Background

Joe Sears was born on August 23, 1949, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, United States. He is a son of Duel Sears, a rancher, and June Lawrence Sears (maiden name Waddell) a restaurant manager.

Education

Joe Sears was raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northeastern Oklahoma State University in 1972. He also studied under Marvin Gordon and Jay Harnick at the New York Performing Arts Repertory Theatre.

Career

Joe Sears started his career in New York City where he found work on Broadway. In the early 1970s, he moved to Texas and worked alternately as a mental health professional at the San Antonio Mental Health Units for seven years and as a host of a late-night television horror film showcase. He also acted in local stagings of Shakespeare plays, and through this work met fellow actor Jaston Williams, who had also grown up in a small southwestern town. As a party skit, the two began creating a cast of fictional, caricatured residents of a somewhat backward mythical Texas town. By 1980, they had crafted a full-fledged work for the stage, helped by Ed Howard, who would also direct it, and were performing ‘Greater Tuna’ in and around the Austin theater scene. The play chronicles one day in the life of Tuna, Texas.

Taking the play on the road across America proved to be a huge success, and Sears and Williams would eventually perform it over 2,500 times. Big-city reviews were less than enthusiastic about the show’s skewering of addled, small-town America residents, but the play did run in New York for over five hundred performances.

The two playwrights continued their idea with an equally successful ‘A Tuna Christmas’ completed in 1992. Again, the action of the play was guided by the events taking place at the town radio station, but the holiday sequel attempts to uncover who is comically vandalizing people’s lawn displays. Sears and Williams reprised most of the roles themselves but added new Tuna residents to their repertoire as well. The sequel was a bit more successful with critics.

Other Sears’ plays include ‘Red, White and Tuna’, ‘The Good Old Boys’, ‘Eddie Lee, Eddie Lee’, ‘The Kansas Open’, and ‘Last Stand’.

Joe Sears has also acted in feature movies such as 1974 ‘See the Man Die’, and in television commercials. He was affiliated with the Hartford Stage Company, Hartford, the Alley Theater, Houston, and the Nexus Theater, Atlanta.

Achievements

• Joe Sears is an accomplished playwright whose plays were popular among the audience at the moment of their appearance and continue to attract viewers in the theaters around the United States.
  
  So, when his ‘A Tuna Christmas’ was staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., President George Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush attended it and later invited the authors to a White House dinner.
  
  ‘Greater Tuna’ was adapted for cable television and aired on HBO.

Works

More photos

• play

  • Red, White and Tuna

    (The much anticipated third installment in the Tuna trilog...)

    1998
  • Greater Tuna

    (The play originally produced in 1981 in Austin, Texas, by...)

    1982
  • A Tuna Christmas 1992
  • Eddie Lee, Eddie Lee: A one act play 1993

Connections

Father:

Duel Sears

Mother:

June Lawrence Sears