The Art of Working With Your Life Partner and Coming Out Still Married

When I meet with Therèsa, it’s a mere couple of weeks since her production company, which she owns with her husband Anton Berezin, has finished a highly lauded run of The Happiest Man on Earth at the Sydney Opera House.

It’s a one-man show that tells the story of Eddie Jaku, who survived imprisonment in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, endured a death march, escaped, and was eventually rescued by Allied soldiers in 1945. Therèsa is in a quiet patch between productions, and I sense an aura of both exhaustion and ease.

The production saw her direct her husband for the first time. An experience she describes as “intense”, not just because she was directing her life partner, but because the story itself carried enormous responsibility. As did the historical and cultural context, especially given it was being performed in one of the world’s most significant theatres.

In fact, Therèsa initially refused to take on the role of director, even though Anton was convinced she was the right person for it. She believed in the work and in Anton’s ability to bring Eddie Jaku to life, but she was conscious of the delicacy of navigating the rehearsal room, the theatre and the marriage all at once, and as she puts it, “coming out still married.”

Her reluctance created an understanding between Anton and herself that they were not entering the room casually. They both understood the stakes. Their intimacy was a strength, but it also made the project more fragile.

This wasn’t the first time they had worked together. Long before creating their production company, Monstrous Theatre, they ran a highly successful family entertainment business together for over 20 years. At its peak, they were touring shows like Sesame Street presents Elmo’s World Tour and turning over tens of millions of dollars, with a large team and thousands of contractors moving through the organisation.

The business was born as a way of surviving as artists while creating more stability for their family than the performing life alone could offer. As Therèsa puts it, “They needed a hustle.” Something that would afford their children the same opportunities they’d had, while still keeping them connected to the theatre world they loved. So, they built something that ticked the boxes of being creative and family-oriented, but also financially rewarding.

Despite the entertainment company’s success, they didn’t always experience the business in the same way. On paper, they were building the same enterprise. In reality, they were living two different versions of it.

Therèsa carried more of the parenting and moved into more flexible creative roles; Anton bore more of the financial and outward-facing pressure. Plus, they were both working inside the business as co-owners and outside it as freelance performers. When they sold the business in 2019, they were not simply leaving the same business, they were leaving two very different experiences of the same business.

This distinction is important in family businesses, because there’s often an assumption that “the business” means the same thing to all parties. However, each person inside it may be living a completely different emotional and psychological reality. One may associate the business with opportunity and provision, the other with sacrifice and loss. Most likely, both are true, but felt by each partner at different times.  

In Therèsa and Anton’s case the experiences were different, but both felt the immense pressure of sustaining such a large organisation, while still delivering to the standards that their family audiences expected. It wasn’t always easy, and Therèsa speaks honestly about the fact that, for a time, they were not sure they’d work together again.

Fortunately, once they’d left the enterprise, they found the space to decompress and reconsider what they both wanted from life and work. They realised their next phase would require a more mature model — one that wasn’t “anything, anytime,” as it had been in the cutthroat world of entertainment, but something more deliberate.

With the financial pressures of raising a young family behind them, they’re now able to be more selective and take greater creative risks. This means only committing to projects where at least one of them has a genuine creative stake, and ensuring the work aligns closely with their current lives and interests.

Regardless of the venture, however, there are always new lessons to learn and explore.

One of these lessons is that intimacy has a shadow side. While directing Anton in The Happiest Man on Earth, there were moments where Therèsa suspected he had his “elbows out” a little more than he might have with another director. Moments where she wasn’t completely sure he believed her. It’s a natural tendency when there are decades of accumulated history, and when you know each other’s weaknesses and doubts.

Perhaps that is one of the strange contradictions of intimacy. At its best, it helps you assume the best of each other because you know the values, intentions and care underneath the behaviour. At its worst, you arrive with too much history and forget to offer the same generosity you might more easily extend to a colleague.

But on the other side of that there was profound trust.  To perform is extremely vulnerable — you are giving your body, voice, instinct and imagination to others to view and interpret without any certainty that they’ll resonate with your portrayal. Having trust in the director to guide you is vital, so who better than your wife to facilitate that. Anton knew Therèsa would be truthful with him, and that her truthfulness was in service of him and the show. The same intimacy that made the work more complicated also gave it depth.

But trust, even profound trust, does not remove the need for care. If anything, it raises the stakes. Because when love is involved, it can be tempting to assume the relationship will absorb the pressure, the directness, the blurred edges or the unspoken expectations.

This is where another piece of advice from Therèsa feels important: love does not function in the same way across all of life’s contexts. Nor does accountability. Sometimes, love can complicate accountability rather than simplify it. It can make us both generous and avoidant, which can allow small debts, resentments and imbalances to accumulate silently. Therèsa gives the example of working with extended family and friends inside the entertainment business. Some worked outrageous hours out of love and commitment, and others, at times, tested the limits of generosity around leave and flexibility.

Therèsa wasn’t saying this critically. In many ways, it was a reflection on how complicated love can make work. It can make people extraordinarily committed, willing to go above and beyond because they care so much about the people and the thing being built. But it can also blur the edges of what is fair, what is sustainable and what is visible to everyone else in the organisation.

This is when love and accountability must be held together. You don’t need less best practice working with people you love, you actually need more — because it’s not just your relationships that are on the line, it’s what other team members see and perceive that can bring down an organisation’s culture.

One final reflection from Therèsa is to wear responsibility lightly. To resist becoming self-important about what you carry. It’s easy to let responsibility become a kind of moral performance, where we carry the work, the clients, the children and the mortgage heroically, as a heavy burden. But that burden can become its own form of power. It can make one person’s stress the dominant emotional fact in the room.

It’s important to make work that matters, but equally important not to lose the people making it. Honour responsibility, but don’t be consumed by it.

Given the many layers to their life story, that’s a challenging balance to get right. So many artists are consumed by their work, just as so many parents are consumed by their families, or business owners are consumed by the P&L, or lovers are consumed by their relationship. Therèsa and Anton’s journey, teaches us that there’s not a wall between these different passions, but a threshold. If you cross them carefully, with respect, instinct, honesty and care, you may find there is still more of each other to meet.