John Uecker

Last updated

John Uecker (8 June 1946 - 24 April 2022) was an American actor and theatre director, who is best known for his work with the writers James Purdy and Tennessee Williams.

Contents

Early career

Uecker studied with Sanford Meisner, Mira Rostova, and Kim Stanley. He also was an assistant to Harold Clurman at the Actors Studio in the Playwrights and Directors Unit. His associations with the Actors Studio and Meisner led to roles in several plays directed by Method and Meisner teachers, including William Alderson and William Esper. He made his Broadway debut in The November People in 1978 [1] and began working in downtown New York City. During this time, he briefly lived with Candy Darling and started to work with James Purdy.[ citation needed ]

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams attended a workshop of several James Purdy stories adapted by Uecker and hired him as a general assistant and intermittent editor. [2] Uecker assisted Williams in the writing of many of his later one-act plays, including The Chalky White Substance, which was dedicated to Purdy. Uecker later directed the premiere of The Chalky White Substance, pairing the short play with The Travelling Companion under the collective title Williams Guignol. [3] [4]

Uecker was sleeping in the adjoining room on the night that Williams died.

Mr. Williams's body was found Friday morning by his secretary, John Uecker, who shared the playwright's two-room suite. Mr. Uecker said he had heard a noise in Mr. Williams's room at about 11 P.M on Thursday, but did not investigate. At about 10:45 A.M. Friday, Mr. Uecker entered the room and found Mr. Williams lying next to his bed. [5]

Williams' sudden death has continued to haunt Uecker, who has faced accusations of negligence and even murder. Speaking to CBS New York, on the 30th anniversary of the playwright's death, CUNY Professor Annette J. Saddik said Williams had been taking Seconal – a barbiturate derivative – to help him sleep, and also had been drinking the night he died.

“When this happened, John Uecker, who was his companion and assistant at the time, was still around and told the (New York City) Medical Examiner, ‘Look, people are going to think it’s suicide or AIDS or something bizarre and we don’t know what happened,’” Saddik said in the interview. “So the Medical Examiner, said, ‘OK, he choked on a bottle cap.’ But really, his body just gave up and the eventual diagnosis was intolerance.” [6]

Uecker was hired by the Executors of the Williams' Estate (Southeast Banking Corporation and John Eastman), for the purpose of cataloguing, authenticating and preserving Mr. Williams' later work because of Uecker's extensive and first-hand knowledge of the genesis of Mr. Williams' later manuscripts.[ citation needed ]

In 2010, Uecker spoke at the grand opening of the newly renovated Tennessee Williams Welcome Center in downtown Columbus, Mississippi. [7]

James Purdy

After Williams died, Uecker became more involved as general and literary assistant to James Purdy. Uecker had already been adapting and acting in Purdy's short pieces. [8] From the late 1980s, he began directing Purdy's plays produced by Victoria Linchong. Their first collaboration was on the production of two of Purdy's short plays Heatstroke and Souvenir under the collective title Sun of the Sleepless, featuring Laurence Fishburne and Sheila Dabney. [9] Other credits include the full-length plays The Rivalry of Dolls and Foment. Uecker and Linchong later founded a theater company to produce the work of Purdy.[ citation needed ]

Uecker collaborated with Purdy on a large-scale, substantive edit of "Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue". Uecker also was associated with the creative development and substantive editing of the last two publications of Purdy's lifetime, "Moe's Villa and Other Stories", a collection of 13 Purdy short-stories, and "Selected Plays", a collection of 4 full-length plays for which Uecker wrote the introduction.[ citation needed ]

The relationship with Purdy produced 9 full-length plays, 30 short plays, as well as a novel and a book of short stories. Uecker brought the mainstream press' attention back to Purdy by helping to land a lifetime retrospective review of Purdy's work in the New York Times Book Review. The result was a long essay by Gore Vidal, who framed Purdy's as "the outlaw of American fiction" and praised him as "an authentic American genius." [10]

Other work

For eight years in New York City, Uecker taught a fusion of the Meisner technique and Method acting, which had been synthesized in exercises developed and taught by the actress Kim Stanley.[ citation needed ] Uecker coached and/or directed James Gandolfini, Holly Hunter, Brett Butler Laurence Fishburne, Melissa Gilbert, Sam Trammell, and Jason Hale.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eli Wallach</span> American actor (1915–2014)

Eli Herschel Wallach was an American film, television, and stage actor from New York City. From his 1945 Broadway debut to his last film appearance, Wallach's entertainment career spanned 69 years. Originally trained in stage acting, he became "one of the greatest character actors ever to appear on stage and screen" and ultimately garnered over 90 film credits. He and his wife Anne Jackson often appeared together on stage, eventually becoming a notable acting couple in American theater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grand Guignol</span> Theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol —known as the Grand Guignol–was a theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris. From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, it specialised in naturalistic horror shows. Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, to today's splatter films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tennessee Williams</span> American playwright (1911–1983)

Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theatre of the Absurd</span> Theatrical genre since the 1950s

The Theatre of the Absurd is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurence Fishburne</span> American actor (born 1961)

Laurence John Fishburne III is an American actor. He is a three time Emmy Award and Tony Award winning actor known for his roles on stage and screen. He has been hailed for his forceful, militant, and authoritative characters in his films. He is known for playing Morpheus in The Matrix series (1999–2003), Jason "Furious" Styles in the John Singleton drama film Boyz n the Hood (1991), Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller in Francis Ford Coppola's war film Apocalypse Now (1979), and "The Bowery King" in the John Wick film series (2017–present).

