Be the Death of Me /
A new installation performance about life and death in New York City
Friday, June 28, 8PM
Saturday, June 29, 8PM
Irondale Center
85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn
Tickets $25
To purchase, click HERE or call 1-800-838-3006.
The Civilians takes its singular brand of creative investigation in a bold new direction with Be the Death of Me, an installation performance piece that offers the audience intimate encounters with matters of life and death in New York City. The audience will navigate their experience inside the atmospheric Irondale Center, housed in a historic church in Fort Greene Brooklyn. Through a dynamic variety of settings and formats, the audience encounters real stories gathered from a wide cross-section of New Yorkers - everyone from ER nurses to priests, funeral directors to vampires, shamans to crime-scene cleaners. Through this myriad of perspectives, Be the Death of Me uncovers hidden worlds inside New York - places inhabited by those that witness the demise of our bodies as well as those that imagine what may or may not happen to our souls on the other side of life. Be the Death of Me draws on months of interviews conducted by The Civilians' artistic team.
"I liken death to a hot air balloon that there are many ropes that tether the balloon once it's full of hot air it wants to rise and leave the ground, leave the earth. But those very thick ropes leave it tethered to the ground, and sometimes those ropes are fear, sometimes they're a very strong relationship, and we think about all the threads that connect you to your mother or your sister, or your brother. You kind of have to let some of those threads go, and you actually need to receive permission from your loved ones."
- Anonymous, Cancer Nurse
"Death gives everything such beautiful meaning. To live forever, you just wouldn't do anything. People already know they're going to die and they just sit around and watch television - that's death as much as anything else... I think maybe people should, periodically, have guns put to their heads."
- Brandon, Former Embalmer
"If you want to buried in New York City, you need a lot of money, or a family member who already has a plot, or you just get lucky with immediate internment, otherwise you're probably going to be buried in New Jersey."
- Allison, Cemetery Tour Guide/Historian
For a listen to somethign else on the subject of death, check out these podcast episodes taken from a performance last year at Joe's Pub in our Let Me Ascertain You cabaret series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. And we hope you'll subscribe for free on iTunes HERE!
And for blog posts with our most recent updates and interviews, click HERE!
