It’s a scene too many of us know all too well. We watch a shaggy-haired, bearded man eating cornflakes in his apartment. Suddenly, the familiar whine of a missile alert sounds on his phone, followed by a siren. Muttering an expletive, the man grabs his bowl and spoon and dashes into the street, heading toward the nearest shelter, pouring milk into his bowl as he eats and runs.
Ben Perry, an actor, along with his Tel Aviv-based family, has turned Israel’s collective pain into performance art. Scene after scene of Perry turning Israel’s angst into laughter, song, and dance surfaced online to garner millions of views over the almost six weeks of siren jumping.
To the tune of upbeat music with ironic lyrics, we’ve seen him dashing out of the bathroom – toilet paper trailing from his back; running out of a shower, covered with suds; stuck with a faceful of needles in mid-acupuncture session; grabbing his challah during a Friday night Shabbat meal; hiding along with his dog in a concrete sewer pipe in the midst of a run; and zipping to the shelter so many times, we feel like we know him, his two boys, Ilai, 14, and Gabriel, 9, and his wife, Vicky Bar-el.
So, who is this man and his family we have gotten to know on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp feeds?
Born in Ramat Hasharon, Perry spent time in England, which explains his barely Israeli-accented English.
A professional actor for 20 years, he graduated from the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio in Tel Aviv. He has been making a living as what he calls an “acting freelancer” in between worldwide cataclysms that have periodically shut down performance careers – namely, COVID and Israel’s wars.
“These shutdowns happen once a year,” he says.
Along with his classmates, he ran a theater group called Tziporela for 18 years. He pursued a solo career off-Broadway in a show called Oddbirdz that had the distinction of a review by The New York Times, and another show called The Next Stop, which recently was “rescheduled” in Israel due to the war.
Perry picked up theater friends wherever he was, so his recent wartime broadcasts reached out to a global array of people.
Poised to make it big on Broadway, which Perry said was his dream, COVID was one of the career interruptions that brought him back to Israel.
Until his literal “explosion” onto social media networks, he was most well known for playing Sharon on the 2007-2009 Israeli TV comedy series Hamovilim, which he says turned into a cult series.
“Sharon is sort of a [Friends] Joey character, one who has a lot more luck than brains. Many people recognized me from that show,” he says. The situation suited him.
“I don’t do stable. I move from one thing to another. It’s how I love doing my thing.”
He says that in Israel he has learned to laugh through tragedies.
“While I was growing up, buses were blowing up,” he recounts. “It’s always something. Here in Israel, you’re just trying to stay alive. That’s the goal. Laughing your way through it is essential,” he states.
“The world needs help to see the situation from a different angle,” he adds. He says he channels Mel Brooks, one of his major influences, when creating his vignettes.
“There is an expression in Hebrew: ‘Do stupid things seriously, and serious things in a stupid way.’ We need to take the situation and show the absurdity of it. If we don’t laugh, we don’t have a chance.”
Ten alarms a night during the first two weeks sparked his creativity.
He explains that from start to finish, writing, filming, and editing a video can take only three hours. Some videos, he says, were more spontaneous than others. Like the cornflakes video. He just handed the phone to his son and said, “Quick, video me” as he grabbed his food and ran the 600 meters to the shelter. His son, who displayed a talent for editing, became his video editor.
“Other videos – the musicals – needed more thinking and storyboarding to lay out the shots. Vicky and I work together on those,” he says.
The comments on his feed are overall quite positive: “Resilience at its best.” “Keep us all on the positive side of life. Next siren, I’m going to dance all the way to the bomb shelter.” “Real-time example of making lemonade from the lemons that are falling from the sky.”
Perry ignores the rabbit hole of antisemitic comments that can crop up. “The Internet is a very bad place. Most of the comments have been amazing, but there are people who just sit online and let their fingers just move.”
He says he has received dozens of messages from Iranian citizens – people who want to meet him after the war and give him a hug.
“These are very dark times,” Perry says. “Israelis are people who are full of light. I don’t understand how so many great people are suffering.”
Turning fear into performance
The Perry family slept in the public shelter on their corner, along with around 40 other neighbors, every night during the missile strikes from Iran. Sometimes up to 80 people would fill the shelter during barrages. That, Perry says, is what gave him the impetus to start videoing his tentative emergence from the shelter each morning, to a happy morning song, too often to be greeted by a siren that drove him back inside.
“We learned during the first Iran war that running back and forth at night was not something we wanted to do,” he explained.
Perry made a video filming his son playing Mozart’s “Turkish March” on the piano with his own unique (Hebrew) lyrics:
“We ran to the shelter, now we are back, but we are sure we will hear another siren, so we will run again and return because we have no other choice. We have no home safe room because we are Tel Avivim, so we will meet some nice neighbors and sleep with them in bed....”
Perry admits he is terrified, but he is afraid to show fear because he needs to project safety for his family’s sake. One of his sons is always the fastest runner to the shelter.
“It is no longer a matter of statistics,” Perry says. “Not when you’ve seen the missiles flying directly over your head. When I see it above my head, I can feel the fear. It’s real – it’s not about statistics. If I don’t keep singing, I might fall into a dark place. I don’t want to show my kids my fear. I need to make them feel secure.”
He says that sleeping in a public shelter is not fun, although the family learned to make the most of it.
“We have no base of ‘normal’ to lean on,” he adds. “But you believe in good and in people. People are amazing. In most cases, in day-to-day life, Israeli people can be aggressive, rough. But somehow, these days we are seeing a nicer side to people.”
Using comedy and pathos, Perry manages to twist the severity of the situation into many different siren scenarios.
The night after his first reel posted, the family went to bed in the shelter.
“I had no [phone] reception in the shelter,” he recalls. “When I left the shelter, my phone blew up. We had half a million views overnight. Before long, I was getting phone calls, and TV shows wanted to interview me. People I know from the neighborhood, who weren’t on Instagram, are getting videos from Facebook and WhatsApp.”
Little by little, he says, the family started to be less bored and less terrified.
“We would brainstorm at home,” Perry says. “My wife is the engine of our troupe. Vicky will take my ideas and put the punch lines where they belong. She dances and sings.
“The musical number ‘Lighten Up’ was the most complicated one to pull off,” he says. “It’s long. Instagram usually doesn’t like long formats. It’s one minute, 40 seconds. But the next morning, we had 600,000 views. Lots of shares, and engagement, too. When I see [American comedian] Elon Gold liking my reel, I know I accomplished something,” he states.
Perry says that the experience of the past few weeks has tuned him in to his identity as a Jewish Israeli.
“I find myself more connected to my roots,” he explains. “I’m part of these people that do this in order to survive.”
Over the six weeks, his videos evolved and changed.
The latest video, “The End? Another Day of Sun” (from the musical La La Land), shows Perry and many of his friends joyfully dancing in synchronized choreography out of the shelter, suddenly puzzled as they encounter “normal” street noise for the first time in weeks.
“There have been 250,000 out-of-work performers during the past few weeks. Most of my friends, all performers, haven’t worked for a month and a half. We met the day after the ceasefire, got together, and in a production number decided to show the world that we still exist.”
With four of his wartime videos garnering more than one million views, and another with two million views, what is next for Ben Perry? What can he possibly do for an encore?
He says his idea for a next project is “War Zone: The Musical.”
“The story is there; I’m just writing it down. At this stage, I’m looking for a producer to discover the potential and the importance and to move the project along. I can see it becoming a full-blown Broadway production.”■