Anna E. Crouse, Who Championed Discount Tickets for Broadway, Dies at 97 Anna E. Crouse, a onetime actress whose fondest Broadway dream - a healthy Manhattan theater district and affordable tickets for young people - was realized when she helped establish the TKTS booth in Duffy Square, died on Dec. 29 in Manhattan. She was 97. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said her children, the writer Timothy Crouse and the actress Lindsay Crouse. Ms. Crouse, who had been married to the playwright Russel Crouse, was an original board member and later chairwoman and acting executive director of the Theater Development Fund, an organization founded in 1968 to aid a theater industry that had fallen on hard times. Growing up in Manhattan, she had been a patron of Gray's drugstore in Times Square, where a discount ticket business that dated to before the turn of the 20th century operated in the basement until the late 1940s. And she had long believed that the theater industry itself should get behind a reduced-price outlet to make unused tickets available at the last minute to people who could not afford the ever-escalating admission price of Broadway shows. The seeds for the Duffy Square booth, Ms. Crouse recalled in a Development Fund memo in the early 1980s, were planted in 1972, when she was in charge of the theater committee of a cultural council appointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay. To make the booth happen, she enlisted the aid of the League of American Theaters and Producers, which, like Mayor Lindsay, had become distressed about the increasingly squalid and dangerous Times Square neighborhood and was searching for a way to bring healthier pedestrian traffic to the area. The ticket booth was housed in a trailer provided by the city Parks Department, and objections by some league members - that the initial investment was too much of a financial risk, that the availability of day-of-performance half-price tickets would undermine advance sales - were eventually overcome. Administered by the development fund with financing provided by the league and several foundations and private donors (including, Ms. Crouse wrote, the producer and director Harold Prince and the playwright Neil Simon), the booth, officially called the Times Square Theater Center, opened in late June 1973 and was an immediate success. The booth sold more than 450,000 tickets the first year. Now 40 years old, the enterprise eventually added locations in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and according to the most recent figures, from July 1, 2012, to June 30, 2013, the three booths were responsible for 1.6 million ticket sales. "Without Anna Crouse, the probability is there would not have been a TKTS booth," Philip J. Smith, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, which owns 17 Broadway theaters, said in an interview on Friday. Anna Erskine was born in Manhattan on Jan. 29, 1916. Her father, John, was a novelist and scholar, the author of dozens of books and a Columbia professor who created the General Honors course, which is thought to have been the dawn of the "great books" movement. He was also the first president of the Juilliard School of Music (now called the Juilliard School). His second wife, Pauline Ives, was Anna's mother. Anna graduated from Horace Mann but dropped out of Barnard College to pursue acting. She appeared on Broadway in a few small roles but gave up performing to support the theater in other ways. She wrote profiles of actors for popular magazines and was personal assistant to the director Joshua Logan before becoming a secretary to the writing and producing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who had by then rewritten Cole Porter's book for "Anything Goes" and adapted Clarence Day Jr."s "Life With Father" stories for the stage. Both shows became Broadway hits. Ms. Erskine and Mr. Crouse married in 1945, the same year Lindsay and Crouse's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "State of the Union," opened on Broadway. Their daughter, whose middle name is Ann, was named in honor of the Broadway partners. Together they wrote two biographies for young readers, "Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr" and "Peter Stuyvesant of Old New York." Mr. Crouse died in 1966. In 1978 Ms. Crouse married George A. Murch, a businessman. He died in 1987. In addition to her children, she is survived by two granddaughters - the daughters of Lindsay Crouse and her former husband, the playwright David Mamet - Willa Ives Mamet, a photographer, and Zosia Mamet, an actress who appears on the television series "Girls." In the 1980s, Ms. Crouse was a central figure in the resuscitation of Lincoln Center Theater, which, having failed in a handful of previous incarnations - its main theater, the Vivian Beaumont, was widely considered a design disaster - was finally rendered viable under the chairmanship of John Lindsay, who by then had left the mayor's office. Appointed by Mr. Lindsay to the theater board, she took charge of the search for people to run it. "It was very, very precarious, after all these management teams that didn't make it work," André Bishop, the current producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, said in an interview on Friday. People were very dubious about the Beaumont and theater at Lincoln Center in general, and this was just about the last chance. Ms. Crouse, he added, "made it her task to find the perfect team to relight this theater." She did all the interviewing and ultimately recommended Gregory Mosher, previously the artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, to be the artistic leader of the theater. Several weeks later the producer Bernard Gersten, who had worked with Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, was named to manage the theater's business side. The two men went on to turn the tide. One of their most successful early productions was a revival of "Anything Goes," which ran at the Beaumont for nearly two years with a new book by John Weidman - and Timothy Crouse.