At this year’s Tony Awards, Tyne Daly introduced the ceremony’s memoriam segment by citing a huge loss to the American theatre: Arthur Laurents. She talked about “the need for recognition” that characterizes Laurents’s masterwork Gypsy. Certainly, recognition is due.

Arthur led an extraordinary life. His career spanned more than 60 years and included writing Academy Award-winning films and Tony Award-winning shows. And he also had a prolific Tony-winning career as a director.

I was fortunate to be able to collaborate with Arthur 14 times and, in the process, we became best friends. I learned much from him as a director, whether hosting him at George Street Playhouse as a guest director, or serving as his associate director on West Side Story (and later directing the national tour) or, most frequently, directing premieres of his work, eight in all.

In all of those collaborations, Arthur stressed the importance of finding the “emotional truth” in the text or subtext of the piece. He believed that was the primary responsibility of any director. Anything that helped to support that truth was gold; anything that served to draw attention to a director’s touch was dross.

I also spent some 20 years going to the theatre with Arthur and talking for hours afterward about the work we saw. He was known, and feared, for his brilliant insights and frequently uncensored criticism. But few talk about his equally passionate praise: Arthur believed in recognizing great work from his fellow artists. There were directors, and moments they created, that he exuberantly admired, among them:

• Mike Nichols. Arthur adored him, and often spoke about a moment in Streamers when the complex nature of forbidden lust and terrifying violence was powerfully captured: Dorian Harewood almost imperceptibly touched his foot against Peter Evans’s foot as they lay on cots downstage, while a scene played out behind them. “That was genius!” Arthur said. “One gesture that caught the whole play.”
• In Spring Awakening, Arthur observed that the young actors pulled microphones out of their pockets like penises bursting forth. He loved the way director Michael Mayer and choreographer Bill T. Jones worked together to help the actors physicalize the entire theme of the musical. “Breathtakingly original,” he said.
• Arthur gushed about Kathleen Marshall’s direction and choreography of “There Once Was a Man” in The Pajama Game when, as he put it, “The driving rhythm of the song became a pure manifestation of unbridled sexual energy—we had no doubt about the core of the show.”
• He remarked on director Mark Brokaw’s incredible sensitivity to the importance of David Morse’s performance in How I Learned to Drive. “That was real direction! To make sure that his sympathetic performance seduced us right along with the young girl. We finally understood the horror of pedophilia.”
• Sometimes it could all come down to one line, and the right emphasis: He praised Doug Hughes’s guidance of Cherry Jones as she delivered the resonant last line of Doubt.
• He talked for hours about Joe Mantello’s brilliant work, in tandem with his designers, on The Pride, in which shiny black mirrors and chrome literally masked and reflected the constant repression and generational paranoia of the story.
• Recently, he was astonished at how Daniel Sullivan, by adding a scene in which Shylock wassubjected to an unspoken baptism of humiliation in The Merchant of Venice, “made me understand the play emotionally for the first time. Sensational!”

I mention these examples to both explain Arthur’s taste in directorial choices and to give a sense of his genuine passion for great work. And what about his own work, of which he was justifiably proud? Probably his favorite moment of illumination was the discovery (first with Angela Lansbury, and then with Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone) that if Rose continued to bow at the end of “Rose’s Turn,” even after the actual applause of the audience stopped, we would become staggeringly aware of the emotional truth of her psyche, and even complicit in contributing to it. It was a genuine coup de théâtre. Emotional truth. A true Arthur Laurents touch.

David Saint is artistic director of the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J.

In Memoriam

• Assubanipal Babilla, founder of the New York theatre troupe Purgatorio Ink—and well-known playwright, director, actor and teacher—has died at age 66. Born in Tehran, Iran, Babilla studied theology and theatre at the American University of Beirut. Upon returning to Iran, Babilla became one of three resident directors with the Drama Workshop of Tehran, before being forced to flee to the United States in 1979. Babilla taught at New York University and Bard College, conducted popular acting workshops in SoHo and led Purgatorio Ink in critically acclaimed productions Off-Off Broadway and around the world.
• Former Theatre by the Sea producer Tommy Brent has died at age 88. As producer and manager of Rhode Island’s iconic summer stock theatre for more than 20 years, Brent fought to be the first summer theatre to receive the producing rights of Broadway shows, and created the tradition of constructing elaborate productions all on-site. Brent is credited with singlehandedly saving Theatre by the Sea’s building from demolition twice—once in 1966 and again in 2007.
• Classical theatre producer Charles J. Bright has died at age 74. A co-founder of American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wis., Bright served as managing director of the outdoor rotating repertory company from its beginnings in 1980 to 1989. He also co-founded the Ensemble of Theatrical Artists in Hawaii, served as press agent and national sales director for the rock musical Hair, and held the post of director of sales and promotion for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
• Leading British playwright Pam Gems has died at age 85. A mother of four with a degree in psychology from Manchester University, Gems stepped into the limelight as a writer at the London Fringe in the early 1970s. By 1976, the commercial success of the play Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi established her as a burgeoning voice in the feminist theatre movement. The following year, Gems became the first female playwright to have her work produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon. The RSC continued to produce Gems’s work, from her best-known play Piaf in 1978, to her Dietrich biopic The Blue Angel in 1991. Gems continued to successfully write and translate throughout her life, receiving her last reading in 2009.
• Actress Marian Mercer, a Broadway star with a flair for comedy, has died at age 75. After receiving her big break in the title role of the Off-Broadway hit Little Mary Sunshine, Mercer went on to win a Tony Award for her performance as a pickup girl in the hit musical Promises, Promises in 1969. Although her comedic talent brought her frequent television appearances and including her own two-season sitcom, Mercer also played classic stage roles in repertory theatres across the country, including Olivia in Twelfth Night and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
• Joachim Neugroschel, translator of more than 200 books from Yiddish, French, German, Russian and Italian, has died at age 73. Son of the Yiddish Galician poet Mendel Neugroschel, he was also a critic and poet, founder and editor of the poetry journal Extensions, published from 1970 to 1975, and a translator for Artforum. His dramatic translations include The Dybbuk, published by TCG, and recently used as the basis for part of Rachel Dickstein’s Betrothed.
• Playwright and filmmaker Charles R. Portz has died in Williamstown, Mass., at age 73. Author of more than 25 plays and screenplays, Portz garnered a Writers’ Guild Award nomination for his adaptation of A Mistaken Charity. Along with wife Bette Craig, he co-founded NYC’s Labor Theater, a nonprofit company designed to bring theatre to working-class audiences in community centers and union halls in the New York City area and around the country. 
• Philip Rose, Broadway producer of A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, has died at age 89. A friend of Lorraine Hansberry, Rose offered to produce the 1959 Broadway premiere of Raisin after reading early versions of the play. It was the first play by a black woman, and the first with a black director, to open on Broadway. Rose was also a pioneer of nontraditional casting in the face of controversy: in the two-handed comedy The Owl and the Pussycathe chose a white actor and a black actress to fill the roles. Rose himself directed and helped produced the 1975 musical Shenandoah, sharing a Tony Award as a writer of the book.
• Clarice Taylor, best known for her recurring role as Cliff Huxtable’s mother in “The Cosby Show,” has died at age 93. Taylor had a long stage career, beginning as an actor with Harlem’s American Negro Theater. In ’67, Taylor became one of the founding members of the New York-based Negro Ensemble Company. Taylor appeared in, and later toured with, the original Broadway production of The Wiz in the late ’70s, and, in the late ’80s, her one-woman show about African-American comedian Moms Mabley toured nationally.