Lucille Lortel; Producer of Off-Broadway Plays

NEW YORK —  Lucille Lortel, who earned the title “Queen of Off-Broadway” for bringing innovative new actors, playwrights and productions to the American stage, has died. She was 98.

Lortel, who died Sunday, worked in theater more than 70 years and produced or co-produced about 500 plays. Five of them--”A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing, “Angels Fall” by Lanford Wilson, “As Is” by William Hoffman, and two South African imports, “Blood Knot” by Athol Fugard and “Sarafina!”--went to Broadway and were nominated for Tony awards.

Born Louise Wadler, Lortel began her career as an actress in the 1920s. In 1947, she was asked by the actor Canada Lee and playwright Philip Huston to help find a place and audience for a staged reading of a new play, “The Painted Wagon,” and the still-thriving White Barn Theater was born in Westport, Conn.

In 1955, her husband, businessman Louis Schweitzer, gave her the Theatre de Lys--now called the Lucille Lortel Theater--in Greenwich Village as a 24th anniversary gift. Its first production was a hugely popular adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera” that made off-Broadway famous.

Lortel’s eye for and confidence in young talent boosted the careers of countless actors, composers, designers, directors and playwrights, from Eva Marie Saint, Zero Mostel and Peter Falk to Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett and Sean O’Casey. She also established numerous funds and fellowships to further the arts.

She persuaded the American National Theater and Academy to back an experimental matinee series, which began in 1956 and ran for 20 years. Among its presentations were a dramatization of Langston Hughes poems called “Shakespeare in Harlem” and performances of rarely seen plays by William Inge and Tennessee Williams.

Lortel was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1990. A tribute to her career is on permanent display at the archives of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.