MIAMI NEW DRAMA She so loved Beach play with Spanish/Creole parts that she wrote the director a letter

co-founders, artistic director Michel Hausmann and director-playwright Moisés Kaufman, in early 2016. But the resonant, movingly executed, fresh interpretation of an American classic about birth, life and death in a small New Hampshire town at the turn of the 20th century so impressed Melk that she sent Hausmann a handwritten letter.

In it, she called the innovative production — which had the play’s key

Webb and Gibbs families respectively speaking Spanish or Creole at home, another touchstone for a diverse audience — “extraordinary.”

And she added: “I was so impressed. It doesn’t get any better than that!...I want you to know how serious I am about the arts and would love to have an opportunity to meet with you to see if I could be helpful to Miami New Drama.”

Ever since, Melk has been exactly that to both Miami New Drama and Miami’s much-lauded Nu Deco Ensemble — helpful,

generous, supportive.

Melk’s passion for the arts and her efforts to make a difference through philanthropy and board participation go back a long way.

Growing up in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Albany, Melk came from a family of modest means with a rich appreciation for arts and culture. Her father played the cello, and in high school, she played clarinet and oboe in the band and orchestra. She married young, skipping college to build a life with her now-former husband, developer John Melk, who would later team with H. Wayne Huizenga in the Waste Management and Blockbuster Video companies.

While raising sons Tom and Dan and daughter Cindy, the couple lived in London in the 1980s and regularly chose outings to the symphony and theater over going to the movies.

“I was born interested in theater and dance and music,” the elegant Melk says during a long conversation on the terrace of her Fisher Island home, which she bought three years ago.

In coming back to Fisher Island, where her former husband, their son Dan and a partner were ownerdevelopers from 1998 to 2004, Melk moved on from more than three decades in Chicago, the city in which she came into her own as a force in the arts world following her divorce.

Melk served for 15 years on the board of the Tony Award-winning Steppenwolf Theatre there and was a Broadway investor in ensemble member Tra