Bryne Piven (September 24, 1929, Scranton, Pennsylvania - February 18, 2002, Evanston, Illinois), was an influential American stage actor, director, and co-founder of the Playwrights Theatre Club, a forerunner of the Second City. The City of Scranton is the county seat of Lackawanna CountyGR6 in Northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 76,415 (2003 estimate: 74,320). ... Incorporated City in 1872. ... The second city of a country is the city that is (or was) the second-most important, usually after the capital or first city, according to some criteria. ...

Piven 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. The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. ... Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky) is an Academy Award winning movie director of films such as The Graduate and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He was born on November 6, 1931 in Berlin, to a Jewish Russian family. ... Elaine May (b. ... Edward Asner Edward Ed Asner (born November 15, 1929) is an American Actor best known for his Emmy-winning role as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and later continued in a spinoff series, Lou Grant. ... The Toys were an R&B trio, a girl group, from New York who formed in 1961 and disbanded in 1968. ...

In the mid-50s, 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. Uta Hagen with Paul Robeson in the Theatre Guild production of Othello, which ran on Broadway from 1943 to 1945. ... The Obie Awards, short for Off-Broadway Theater Awards, are annual awards bestowed by the newspaper The Village Voice on theater artists performing in New York City. ...

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. In 1972 they started the Piven Theatre Workshop, partly to supplement their incomes, and partly to have something for their children to do after school. As Piven liked to point out, many of those children went on to fame and fortune.

Some of Piven's favorite roles include The Man in 605, for which he received the Joseph Jefferson Award for best actor, the Piven Theatre Workshop/Famous Door production of The Shoemakers, directed by Shira, Victory Garden’s production of The Value of Names with Shelley Berman, This Old Man Came Rolling Home and The Sunshine Boys at the National Jewish Theatre, Bob Falls’ Hamlet (starring Byrne’s then-student Aidan Quinn) and the Workshop’s futuristic production of Macbeth.

Piven also starred as the river boat captain in the Uncle Ben’s rice commercials in the 1970s, and many television appearances. He died of lung cancer.

His son is actor Jeremy Piven. Jeremy Samuel Piven (born July 26, 1965, in New York, New York) is an Emmy Award-winning (2006) American actor who is best known for his role as Ari Gold on the HBO series Entourage. ...