Tanya Berezin, Behind-the-Scenes Off Broadway Force, Dies at 82

By the mid-1980s, Tanya Berezin had come a long way as a stage actress in New York. She had received critical acclaim for her performances on Broadway over the years, and she had won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson's play “The Mound Builders” in 1975.

Still, she began to tire of the hustle and bustle. “When you're forty, it really seems that way inappropriate waiting for calls from people asking you to do a job,” she said in a 1993 interview. “It just feels very awkward and childish.”

Her burgeoning career crisis turned out to be an opportunity. In 1986, Ms. Berezin shifted her focus from the stage to a highly influential behind-the-scenes role in the theater world: artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company, a legendary Off Broadway incubator of talent that she had helped found in 1969.

Mrs. Berezin died Nov. 29 at the home of her daughter, Lila Thirkield, in San Francisco. She was 82. Mrs Thirfield said the cause of her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was lung cancer.

At the time, Circle Rep was often associated with the lyrical naturalism of playwrights such as Mr. Wilson and John Bishop, which focused on the daily struggles of the marginalized and underrepresented. Ms. Berezin stated from the beginning that she intended to expand the company's focus to include more experimental and current dishes.

“Her goal was to bring in more imaginative work — Craig Lucas, Jon Robin Baitz,” Marshall W. Mason, the company's founding artistic director, said in a telephone interview. “She didn't go towards the classics at all. Under my tenure we created Chekhov, Shakespeare and Schiller.”

This new direction was not always warmly received initially. “Certainly, everyone was confused last season,” Ms. Berezin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1988. “Our subscribers were confused; the press was confused.”

She was not deterred. “What I hope will happen is that Circle Rep will continue to confuse people,” she added. “It will never have one specific personality again. In a sense, we are a brand new theater that just happens to be important.”

Despite initial skepticism, Circle Rep blossomed artistically during Ms. Berezin's eight-year tenure, a period when the company broke new ground with plays such as “The Destiny of Me,” Larry Kramer's intimate portrait of a man struggling with AIDS; 'Three Hotels', the razor-sharp eye of Mr. Baitz on the capitalist mentality; and Paula Vogel's 'Baltimore Waltz', about a teacher's relationship with her terminally ill brother.

“It was the most amazing era,” Mr. Lucas, whose acclaimed plays “Reckless” and “Prelude to a Kiss” premiered at Circle Rep during those years, said in a telephone interview. “She invited a whole cohort of writers who were completely unknown to the New York theater audience, people whose plays had been rejected by every theater in New York. She said, 'I'm excited about what you're doing, and I'm going to create a laboratory where we can hear new plays.'”

But Ms Berezin's contributions to Circle Rep went back much further than that. Before taking over, she starred in many of the productions and mentored young actors, including Jeff Daniels, who joined the company in 1976.

Ms. Berezin “was the heart of Circle Rep,” Mr. Daniels said in a telephone interview. Before a performance, he recalled, “she had a way of saying that one thing that became the main thought that you would stick to the inside of your forehead and carry with you throughout the play, and that defined the character .'

In 1977, Mr. Berezin appeared with Mr. Daniels in “Brontosaurus,” a one-act play by Mr. Wilson. “We were cremated,” Mr. Daniels said. 'Mel Gussow of The Times called me 'empty as a balloon', if I remember correctly, and he wasn't wrong. I was just beside myself, crushed, as if I had been exterminated like an insect. She listened and listened, and what she said to me was, “You're going to have to learn to deal with the jealousy of others.”

Harriet Fayne Berezin was born on March 25, 1941, in Philadelphia, the only child of Maurice Berezin, a men's clothing store owner, and Bettye (Shifrin) Berezin, who managed the home.

Drawn to the stage at an early age, she was active in theater in high school and went on to study theater at Boston University. A director in a college production nicknamed her Tanya after noticing her skill in interpreting Chekhov and others, and the name stuck.

She moved to New York in 1963 to pursue her acting dreams and quickly became entrenched in the experimental theater scene that thrived in downtown Manhattan's cauldrons of creativity like La MaMa and Caffe Cino.

She became close to Mr Wilson, Mr Mason and Rob Thirkield, with whom she founded the Circle Theater Company, as it was originally known, in 1969. She married Mr. Thirkield that year.

In 1974, the company moved into the Sheridan Square Playhouse, located in a former garage in Greenwich Village. That same year, Mr. Gussow of The Times praised it as “the leading supplier of new American plays to the New York commercial theater.”

Ms. Berezin also appeared on television and in films until the mid-2000s. She has appeared in shows such as 'St. Elsewhere” and “The Equalizer” and in films such as “Awakenings”, with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Jonathan Thirkield, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 1986.

Despite the creative triumphs during her years as artistic director, Circle Rep continued to struggle financially. Ms. Berezin left her position in 1994 and worked as an acting coach for more than twenty years. The company was closed in 1996.

When she left the company, Ms. Berezin told The Times of her plans to appear in a pilot for a series that Montel Williams was trying to get off the ground. Her role? A high school principal in Chicago.

“It's a lot like running a nonprofit,” she said. “Typecasting, don't you think?”