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.
If the storytelling could be complex, the productions themselves were often anything but. “They were so spare,” Ms. Nixon said. “No unneeded froufrou. You know, Mark was kind of a very WASP-y Midwestern guy, and a lot of his plays were like that.”
The haberdashery department at Saks, the backseat of a limousine and the lobby of a boutique hotel? All handily represented by a few cushioned stools in “As Bees in Honey Drown.”
A few months earlier, Mr. Brokaw had worked the same sleight-of-hand, slight-of-set magic with his direction of “How I Learned to Drive,” an account of a young woman’s incestuous relationship with her pedophile uncle, which was performed on a nearly bare stage. (Mr. Brokaw directed the play again in 2022; it would be his final Broadway credit.)
And the set for the Broadway production of Simon Stephens’s “Heisenberg” in 2016 consisted entirely of two tables and two chairs, with a single pillow making an appearance halfway through the performance.
As Mr. Brokaw explained in a 1997 profile in The New York Times, “I’m distrustful when everything’s already there.”
Robert Mark Brokaw was born on Sept. 13, 1958, in Aledo, Ill., a rural community in the western part of the state. He was the third of five children of Robert Brokaw, a farmer, and Helen Lee (Peterson) Brokaw, who ran the household and worked at the local University of Illinois Extension office.
He studied rhetoric at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1980. In 1986, after completing graduate work at the Yale School of Drama, he moved to New York on a Drama League fellowship. There, he met Carole Rothman, the co-founder of Second Stage Theater, and at the time, its artistic director.
Mr. Brokaw served as the assistant director on Ms. Rothman’s production of Tina Howe’s drama “Coastal Disturbances” when it moved to Broadway in 1987, with a cast that included Annette Bening. The next year, Ms. Rothman gave him his first New York directing gig: “The Rimers of Eldritch,” by Lanford Wilson.
Mr. Brokaw came to wide attention with his 1991 Second Stage production of “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” a play by the cartoonist Lynda Barry about an interracial friendship between two girls.
He followed up with “How I Learned to Drive” and “This Is Our Youth,” productions that were part of long-running collaborations: Mr. Brokaw also directed Mr. Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero” Off Broadway in 2001 and at Donmar Warehouse in London in 2002; Ms. Vogel’s plays “The Long Christmas Ride Home” in 2003 and “The Baltimore Waltz” in 2004; five plays by Mr. Silver, including “The Lyons,” which ran off Broadway in 2011 and transferred to Broadway in 2012; and two plays by Craig Lucas, “The Dying Gaul” in 1998 and “Reckless” in 2004.
Mr. Brokaw had similarly enduring partnerships with actors.
“I worked with Mark three times and always hoped there’d be a fourth,” Harriet Harris, who was in the casts of “The Innocents’ Crusade” in 1992, “Cry-Baby” in 2008 and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” in 2013, said in an interview.
“With him, you always knew that the main goal was the play and what the purpose of the play was,” she continued. “He had knowledge about it that maybe the playwright didn’t have.”
“Mark’s great talent was understanding what the playwright wanted and conveying it to the actors in a deep way,” Robyn Goodman, a producer who worked with Mr. Brokaw on several shows, said in an interview. “He spoke to actors better than anyone I knew. It was a kind of poetry.”
Two weeks ago, just before he went into hospice, Mr. Brokaw held a gathering of cherished colleagues, among them Mary-Louise Parker; Mr. Lonergan and his wife, J. Smith-Cameron; Ms. Nixon; and Ms. Harris, at 33 Hotel in the financial district.
“The one thing Mark wanted to do was to say goodbye to everyone,” Mr. Farber, an entertainment lawyer, said. “He really did love the people he worked with.”
In addition to Mr. Farber, his partner of 36 years, whom he married in 2019, Mr. Brokaw is survived by his siblings, Sharon Zigmont, Debby Brandon, Christina Nelson and Bradley Brokaw.
Early in his relationship with Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Farber good-naturedly accompanied him to Buffalo on New Year’s Eve for a tech rehearsal of the A.R. Gurney play “The Snowball.”
“When it was midnight, I turned to hug Mark,” Mr. Farber recalled. “But he was running up on stage to hug the actors.”
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