Byrne Piven

Bernard Piven (September 24, 1929 – February 18, 2002) was an American stage actor, director, and co-founder of the Playwrights Theatre Club, a forerunner of The Second City. He was known as Byrne Piven. Life and career Piven was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania the son of Katie (née Balaban) and Samuel Piven, who were Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants. He came to Chicago in 1954 and met Joyce Hiller at the University of Chicago. They were married a short time later. In the 1950s, the Pivens were two of the founding members of the Playwrights Theatre Club, along with Paul Sills and David Shepard. Playwrights featured such budding stars as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner and Barbara Harris. In the mid-1950s, the Pivens moved to New York, where they studied with Uta Hagen. Piven played the leads in several New York Shakespeare Festival productions. He was also part of the Obie Award-winning cast of A House Remembered. They returned to Chicago in 1967 to rejoin Sills, Sheldon Patinkin, Bernie Sahlins and Joyce Sloane in forming Second City Repertory and then Story Theatre. Piven, charismatic, balding and bearded, with a beautifully resonant voice, spent some time as an acting teacher at Northwestern University, offering his expertise in improvisation as well as his peculiarly sage view of life, combining a respect for zen and the torah. In 1972, he and his wife started the Piven Theatre Workshop, partly to supplement their incomes, and partly to have something for their children to do after school, both of whom pursued acting and directing respectively.