
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Laura Collins-Hughes
JAN 4, 2021
Lee Breuer, an acclaimed and influential director who over a half-century in New York’s downtown theater scene blended genres in extravagantly experimental productions, often with Mabou Mines, the avant-garde troupe he helped found, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn Heights. He was 83.
His wife and artistic partner, the actress Maude Mitchell, confirmed his death. He had had advanced kidney disease and metastatic lung cancer.
A tenacious outsider who refused his sole Tony Award nomination — for his biggest hit and only Broadway show, the Sophocles adaptation “The Gospel at Colonus” — Mr. Breuer flourished in the scrappier realm of Off-Off-Broadway even as the scale of his works and ambitions took him to larger stages, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park and the Comédie-Française in Paris.
“How much of the game do you have to play, and how much can you play against the game?” he said in a 2011 interview. “That’s an enormous question, and it’s a question that’s been part of my life, always.”
Mr. Breuer reveled in colliding the comic with the tragic, the classical with the vernacular, layering in music, and Bunraku puppetry. He was widely known in recent years for “Mabou Mines DollHouse,” a recalibration of Ibsen’s classic that opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and toured internationally, with a cast of average-size women opposite men no more than four and a half feet tall.
Mr. Breuer’s audiences had to be willing to embrace, or at least shrug off, some quantity of abstruseness in his productions. Yet there was often a rapturous, cacophonous beauty to them. At their best they worked on spectators like enchantments — as in “DollHouse” (2003), which he adapted with Ms. Mitchell, who played Nora; the wondrous, child-friendly “Peter and Wendy” (1996), adapted by Liza Lorwin from “Peter Pan”; and the kaleidoscopic fantasia “La Divina Caricatura, Part 1, The Shaggy Dog” (2013), which Mr. Breuer also wrote. READ MORE