The easiest way to describe Mark Brokaw as a friend, collaborator, and director is by quoting my favorite movie line. In 1949’s A Letter to Three Wives,” Linda Darnell is getting dressed for a date. Her mother’s best friend, played by Thelma Ritter, suggests she spruce herself up with a necklace or some beads. Darnell deadpans, “What I got don’t need beads.”

It was 1994. Morgan Jenness, that literary doyenne of the American theatre and artistic matchmaker supreme, was trying her hand at agenting. She took me under her wing and introduced me to Mark Brokaw, who had recently directed Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killing Me. I had written a darkly sexy play about an 18th-century German art historian. Morgan thought we might mesh artistically. So Mark and I met over martinis and began a conversation that grew and evolved over decades. He directed my first professional production, Sheridan, Or School’d in Scandal, at La Jolla Playhouse. Two winters ago, knowing he was ill, I asked Mark to direct my adaptation of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire (a commission for NYU Grad Acting). It proved to be his last full production and our final collaboration. Tragically, cancer took Mark away from us in the small hours of June 29.

In the world of the theatre, true friendships are hard to come by. It’s a business like any other, and its professionals can be as ruthless as corporate giants. At best, friendships are fleeting. More often, they are opportunistic and transactional. But Mark was a true friend. I don’t know if it’s because we shared a Midwestern upbringing (me from Ohio, Mark from a farm in Illinois), or that we were both gay men who came of age in NYC during the AIDS epidemic and managed to survive, or our enjoyment of each other’s sense of humor (Mark sported an enigmatic smile and a dry wit). But we got on like a house on fire. Mark was remarkably free of neuroses. His friendship, much like his work, was clear, precise, and full of love. What Mark Brokaw had didn’t need beads.

Theatre directors are trained to blather endlessly about how they are there to “serve the writer,” when what they means is, “serve the writer a restraining order if they don’t shut up and leave them alone!” But Mark actually loved playwrights. Living playwrights. Opinionated playwrights. It wasn’t about wrestling control of the script from them. He was committed to the collaboration, to enlighten the truth of a play with clarity and empathy. He directed new plays like they were established classics and classics like they were new plays. Often when he did direct a classic, he’d remark how much he missed having a writer in the room. And playwrights loved him back. From the likes of Kenny Lonergan, Paula Vogel, Nicky Silver—the list is endless, and I count myself lucky to be in their number.

Though a deeply private person, Mark made lifelong friendships wherever he went. The love he engendered showed in the work. He helmed some of the most memorable productions and performances of the last fifty years. Who can forget Mary Louise Parker in How I Learned to Drive, Reckless, or Heisenberg? Who doesn’t still have J. Smith Cameron’s performance in As Bees In Honey Drown seared on their brain? Or Santino Fontana in Cinderella? The list goes on and on.

Mark and his husband, Drew Farber, created for themselves a beautiful home. Some of my favorite memories are those of intimate dinners at their apartment with Robyn and Anna, or, when she was in town, his best friend, Lisa. Mark and I shared a passion for the visual arts. We’d spend whole days at museums or galleries (we had a special passion for the Neue Gallerie), and his favorite gift to give were books of art.

And Mark loved travel. There aren’t many places in the world he and Drew didn’t visit at one point or another. I still treasure my stack of postcards, most unsigned, many with cryptic jokes we shared. Writers tend to be gossips. I know I am. I’ve always lived by the motto, “If you have nothing nice to say, come sit next to me.” And Mark loved a gossip. But Mark was like a steel trap. He could keep a secret better than anyone I knew. Which was rooted in his deep sense of kindness. He was the kindest man I knew. In fact, the worst thing he could say about someone or their work, and he’d often only use the abbreviation “P.B.,” was “phony-baloney”. There was nothing phony-baloney about Mark. Pretense and the empty gesture withered at his feet.

Above all, Mark was pure class. 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. The treatment he was on seemed to be working. Until it didn’t. Mark never spoke about his pain. 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.

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.

David Grimm is a Brooklyn-based writer whose plays include Tales From Red Vienna, Measure For Pleasure and Kit Marlowe.