Joyce Piven (1930-2025)
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Joyce Piven, visionary artist, director, actor and influential acting teacher who co-founded Evanston’s Piven Theatre Workshop, died on January 18 at the age of 94. With her husband, Byrne Piven (who died in 2002), Joyce created the famed workshop in the early 1970s as a place where students could “celebrate play while finding their unique creative voice through the study of improvisation, theatre games, scene study and story theatre,” according to the school’s website. Over the decades, the workshop trained thousands of aspiring artists, including her children Jeremy and Shira Piven.
Joyce was part of a 1950s theater movement at the University of Chicago that laid the groundwork for what would become Chicago’s improv scene. She was an early member of the Playwrights Theatre Club, which started in Chicago in 1953 after being founded by David Shepherd, Paul Sills and Eugene Troobnick. That company became the Compass Players, which in turn led to Second City, SCTV and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” While at Playwrights, she met Byrne, and the two married in 1954. Shortly afterward, they moved to New York, but returned to Chicago in 1967 to work for what was then known as the Second City Repertory company at the Harper Theater in Hyde Park. They started their own enterprise in the Evanston Art Center in 1971 but soon moved their acting studio to the Noyes Center. In 1996, the Pivens were jointly named the Tribune’s Chicagoans of the Year in the theater. The style of teaching developed by the Pivens is outlined in a book Joyce co-wrote, “In the Studio With Joyce Piven.” As an actor, some of Joyce’s most memorable roles were Lady Macbeth in the Piven Theatre’s futuristic MACBETH, Bessie in Wisdom Bridge’s production of AWAKE AND SING, and Lillian Hellman in THE JULIA PROJECT, directed by Shira Piven at New York’s Greenwich Theatre. Some of her later performances were in GREAT EXPECTATIONS at Piven Theatre and in Lookingglass Theatre’s HARD TIMES. Joyce was also a formidable director and mentor. She was an early champion of playwright Sarah Ruhl, commissioning and directing Sarah’s first professional play — an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO. At Piven Theatre, Joyce directed Rochelle Distelheim’s SADIE IN LOVE, Caryl Churchill’s TOP GIRLS, BRILLIANT TRACES by Cindy Lou Johnson, SPEED-THE-PLOW by David Mamet, COLLECTED STORIES by Donald Margulies, Chekhov’s THREE SISTERS and IVANOV, CHEKHOV: THE STORIES, Sarah Ruhl’s EURYDICE, as well as FESTIVAL OF JEWISH STORIES, CHEKHOV STORIES: THE EMERGING WOMAN, and WHAT DREAMS MAY COME: AMERICAN VISIONS THROUGH JEWISH EYES and SUFFRAGETTE KOAN by Linda Carson in Los Angeles. Joyce was born in 1930 as Joyce Goldstein She is survived by her children Jeremy and Shira (Adam McKay), grandchildren Lili Rose McKay and Pearl Beckett McKay. Per Shira Piven — “Inspired by her passion for a living humanistic theater, she believed with her whole being the unassuming, almost un-American power and beauty of collaboration. She nurtured artists and human beings, and she did it without manipulation, without exploitation and with elegance, patience and a willingness to experiment.” With thanks to WBEZ and Chicago Tribune for additional content. |