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, to an archeological dig and the Golan Heights -- I began to realize why I’d never watched them: it was because they were so emotional, so fraught with often-contradictory thoughts and feelings.

We watched the videos in chronological order, eventually getting to the one that showed my bar mitzvah ceremony, atop a water tower on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert.  In my memory, that ceremony had been powerful, but as I’d retold it to David and Amy earlier that day, I’d made it sound lighthearted and fun.  Yet now, as Amy watched the video, she kept talking about how moved it showed me to be -- indeed, I was often crying.  And the unruly feelings from that day started coming back to me: my joy at experiencing this with my (non-Jewish) wife and son and some wonderful new friends; my confusion at what my anti-religious father might have made of this; my awe that the rabbi had borrowed  for this occasion a Torah that had been rescued during the Holocaust by Lithuanian partisans; my intense nervousness about delivering my parsha (Torah portion) and drash (interpretation of that passage); my annoyance that a feral cat nearby had begun heckling me (I found out later that it was a peacock, which seemed a lot cooler).  Having Amy there with me -- seeing my self of two years ago through her eyes -- taught me that not only had I been allowing my current perspective to block out what other people perceived, but I’d also been allowing it to occlude aspects of my earlier selves.

As our week in Boston progressed, I kept alternating between enjoying what I was learning from this new, multi-person creative process and being completely weirded out by it.  It wasn’t until the last day that I made the connection between that process and the subject of Sea of Reeds: grappling with the great complexities of personal and group identity, as experienced in my recent explorations of Judaism.

The answers I’m looking for are not inside myself, waiting to be regurgitated and maybe cleaned up a bit; they exist between me and others, and, like the breath moving through the oboe’s double reed, can only be discerned in the vibrations that emanate from that space.

A monologue can do a lot of things, but some tasks call for a dialogue.

Who knew?

Sea of Reeds will open in July at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley and move to the JCCSF in January.  Besides Josh and Amy, there will also be a number of musicians onstage, playing Bach, Sephardic tunes, and original music written by composer Marco d’Ambrosio.