Close to 300 family members, friends, colleagues, and members of the Princeton community gathered Sunday in the James M. Stewart ’32 Theater at 185 Nassau Street on the Princeton University campus to remember and celebrate the life of Timothy Vasen.

Mr. Vasen, 51, lecturer in theater and director of the Program in Theater at Princeton, died on December 28 following an accident at his home in Brooklyn, New York.

The gathering also included current and past colleagues from the Yale School of Drama and Baltimore’s Center Stage. More than a dozen speakers shared memories of Mr. Vasen as a dedicated family man, an avid outdoorsman, a food aficionado and cook, a world traveler, a talented theater director, and a generous colleague, teacher, and mentor.

“Some of us have lost a very dear friend, one of the finest human beings we have known,” said Michael Cadden, chair of the Lewis Center last week. “All of us have lost one of the world’s finest teachers of theater — an intellectually voracious, physically vital, and imaginatively daring practitioner of the art form he cherished above all others.”

Mr. Vasen directed plays and taught classes at Princeton part-time starting in 1993. He went on to direct plays in New York, Philadelphia, and at theaters throughout the country. From 1997 to 2003 he was resident director at Center Stage in Baltimore, then joined the Princeton faculty in 2003 and in 2012 became director of the Program in Theater. 

Mr. Vasen’s university directing credits include many classic works — Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Synge, Brecht, Beckett, and Williams — as well as new works by emerging student playwrights at Princeton, Yale School of Drama, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“I was impressed from the first by Tim’s passionate commitment to working with the students as artistic collaborators on the kind of work that demanded their full investment,” Mr. Cadden stated. “Tim always insisted theater was first and foremost about people in a room together, figuring something out. Initially the artists; eventually to be joined by an audience.”

Mr. Vasen often also collaborated with colleagues in other departments at Princeton — Slavic languages and literatures, music and Hellenic studies — creating the popular course “Re: Staging the Greeks” and becoming a recognized authority on directing world premieres of unproduced Soviet-era projects.

“Tim did a marvelous job directing the Program in Theater,” Mr. Cadden added, “reaching out to colleagues across the University to explore artistic-scholarly collaborations. Tim always argued that university arts programs are in a particularly good position to benefit from the intellectual and artistic resources of their surrounding community.”

Joseph Labatt, a 2015 Princeton graduate, described Mr. Vasen’s influence on his life: “Tim Vasen was the one who encouraged me to apply for an internship at The Public Theater, and my time there taught me that I belonged in the professional theater world. Tim Vasen was the one who let the cast and crew of Half stay in his home for free so we could afford to put up the show in the NYFringe, a show where I made lifelong friends. And Tim Vasen was the one — during perhaps the worst week of my life, as I was quarantined in McCosh Infirmary with gastro and pneumonia — who took over my role in Onegin for our opening night, so that I could sleep in a hospital bed undisturbed for almost 30 hours. I was lucky to have him in my life. He was a good man, and he will be so, so missed, by so, so, many.”

Mr. Vasen is survived by his wife, Leslie Brauman; his children, Sam and Rosie; his mother, Sally Vasen Alter; his father Richard Vasen; and his brother Dan Vasen.