<i>Sweet Bird of Youth</i> 1959 play by Tennessee Williams

Sweet Bird of Youth is a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams which tells the story of a gigolo and drifter, Chance Wayne, who returns to his home town as the companion of a faded movie star, Alexandra del Lago, whom he hopes to use to help him break into the movies. The main reason for his homecoming is to get back what he had in his youth: primarily, his old girlfriend, whose father had run him out of town years before. The play was written for Tallulah Bankhead, a good friend of Williams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Purdy</span> American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright (1914-2009)

James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.

Randall Herman Meisner is a retired American musician, singer, songwriter and founding member of the Eagles. Throughout his professional musical career, Meisner's main role was that of bassist and backing high-harmony vocalist as both a group member and session musician. He co-wrote the Eagles hit song "Take It to the Limit", which he also sang.

<i>Something Cloudy, Something Clear</i>

Something Cloudy, Something Clear is an autobiographical play by Tennessee Williams that was originally written in 1941 as a short play titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer, which was produced posthumously in Provincetown in 2006. In 1962, Williams retitled and expanded The Parade into a full-length play that was first produced Off-Off-Broadway in 1981. Both versions of the play are set on the wharfs of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tell the story of a young playwright named August dealing with his unrequited homosexual love for another man.

TriBeCa was a television drama anthology series created by David J. Burke and co-produced with Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal for TriBeCa Productions in 1993 that aired on the Fox Network. The series theme song, "Keep It Going," was performed by the alternative hip hop artist Me Phi Me.

<i>The Traveling Companion and Other Plays</i>

The Traveling Companion and Other Plays is a collection of experimental plays written by American playwright Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions and in New York City in 2008. It is edited by Williams scholar Annette J. Saddik, who provides the introduction.

The Two Character Play is an American play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in London at the Hampstead Theatre in December 1967. Williams himself had great affection for the play, and described it as follows:

Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? is a short play by Tennessee Williams, premiering on 24 January 1980 at the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center, Key West, Florida.

Jason Hale is an American actor, international theatre director, and professor of theatre at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

<i>In Masks Outrageous and Austere</i>

In Masks Outrageous and Austere is the final full-length play of Tennessee Williams, written perhaps as early as 1970, but chiefly between 1978 and the fall of 1982. The play’s literary roots for characters and situations can be found in Williams’ 1945 short story "Tent Worms". The play title is taken from a line in Elinor Wylie's poem "Let No Charitable Hope."

<i>Rocket to the Moon</i> (play)

Rocket to the Moon is a 1938 play by the American playwright Clifford Odets. Originally produced by the Group Theatre at Broadway's Belasco Theatre, directed by Harold Clurman, starring Morris Carnovsky, Luther Adler and Eleanor Lynn.

Victoria Linchong is an American screenwriter, producer, actress and director working in both theater and film.

Audrey Violet Wood was an American literary and theatrical agent. Wood was influential in the careers of several of the most recognized dramatic playwrights of the mid-20th century, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Robert Anderson and Arthur Kopit.

Leslie Lee was an American playwright, director and professor of playwriting and screenwriting.

References

  1. ↑ Internet Broadway Database
  2. ↑ Purdy, James (2009). Selected plays. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. pp. x–xi. ISBN   978-1-56663-798-5.
  3. ↑ "Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival - The Traveling Companion/The Chalky White Substance". twptown.org.
  4. ↑ Sam Whitehead, "Williams Guignol," Time Out NY, March 15–22, 1996
  5. ↑ SUZANNE DALEY (February 27, 1983). "Williams Choked on Bottle Cap". New York Times.
  6. ↑ "30 Years Ago Monday: Tennessee Williams Dies In Manhattan Hotel Suite". CBS New York. February 25, 2013.
  7. ↑ "Newly renovated Tennessee Williams home debuts". The Commercial Dispatch. 10 Sep 2010. Archived from the original on 8 July 2011. Retrieved 12 September 2010.
  8. ↑ "Nightshift by Allen Frame". BOMB Magazine. No. BOMB 5. Spring 1983.
  9. ↑ Michael Feingold, “Waking Dreams,” The Village Voice, April 4, 1989, 81-82
  10. ↑ Vidal, Gore (27 February 2005). "James Purdy: The Novelist as Outlaw". The New York Times.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42196233@N07/sets/72157624984066036/

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.