By the mid-1980s, Tanya Berezin had come a long way as an actress on the New York stage. She had garnered rave reviews for her Off Broadway performances over the years and won an Obie Award for her role in Lanford Wilson’s “The Mound Builders” in 1975.
Even so, he was getting tired of the fuss. “When you’re 40 it really does look like that unsuitable waiting for people to call to ask you to do a job,” he said in an interview in 1993. “It feels very awkward and childish.”
Her budding career turned out to be an opportunity. In 1986, Ms. Berezin turned her attention from the stage to an influential behind-the-scenes role in the theater world: artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company, a historic incubator of Off Broadway talent she had helped found in 1969.
Mrs. Berezin died Nov. 29 at the home of her daughter, Lila Thirkield, in San Francisco. He was 82 years old. Ms Thirkild said the cause of her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was lung cancer.
Circle Rep at the time was often associated with the lyrical naturalism of playwrights such as Mr. Wilson and John Bishop, which focused on the everyday struggles of the marginalized and underrepresented. Ms. Berezin said from the start that she planned to expand the company’s focus to include more experimental and topical fare.
“Her goal was to bring in more imaginative work — Craig Lucas, John Robin Baitz,” Marshall W. Mason, the company’s founding art director, said in a telephone interview. “It didn’t go classical at all. During my tenure we performed Chekhov, Shakespeare and Schiller.”
This new direction was not always warmly received at first. “Certainly everybody 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 undaunted. “What I hope will happen is that Circle Rep continues to confuse people,” he added. “He will never have a specific personality again. In a sense, we’re a brand new theater that happens to be important.”
Despite initial skepticism, Circle Rep began to flourish artistically during Ms. Berezin’s eight-year tenure, a period in which the company broke new ground with such plays as ”The Destiny of Me,” Larry Kramer’s intimate interpretation of a man dealing with AIDS. “Three Hotels,” Mr. Baitz’s sharp look at the capitalist mentality. and Paula Vogel’s “Baltimore Waltz,” about a teacher’s relationship with her terminally ill brother.
“It was the most amazing time,” Mr. Lucas, whose plays “Reckless” and “Prelude to a Kiss” premiered at Circle Rep during those years, said in a telephone interview. “He invited a whole group of writers who were completely unknown to the New York theater public, people whose plays had been rejected by all the theaters in New York. She said, “I’m excited about what you’re doing and I’m going to create a workshop where we can listen to new works.”
But Ms. Berezin’s contributions to Circle Rep went back much further than that. Before taking the helm, he had acted in many of its 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 recalls, “he had a way of saying this one thing that became the staple he thought you would tape to the inside of your forehead and carry with you through the whole play, and it defined the character.”
In 1977, Ms. Berezin appeared with Mr. Daniels in “Brontosaurus,” a one-act play by Mr. Wilson. “We got cream,” Mr. Daniels said. “Mel Gussow of the Times called me ’empty like a balloon,’ if I remember correctly, and he wasn’t wrong. I was just beside myself, devastated, like I’d been wiped out like a bug. He listened and listened, and what he said to me was, “You should learn how to deal with other people’s jealousy.”
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, a housekeeper.
Drawn to the stage from 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 ability to perform Chekhov and others, and the name stuck.
She moved to New York in 1963 to pursue her acting dreams and quickly established herself in the experimental theater scene that was flourishing in midtown Manhattan cauldrons of creativity like La MaMa and Caffe Cino.
She became close with Mr. Wilson, Mr. Mason and Rob Thirkield, with whom she founded the Circle Theater Company, as it was originally known, in 1969. That year she married Mr. Thirkield.
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 hailed it as “the leading supplier of new American plays to the New York commercial theater.”
Ms. Berezin also acted in television and film in the mid-2000s. She was seen 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 her creative triumphs during her years as artistic director, Circle Rep continued to struggle financially. Ms. Berezin left her position in 1994 and for more than two decades worked as an acting coach. The company closed in 1996.
After leaving 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? High school principal in Chicago.
“It’s a lot like running a nonprofit,” he said. “Typing, don’t you think?”