Gene Frankel, theater director and acting teacher who directed the landmark off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at New York University Medical Center. He was 85.

Although Frankel also directed on Broadway – most notably a 1969 production of Arthur Kopit’s “Indians,” starring Stacy Keach as Buffalo Bill – it was off-Broadway where he met with his greatest success.

His production of “The Blacks,” Genet’s sardonic drama about role-playing in society, opened in 1961 and ran for more than 1,400 performances. Its original cast included such actors as James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, all at the beginning of their careers, as well as two performers who later would gain more fame as writers, Maya Angelou Make (before she dropped her last name) and playwright Charles Gordon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Place to Be Somebody.”

Among Frankel’s other Broadway productions were “A Cry of Players” (1968), a revival of the Kurt Weill musical “Lost in the Stars” (1972) and “The Night That Made America Famous” (1975), a musical revue featuring the songs of Harry Chapin and starring the composer.

His many off-Broadway productions included such shows as “Brecht on Brecht,” starring Viveca Lindfors, Lotte Lenya, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson, as well as “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” with Cicely Tyson.

For much of his career, Frankel, who was born in New York, taught acting, writing, and direction, most recently at his small off-off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village.