Ben Yalom

Ben Yalom is founder and artistic director of foolsFURY, a San Francisco-based, physically oriented theater ensemble. Under his leadership foolsFURY was recently selected by SF Weekly as San Francisco's Best Theater Company (2008), coined "… one of the brightest stars of the San Francisco experimental theater scene" by San Franciscco Arts Monthly, and won the San Francisco Bay Guardian 2008 Goldie award for Theater.

Ben has directed many foolsFURY productions, including the world premiere of Monster in the Dark, the U.S. premiere of Fabrice Melquiot's The Devil on All Sides (which he also translated), Don DeLillo's Valparaiso, the West Coast premiere of Martin Crimp's seminal avant-garde work, Attempts on Her Life, and others.

In 2005 he directed the controversial musical Bangers' Flopera with Inverse Theater in the New York Fringe Festival and the New York Musicals Festival (praised as "One of the top three musicals of the N.Y. Fringe," American Theater Web; "Outstanding new musical," Talkin Broadway, Summer 2005 citations).

With San Francisco's A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Ben directed Naomi Newman's award-winning, one-woman show, Fall Down Get Up. He also has worked locally with A.C.T., the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Magic Theatre, PlayGround, Aurora Theatre Company, and Encore! Theater Company, as well as internationally with Théâtre Ange Magnétique (Paris).

Ben's work constantly pushes the boundaries of theater, and he has sought many important artists with whom to study and collaborate over the years. As a practitioner and teacher, he is intensely interested in exploring effective ways of applying contemporary physical theater and dance techniques to new plays and classics alike, to bridge the gap between training and performance.

He teaches both playwriting and physical performance at CCA, and will be teaching movement for actors at the Lee Strasberg Institute (New York University/Tisch) in spring 2009. He also has taught at the La Mama Umbria Director's Symposium, Stanford University, Vassar College, and Berkeley Repertory School of Theater.

Ben holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his fiction, essays, and translations of plays have appeared in magazines nationwide. His play The Strange Case of the Jensen Files was produced as part of the 2005 FURY Factory festival of ensemble theater.

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