Josephine Abady, 52; Innovative Director at Noted Regional Theaters

Josephine “Josie” Abady, an innovative artistic director of prestigious regional theaters who was adept at improving their financial health, has died at age 52.

Abady, who died Saturday at her home in New York City, had continued to direct challenging plays despite a battle with breast cancer that spread to her bones and brain.

With characteristic spunk, she agreed to direct Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play “Wit” earlier this year at Theatre Virginia in her native Richmond even though she had neither read nor seen the play. It features a woman with terminal ovarian cancer.

“I would say, ‘I live “Wit”; I don’t need to see it,’” she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch when the play opened Jan. 11. “I wasn’t afraid to see it. I just--I know what it is about.”

Despite continuing chemotherapy, Abady’s final six months might have been the most productive of her career.

In addition to “Wit,” she directed a new version of “Abyssinia” at the Lyric Theater in Texas--a black-cast musical she had premiered in Cleveland in 1991--and “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” at the Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Fla.

She also conducted Food for Thought, a lunchtime play-reading series, in Manhattan.

“Josie’s leadership in the not-for-profit theater in the 1980s and 1990s was remarkable,” said Ben Cameron, executive director of the Theater Communications Group. “She is known for the sharpness of her mind [and] her ability for working with actors ... “

With a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and a master of fine arts from Florida State, Abady taught theater at Bennington College in Vermont and then headed the theater department at Hampshire College in Massachusetts from 1976 to 1979.

She then turned professional, rescuing from bankruptcy the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass., and building its reputation during her nine years there. Her production of “The Boys Next Door” moved to off-Broadway and earned her a best director nomination for an Outer Circle Critics Award.

Next came a successful and sometimes controversial six years--from 1988 until her surprise ouster in 1994--at the Cleveland Playhouse. Her first production, a high-profile staging of “Born Yesterday” starring Edward Asner and Madeline Kahn, moved on to Broadway.

In 1991, Abady set up a remarkable theater exchange with Russia and became the first American woman to direct a Russian theater company on its home turf: “A Streetcar Named Desire” in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). Not only was she treated as “virtually worthless” because she was a woman traveling alone, and a Jewish woman at that, she said, but the Russians insisted that she change the ending of Tennessee Williams’ classic play.

“Because political dissidents in that country were often taken to mental asylums, the Soviets would not allow the real ending of ‘Streetcar’ to be performed,” she said in 1995. “Rather than having Blanche committed to a mental hospital, she was lifted up by Mitch [her gentleman friend] and taken off, maybe to heaven or who knows where. Talk about censorship!”

Abady brought the Russian company to the Cleveland Playhouse for a sold-out run of the play, with the audience using headphones to listen to the Russian actors in translated English.

During her tenure in Cleveland, Abady produced 22 world and American premieres, sent two plays to Broadway and then to Hollywood for filming, and sent two others to off-Broadway.

She also developed an actor training program and reached out to minority communities to expand the Playhouse audience. In addition, she increased earned and contributed income by 60%.

When she was dismissed by a board demanding plays with less controversy and more happy endings, she described herself as “devastated ... sideswiped by a bus.”

The financially troubled Circle in the Square in Manhattan quickly grabbed her. The Broadway nonprofit theater had been dark for two years, and she resurrected it with considerable success from 1994 through 1996.

She directed a hit revival of “Bus Stop” starring Mary-Louise Parker and Billy Crudup, and was nominated for a Tony as producer of “The Rose Tattoo.” She also brought in enough revenue to begin paying off the theater company’s debts.

But that board replaced the outspoken Abady in a squabble early in 1996, and the theater sank deeper into bankruptcy, soon closing.

Abady served on the President’s Commission on Scholarships in the Arts, was on the national advisory board of the Drama League and in 1994 earned a grant to make a short movie, “To Catch a Tiger,” about her mother’s work as a civil rights activist. The screenplay was written by her husband, Michael Krawitz, and the film starred her sister, Caroline Aaron.

The director is survived by Krawitz, Aaron and a brother, Samuel Abady.

Contributions can be sent to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City for breast cancer research.