In Front of Your Eyes 2026
A Festival of New Performance Presents
Joyful Raven’s
Tactical Frivolity
The Marsh Berkeley Theater
August 27 at 7:00 pm & August 29 at 4:00 pm
Written & Performed by Joyful Raven
Opener: Dara Kosberg
Ticket Information
Tickets: $15 – $35 General Seating | $50 & $100 Reserved Seating
60 minutes | No Intermission
(Please do not bring infants to the show)
Online ticket sales close 2 hours before each performance.
Additional tickets may be available for purchase at the door.
Show Description
Born into a radical theater company, Joyful Raven was tasked from the tender age of 5 with the daunting mission to save the world from impending doom… using theater. Forced into animal-print unitards and political positions long before she was a consenting adult, she never had a fighting chance at anything resembling a normal life. You think your parents were embarrassing? Did you have to sing about salmon sex on stage, in a unitard, at 12 years old… WITH your parents? I didn’t think so. In an attempt to heal her hippie trauma, she runs away from home to seek solace in the arms of a spiritual teacher… and accidentally finds herself in the yoga-to-fascism pipeline. Can she save herself? Can she save the world… using theater?! Or does she have to choose? Blending standup, drag, storytelling, & clown, Raven takes audiences on a dystopian and hilarious romp through the looking glass.
Artist Biography
Joyful Raven, Actor and Director
Joyful Raven is an award-winning actor, director, and “story midwife” known for her powerful and thought-provoking solo shows, where she tackles thorny social issues with humor, heart, and nuance. Born into an iconic political theater family, she has been devising original work for over 20 years. Her first solo comedy, Tales of a Sexual Tomboy, was dubbed “…one of the funniest shows now on display on Bay Area stages” by the SF Chronicle, won Best of the Fringe at the 2016 San Francisco International Fringe Festival, and enjoyed an Off-Broadway run in 2017. Her latest solo show, Breed or Bust, was nominated for Best Comedy at the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival, critically acclaimed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, where it won an Offie (OffWestEnd Award), and went on to have an extended run at The Marsh, where it received a Critics’ Pick in the SF Chronicle. She co-founded the award-winning theater company Rococo Risqué and co-authored four plays for the Prize of Hope-winning company Human Nature. As an actor, she has appeared in numerous stage and film projects, including Odyssey Works, the film The Pursuit of Happyness alongside Will Smith, and Spring Awakening, directed by Stafford Arima. Joyful holds an MFA in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Davis, and teaches solo performance and storytelling at Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, The Marsh, and her own studio in Berkeley.
Opener
Dara Kosberg
Dara Kosberg is a storyteller, comedian, writer, and actor. She recently debuted her solo storytelling show “Homecoming” to multiple sold-out audiences at NYC’s Under St. Mark and LA’s Lyric Hyperion, as well as in Chicago’s Color Club and Atlanta’s The Supermarket. She’s a Moth StorySlam winner and has performed at San Francisco’s Punch Line Comedy Club and Brooklyn’s Union Hall. As part of the Reimagine End of Life arts festival in SF and NYC, she’s produced and performed in comedy shows about grief and loss that demonstrate the healing power of humor.
Piece Description – Homecoming
Dara is studying art in Australia when she gets that call— her mom is dying, and she has to come home. Suddenly, their already difficult mother/daughter relationship becomes a lot more complicated. How do you make amends with a dead mom?
What follows is a winding journey through the awkward, painful, unexpectedly hilarious process of finding yourself again after loss.
“Homecoming” is a darkly funny solo show about complicated grief, identity, and how losing your mom can really mess with your study abroad year (and the next 20 years after that).
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