Ben Beckley recently appeared in Dying For It (Atlantic Theater Company), dir. Neil Pepe, and in the first national tour of Peter and The Starcatcher, dir. Roger Rees and Alex Timbers. With his company, The Assembly, Ben has co-created and appeared in four plays–Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, Three Sisters, That Poor Dream, and HOME/SICK (New York Times and Backstage Critics’ Pick)–and is currently working on a fifth project, supported by a residency at IRT and The New Ohio. With the experimental theater company Temporary Distortion, Ben created four projects and performed with them at several venues in New York and internationally, including performances at Mois Multi and Usine C in Canada, The Salzburg Festival in Austria, and The Via and Exit Festivals in France. Other credits include The Cocktail Party (TACT/The Actors Company Theatre), The Illusion (Berkshire Theatre Group), and premieres with Christopher Durang, Kip Fagan and Adam Rapp at The Flea. Ben has developed work with Robert Wilson for Montclair University’s Peak Performances series (Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter), with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for P.S. 122 (An Octoroon), and with Anne Kauffman and Heidi Schreck for Playwrights Horizons (The Consultant).
Performance:
Philosophy in the Boudoir
A full reading of the book by the Marquis de Sade (1795), in the first unexpurgated English translation by Richard Seaver & Austryn Wainhouse published in the US by Grove Press in 1965. No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century–from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka–is indisputable. Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) is a major work that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy. It’s a dialogue set in a boudoir exploring and experimenting through language the links between total freedom of thought and total freedom of manners and bodies. The text is adapted for five actors who give their voice to a relentless Marquis de Sade proposing a radical thought experiment.
Explicit content.
Time: 12 am – 5 am
Location: Ukrainian Institute of America / 3rd Floor / Oval Room
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