03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mark Brokaw, Theater Director Known for Slight-of-Set Magic, Dies at 66
Mark Brokaw, a director of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional productions, who shepherded the work of rising playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Kron, Paula Vogel and Nicky Silver beginning in the early 1990s, died on June 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 66.
His husband, Andrew Farber, said the cause was prostate cancer.
Mr. Brokaw was comfortable with the classics. He directed productions of Molière's 'Tartuffe,' W. Somerset Maugham's 'The Constant Wife' and the musical 'Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella' — albeit a Cinderella with a fresh, feminist gloss.
But he was a specialist in new plays, including Patrick Marber's 'After Miss Julie,' which he directed in 2009; Mr. Lonergan's 'This Is Our Youth,' which he directed in 1996 and again in 1998; and Ms. Kron's 'The 2.5 Minute Mile,' in 1999. And he had something of a subspecialty in the nonlinear storytelling seen in works like Douglas Carter Beane's 'As Bees in Honey Drown' and Ms. Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning 'How I Learned to Drive'; he directed both in 1997.
'Mark was especially good with plays that jump around in time, and you had multiple people playing multiple parts,' said the actor Cynthia Nixon, who worked with Mr. Brokaw on 'As Bees in Honey Drown' and Lisa Loomer's 'Distracted' in 2009.
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