nonviolent executions

written and performed by 

steve ben israel

2007 obie award winner

June 26, 27, 28

friday – sunday

8 pm            $15

Reservations: 212-929-2545 or click for smarttix

“Hilarious and moving. One of our great performers.”  – The LA Weekly

nonviolent executions, steve ben israel’s one-man show, is his latest séance to contact the living. A series of short takes combining humor, poetry, stories of rare poignancy, and his virtuosic acting abilities, nonviolent executions is an evening of entertainment with extraordinary intelligence and heart.

Mr. israel started working as a comedian more than 50 years ago, then joined The Living Theatre and for many years toured this country, Europe, North Africa and Brazil as a leading  actor in that ground-breaking group. More recently, he has performed extensively on the downtown scene, in such venues as The Kitchen, The Performing Garage, and The Nuyorican Poets Café, and has appeared in movies by Bertolucci, been a featured artist on recordings by Frederic Rzewski and Anthony Braxton, and has been a guest commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He is a recipient of a 2007 Obie Award.

In nonviolent executions, israel comes full circle, to inhabit the city of his waking dreams and nightmares to confront the beauty, the horror and the possibilities of “the island that creates the spice that gives much of the country its flavor.”

When he finds communality with an immigrant cab driver, a cashier at the phone company, or an old jazz hand, he touches something in us all. When he tells his audience that he doesn’t “like the way white people are portrayed in movies,” he is completely sincere. When he sings the cantorial “Ballad of Black, White, and Jew,” sadness and hope ride a North African musical motif from hidden grief to deliverance.

steve ben israel would present an audience’s most generous face to itself. If he pierces the slick armor masquerading as sense in our time with jolts of love and compassion, it is only his compulsion and our deep pleasure to be so subjected.

steve ben israel was a long time member of the Living Theater and worked with the company from the early sixties to the late seventies. He was a performer in their seminal works The Brig, Frankenstein, Mysteries, and Paradise Now.  He toured throughout Europe, America, North Africa, and escaped from Brazil when The Living Theater was imprisoned there. He then worked to free them and the group returned to bring their work back to the States. In his current show nonviolent executions he brings together his background in Jazz, the stand up comedy scene of the Greenwich Village renaissance of the fifties. and the Living Theater’s world travels. He currently lives in downtown NYC where he “holds séances to contact the living”  

THE EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMANCE SERIES