By the mid-1980s, Tanya Berezin had gone far as a New York stage actress. “It just feels really uncomfortable and childish.”Her budding career crisis turned out to be an opportunity. In 1986, Ms. Berezin turned her attention from the stage to a highly influential behind-the-scenes role in the theater world: artistic director of the Circle Repertory Company, a storied Off Broadway incubator of talent that she had helped found in 1969. Ms. Berezin died on Nov. 29 at the home of her daughter, Lila Thirkield, in San Francisco. Ms. Thirkield said the cause of her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was lung cancer.

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Persons: Tanya Berezin, Lanford, ”, Berezin, Lila Thirkield, Thirkield Organizations: Circle Repertory Locations: New York, San Francisco