Joyce Piven, the influential acting teacher who co-founded Evanston’s Piven Theatre Workshop and was the mother of actor Jeremy Piven and filmmaker Shira Piven, has died at age 94.
“She was graceful until her last breath. Always the teacher,” Jeremy Piven said in an Instagram post Sunday.
With her husband, Byrne Piven, who died in 2002, Joyce Piven 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 Piven’s two children and such eminent actors as John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Aidan Quinn, Kate Walsh and Lili Taylor.
“Not quite sure how to navigate without her,” Jeremy Piven wrote, “yet this beautiful life is about transformation, which was one of her theater games. [She] taught us comedy & drama can exist simultaneously (just like life). She affected so many lives. …
“We don’t know how long we have here in this human form, but I can tell you that we lost a good one. She’s dancing with my father. Be good to each other.”