From Erin: Sid and Coca–no sitcom team ever did it as good as they did. And that is LIVE laughter. RIP Sid Caesar.
Steve Ben Israel, Actor, Satirist and Friend… RIP
Steve Ben Israel, a Living Theater Performance Artist, Dies at 74
by Paul Vitello
The New York Times
June 16, 2012
The young Steve Ben Israel was a longhaired, card-carrying pacifist, anarchist, comedian and performance artist who toured during the 1960s and “™70s with the Living Theater, an avant-garde repertory group. He had leading roles in many of the company”™s cheerfully seditious productions, including “Paradise Now,” in which the cast, naked, exhorted audience members to seize the theater, form anarchist cells and overthrow the government.
Making anarchist performance art was a hard way to earn a living even back then, when millions of young Americans were dabbling in revolutionary ideas. But Mr. Israel, who died of lung cancer on June 4 in Manhattan at 74, kept at it for the rest of his life, friends said “” a one-man revolutionary cell delivering jokes, stories and poems aimed at undermining capitalist society. He did not advocate overthrowing the government much anymore. He was trying, he told people, to foment a mass uprising of compassion. Continue reading “Steve Ben Israel, Actor, Satirist and Friend… RIP”