Sometimes a blind date produces a happy marriage. That was the case, professionally speaking, for Misha Berson and me.

In early 2021, the outgoing chair of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Committee, Lou Harry, approached two people to jointly take over administration of the Steinberg/ATCA and M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Awards. The first was Misha. The second was me.

It made perfect sense to tap Misha for such a job. She was a 30-year veteran of the American Theatre Critics and Journalists Association, which houses the awards, and had been the daily theatre critic at the Seattle Times for a quarter-century. (She was also a longtime contributor to this publication, dating back to its founding in 1984.) She sat multiple times on the Pulitzer Prize jury, including multiple stints as its chair. She was exactly the sort of person you’d imagine running the program that awards the largest cash prize in American playwriting.

I wasn’t—at least in my own mind. Having only been a professional critic for a few years at that point, the prospect of even entertaining such a responsibility felt daunting. My immediate inclination was to say thanks, but no thanks.

Before I could demur, Misha asked if we could talk on the phone. “Let’s see if we have some chemistry,” she wrote in an early email. She relished the idea of taking on Steinberg/ATCA, but she didn’t want to do it alone.

Within minutes of chatting, I knew Misha and I were copacetic. I was utterly charmed by her quick wit and her encyclopedic knowledge of theatre. Having spent 25 years in the newsroom at the Times—and another decade before that freelancing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle—she spoke unironically like a character from His Girl Friday, peppering her conversation with industry jargon like flack, topline, and kicker. She spoke a mile a minute, her honeyed voice still bearing the slight trace of her Midwestern origins, and you couldn’t help but listen and smile.

In four years of working with Misha, I witnessed firsthand her voracious energy and all-consuming dedication to the art form she championed. She had eyes on the regional theatre movement in every corner of the country: A few days wouldn’t go by without an email about a new play premiering in San Diego, or Houston, or Boston that had caught her attention. “We should be reading this,” her message would usually start. Although nominally retired, she would send updates from her whirlwind annual trips to New York City about which Broadway shows she was eager to introduce to her readers in the Pacific Northwest.

Our conversations didn’t only revolve around our work, though. She often spoke warmly about her husband Paul and stepdaughter Sarah; a new piece of music that Paul, a composer, had in the hopper; a vacation they were looking forward to taking. Watching Misha center her family in such a loving and intentional way served as a strong reminder that even the most passionate advocate for theatre and journalism should balance their professional and personal lives. I came away feeling as if I knew Paul and Sarah, even though we’d never met.

But that was Misha: She treated everyone as an instant friend, and we all savored the time in her orbit. Last May, before presenting the Steinberg/ATCA and Osborn Prizes at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, we sat on the plaza of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, already planning our strategy for the next awards cycle. (Time moves fast in the prize-giving world.) Or, at least, we tried. Neither of us could finish a sentence before a friend from Seattle, San Francisco, or L.A.—all in town for the Pacific Playwrights Festival—came up to confab with Misha.

She knew everyone by name and could remember minute details about a production some long-defunct Seattle company had done in 1997. She joked about rickety old theatres with bathrooms behind the stage and productions where the director, script in hand, had to spell a sick actor. A few younger artists who knew her by reputation only came up to introduce themselves and pay respects, which delighted her.

It’s hard to imagine that when I return to California later this spring, I will be alone. Misha Berson died, suddenly and unexpectedly, on Feb. 13, likely of a heart attack. It seems cruel and confounding that someone with such vigor could be taken from the world in a snap.

But to quote the composer William Finn, “The ending’s not the story.” When I remember Misha, I’ll picture her laughing gregariously on the plaza in Costa Mesa, or beaming with pride as she handed plaques and checks to deserving American playwrights. Her legacy will live on in the stories she wrote, the lives she touched, and her unflagging advocacy for the art form she loved so much.

And I’ll be forever grateful for the leap of faith we took together, and the friendship it fostered.

Cameron Kelsall (he/him) is a theatre critic and college lecturer based in Philadelphia.