Peter's journey so far...

Born November 26, 1953 in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Grew up in Montréal. My older brother, Erik Neil Weiss, was a profound influence and inspiration. From a young age, he showed enormous artistic talent and that made me want to be an artist too. I knew I could not draw as well as he could and so I decided to be something else. I started writing poetry at the age of 8 and soon began to think of myself as an aspiring writer.


I always think of writers as prolific readers, but I was a slow reader. I preferred comic books to novels and thought that meant I was stupid. I could not understand why I would be able to easily read and enjoy one Hardy Boys novel and then get bogged down in another and be unable to finish it (I hated then, as I do now, not finishing things) and it was not until I reached adulthood that I found out Franklin W. Dixon was not a real person and that the books had been written by different people, some of whom had styles I enjoyed and others did not. When I was 11 years old, my brother lent me his copy of Edward Albee's The American Dream. It was a revelation - in so many ways. It was something that I could read...quickly. It was full of ideas that excited me, that were mysterious, erotic, compelling. I began reading plays. Dozens of them. I began writing plays. I decided I wanted to be a playwright.


At the age of 12, I opened the Montreal Star to see the following headline in the Entertainment Section: "Peter Weiss has hit on Broadway." Obviously that Peter Weiss and this Peter Weiss were not the same Peter Weiss. The hit was The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates at the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, better known as Marat/Sade. It is a brilliant play, perhaps even the last truly "great" play of the 20th century. In form, it builds on Bertolt Brecht-s theories and practice. Also, Peter Brook-s signature production of it (the one that was in New York at the time) combined Weiss-s version of Brecht-s Epic Theatre, with his own brand of Antonin Artauds Theatre of Cruelty crossed with Jerzy Grotowski-s Poor Theatre, not only bringing together progressive ideas from the previous 50 years of the modern avant-garde, but bringing this revolutionary, challenging, difficult artwork to the centre of commercial theatre, Broadway, to sit side-by-side with The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof.


Plays, plays, plays: in the summer, when I was 12, my first year at Camp Wakonda, my counselor gave me a copy of The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde to read. I read every one. By 16, I had read Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd, many of the plays he regarded as "absurdist" but more importantly, plays of the late 19th and early 20th century that had contributed to the abstract expressionism Esslin called "Absurd." I was most attracted to Strindberg, Toller, Pirandello and Ionesco. I, of course, still loved Albee.


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