Mark Brokaw Dies of Cancer: What to Know

Mark Brokaw, a visionary theater director who worked with playwrights including Douglas Carter Beane, Kenneth Lonergan, Nicky Silver, Paula Vogel and Lynda Barry, died on June 29 following a battle with cancer. He was 66.

Actor Camryn Manheim shared the news of Brokaw’s passing on Instagram at the time, writing in part, “My beautiful friend Mark Brokaw lost his battle with cancer this morning….Today, we lost a beautiful, gifted, beloved friend, artist, husband, and son. The entire theater community is grieving today. I will miss him terribly.”

Playwright and screenwriter David Grimm also penned a tribute to his close friend for American Theatre following his death, praising Brokaw as “pure class” through and through.

“I was lucky enough to be among the few close friends Mark told about his cancer. He was a deeply private person and didn’t want a change in the behavior of his friends and colleagues,” Grimm wrote. “The treatment he was on seemed to be working. Until it didn’t.”

“Mark never spoke about his pain,” he continued. “Finally, realizing that he was dying, he threw a goodbye party for his friends and collaborators. An impromptu ‘This Is Your Life.’ There was more genius and more love in that room than I have even experienced before.”

Grimm continued, “I can’t quite imagine life without Mark. At the moment, it feels like he’s just on another out-of-town job and soon he’ll be back and I will hear all the stories. Stories that will never come.”

After graduating from Yale’s drama school found himself working with Carole Rothman, artistic director of the Second Stage Off Broadway theater, on Tina Howe’s Costal Disturbances in 1987, Deadline reports. The following year, he took on his first solo directing job at Second Stage, directing Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch, followed by Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killing Me.

Throughout the next decade, Brokaw served as the premiere director for some of the most celebrated plays and playwrights of the ’90s, including Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in 1996, Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive in 1997, and Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown that same year.

Brokaw would also go on to direct Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home and The Baltimore Waltz, and five plays for Silver, including Pterodactyls.

Brokaw’s work on Broadway was also celebrated, as he directed Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife in 2005, a 2007 adaptation of John Waters’ Cry-Baby, Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella in 2013, and many other productions, most recently of which was a revival of Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive that debuted 28 years after the play’s Off Broadway premiere.

Brokaw also directed numerous regional productions all over the U.S. as well as at London’s Donmar Warehouse and Menier Chocolate Factory, Dublin’s Gate Theatre and the Sydney Opera House.

Brokaw is also the director of 2007’s Spinning into Butter starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Beau Bridges and Miranda Richardson.

In addition to his work in the theater, Brokaw served as Vice President and Executive Board member for the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, as well as President of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation. From 2009 to 2017, Brokaw also acted as the Artistic Director of the Yale Institute for Music Theatre.