Ted Weiant, Director of A.R. Gurney Plays, Dies at 77

Ted Weiant, who directed Stephanie Zimbalist in a Los Angeles production of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia and handled more than 500 performances of the playwright’s most popular work, Love Letters, has died. He was 77.

Weiant died Nov. 29 following a heart attack at his home in Ceaucé, France, publicist Ken Werther announced.

Weiant also helped countless new writers looking for careers in the theater at the Playwrights’ Kitchen Ensemble, housed inside the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and with his late wife, Tony winner Joan Stein, he managed the defunct Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

In 1997 at the Coronet, Weiant directed Zimbalist as a pooch in the comedy Sylvia, which had premiered off-Broadway a couple years earlier with Sarah Jessica Parker in the title role.

He also had a thriving landscape design business.

Born on June 10, 1947, and raised in Connecticut, Edward Weiant graduated from the University of Connecticut. He settled in New York City in the West Village and began his stage career at the New York Academy of Theatrical Arts, where he taught and directed.

He met Stein in 1974, and they married three years later and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her Tony for best play in 1999 for Warren Leight’s Side Man, a drama centered on the turbulent life of a jazz musician; later, she partnered in a TV company with Steve Martin.

Following her death from appendix cancer in 2012, Weiant embraced his dream of living in France and rebuilt his life in the village of Ceaucé. He met Pantelis Karras in 2017, and they married in 2021; they would split their time among the French countryside, Paris, Greece and Bali.

In addition to his husband, survivors include his daughter, Kimberly.