NEW YORK—“I like old shoes on a stage,” said Shira Piven, sister of Jeremy Piven (who plays Ari Gold on HBO’s comedy TV series “Entourage”), when she directed me in an Off-Off Broadway play called “Pilgrims.”
Small world. Some 12 years later, we would meet again at Soho’s Crosby Street Hotel in New York to discuss her first Hollywood film, “Welcome to Me.”
Serious stage directors like Piven know things like the haunting atmosphere created when audiences quietly meditate on the abject wistfulness of a 1940s pair of beat-up wingtips, lying on an empty stage.
Piven comes from Chicago theater royalty.
Both her father and mother were theater directors. Her husband, Adam McKay, is a former “Saturday Night Live” director now a Hollywood director. Her brother’s a movie star. The theater-art gene was passed along successfully.
Shira’s first feature film tells the story of a veterinary technician with a borderline personality disorder (Kristen Wiig, formerly of “SNL”) who wins the lottery for $86 million and self-finances her own show on a down-and-out local shopping channel because she wants to be Oprah.
It’s social commentary on our collective American reality-TV and selfie-infested mindset, and how, hypothetically, if we were to put a borderline crazy person on TV and let her go off her meds, America would enjoy watching the train wreck of it all.
