The celebrated playwright, actor, and doyen of the downtown performance Jeffrey Weiss has died age the age of 82. In the wake of his passing on September 18, figures including the novelist and historian Sarah Schulman, actor Harvey Fierstein, and the critic Lynne Tillman took to social media to express their grief, the latter writing: “He was electric.”
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1940, Weiss dropped out of high school and moved to New York City as a young man, where he became involved in the city’s bourgeoning experimental theater scene as a performer and dramatist. Forgoing formal acting training (he reportedly quit Stella Adler’s class after a single session, finding it to be an “offensive lesson in group therapy”), Weiss’s made his on-stage debut at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1964 in Robert Sealy’s Waiting Boy. In the…
