Marlyn A. Robinson
Actress, teacher and founder of Performance Workshop Theater ‘remembered as a transformative force in the world’
Marlyn A. Robinson, an actress, teacher and founder of Performance Workshop Theater in Federal Hill, died of complications from a stroke Nov. 15 at Doylestown Hospital in Doylestown, PA, , where she had been visiting a daughter. She was 94.
“Marlyn was a force of nature and knew her own mind,” wrote Harriet Lynn, an actress, dancer and director and longtime friend, formerly of Baltimore and now of Carmel, California, in an email. “Her life is a testimony for living with a strong code of ethics and through her art she reflected what was good and just in the world. She made a difference.”
The former Marlyn Ann Greenberg, daughter of William Greenberg, a dry goods merchant, and his wife, Pearl Greenberg, a homemaker, was born in Salisbury and raised in Selbyville, Delaware.
After graduating from high school, she enrolled at the University of Delaware, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts and a master’s degree in the discipline from Case Western Reserve University. She later moved to New York City and did post graduate work in video production, TV in education, acting and directing.
She returned to Baltimore, where she met and fell in love with Louis Robinson Jr., who she married in 1952.
As a young mother, she began teaching drama at the Children’s Theater Association, where she worked with Isabel Burger. In 1964, her husband’s work took her and her family to England for two years, and after coming back to Baltimore, she chaired the speech and drama department at the Samuel Ready School, where she taught drama to junior and senior high school students. She also produced plays and toured with them to elementary schools.
When her husband took a position at Lehigh University in 1975, she directed productions for the Young Actors Studio at the Pennsylvania Playhouse in Bethlehem, as well as conducting workshops and teaching acting.
In 1980, she was the founder and artistic director of Performance Workshop Theater Inc., a nonprofit resident professional theater company and school in Bethlehem. During her decade in Pennsylvania, she offered artistically rich and socially insightful productions of works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Ibsen, Singe, Moliere, Coward, Exupery, Wolf, Ionesco, Pinter and Brecht.
After her husband was recruited in 1987 by the University of Maryland to develop an industrial partnership program at its Engineering Research Center the couple returned to Baltimore, where Ms. Robinson relocated her Performance Workshop Theater in the basement of a Federal Hill church. One of her early touring productions was “The Puppet Boy of Warsaw” by Eva Weaver.
In 2011, she expanded her operation when she purchased a building on Harford Road in Hamilton, and continued to do so when she closed Performance Workshop Theater in 2015, but two years later, wishing to keep an active hand in the theater, she directed Brecht’s “In Search of Justice” at the Fells Point Corner Theatre.
Ms. Lynn was working at the Pumpkin Theater in the 1990s when she became acquainted with Ms. Robinson at the Baltimore Theater Alliance.
“Marlyn was really into social justice, the Holocaust and education as well, and used the theater for people to have a dialogue,” Ms. Lynn said in a telephone interview. “She was a woman of strong convictions and will, and she knew what she wanted. I admired her courage and that she put her money where her mouth was.”
She so loved working in the theater that after she closed down Performance Workshop, “she had trouble finding her way because her life was the theater,” Ms. Lynn said. “But we had so many good times and I will miss her deeply. She was such a good person and well known in Baltimore’s theater community. She loved the arts and lived it.”
The Federal Hill resident who remained active enjoyed taking classes at the Johns Hopkins University, attending the theater and movies, going out to dinner with friends and vacationing at a second home in Fenwick Island, Delaware, was still driving her car at 94.
She was a former member of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.
Her husband died in 2002.
“Marlyn Greenberg Robinson is remembered as a transformative force in the world,” said Rabbi Jerry Seidler in his eulogy at her funeral that was held Nov. 19 at Sol Levinson & Bros. in Pikesville. “She was a loving person who made an impact on other people’s lives as a dynamic influence and nurturing mentor. Many say or feel that they are who they are, that’s why they do what they do today and for the better, because of Maryln.”
Ms. Robinson is survived by a son, David Alan Robinson of Canton; two daughters, Joan Marie Summers of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and Lynn Pearl Robinson of Philadelphia; and five grandchildren.