Keith Fowler


Keith Franklin Fowler is an American actor, director, producer, and educator. He is a professor emeritus of drama and former head of directing in the Drama Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts of the University of California, Irvine, and he is the former artistic director of two LORT/Equity theaters.

Early career

Fowler was born in San Francisco in 1939. He began acting professionally with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, playing Antony in Julius Caesar and Lorenzo in Merchant, before leaving to study as a Fulbright scholar at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.
In England, he directed the Midlands premiere of Brecht's Mother Courage. The production at the Stratford Hippodrome in spring 1961 led the town's veteran drama critic to compliment the local troupe for daring a type of theater that Sir Peter Hall hesitated to bring to Stratford's just-founded Royal Shakespeare Company.
Fowler earned a doctorate at the Yale School of Drama, studying under Nikos Psacharopoulos, director of the Williamstown Theater Festival, who chose Fowler to serve as his assistant, first as resident director of a theater in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Fowler staged productions of J. B., by Archibald MacLeish, and Romeo and Juliet and later as assistant director at Williamstown. In between Yale terms he directed a season of summer stock at the Belfry Theater in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and staged a production of Hamlet for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. After Yale, Fowler joined the faculty of Williams College, and in the late 1960s he directed a highly stylized Macbeth for the El Paso Festival Theater, then acted and directed for the Asolo Theater in Sarasota, Florida.

Virginia Museum Theater

In 1969, he was appointed head of the Theater Arts Division of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and artistic director of the Virginia Museum Theater, and he undertook to guide VMT in becoming Richmond's first resident Actors Equity company and a home for classics and new plays. His productions, beginning with Marat/Sade, brought controversy into the heart of Richmond's museum district but also drew increased attendance, more than doubling audiences between 1969 and the late 1970s.

The "Fowler 'Macbeth'"

Dubbing the professional company "VMT Rep", he drew national attention when in 1973 his second staging of Macbeth, a rather more realistic Stonehenge/historical version starring E.G. Marshall, led Clive Barnes of The New York Times to hail it as the "Fowler 'Macbeth.'" as Macbeth, 1973, with Ken Letner as Macduff Barnes described the production as "splendidly vigorous, forcefully immediate... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'." Of Fowler, he wrote, "Virginia is lucky to have him." Alfred Drake also joined the company in 1973 to direct the premiere of Richard Stockton's The Royal Rape of Ruari Macasmunde with Fowler in the title role. International attention arrived in 1975 when Soviet Cultural Consul Viktor Sakovich provided coverage on Moscow Television for Fowler's English-language premiere of Maxim Gorky's Our Father. Fowler subsequently produced the New York premiere of the Gorky drama at the Manhattan Theater Club.
In expanding VMT's reach beyond the capital city, he created and hosted a radio program, Keith Fowler Presents..., over WRFK-FM, weekly readings from classic literature, each program focusing on selections from a major British or American poet, dramatist, or novelist, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Hawthorne.
In 1977, refusing the museum administration's pressure to censor his premiere of Romulus Linney's play Childe Byron, Fowler resigned to serve his Yale alma mater as chief of directing for a year. His departure provoked a public outcry over an alleged pattern of censorship by the museum, with some arts patrons supporting the administration and many standing by Fowler, asserting, for instance, that "no one else can jump in and claim credit for what Dr. Fowler has done ... he stood up for what he knew was right."

American Revels Company

He returned to Richmond in 1978 with his associate director M. Elizabeth Osborn to lease the Empire Theater, on the border between historically black Jackson Ward and the city's business district, where they founded the American Revels Company.
Revels attracted progressive support for appealing to both black and white communities in Richmond. Without intending to enter into Richmond's post-segregation politics, Fowler nevertheless found Revels becoming a rallying point in the late 1970s for re-balancing the two symbiotic communities through art. Funding through the box office and City Council support was affected directly by public favor in a city with a growing black majority.

Unity Audience

Following a summer of advance promotion, American Revels' first season started with strong audiences, including full houses for A Christmas Carol and The Club in the thousand-seat theater. Such peaks in attendance could not be sustained, however, when later play titles, including Othello and I Have a Dream, leaned toward those least likely to afford tickets—the African-American community. Fowler countered by offering free performances to neighboring residents. The plan drew hundreds of African-American theater-goers and began to build a new sector of audience. In the summer of 1979, Richmond's City Council awarded the company a challenge grant, and a patron stepped forward to raise matching funds by sponsoring a performance by entertainer Ray Charles to benefit Revels. The success of the fund drive propelled the company into a second season in which Revels dealt with racial issues head-on by presenting a satire entitled The Black and White Minstrel Show, a parody of the racially split City Council. The season continued with works aimed at all of Richmond; Revels found resurgent support for its balance of classics and new plays, as well as for an occasional special event, such as the popular Strutters’ Ball, featuring local celebrity talent.
Still the costs of production were higher than the purses and wallets of many in the core audience could support. American Revels closed after two seasons.
The company had made its mark. Revels mounted fourteen productions between 1978 and 1980. By presenting actors of color and dramas with black themes—alongside classics and "standard" works—the company drew a sizable African-American audience to live theater, many for the first time. Richmonders found that new plays and politically engaged works were not alien to their taste. Also, by resurrecting the long-dormant Empire/November Theater, the troupe pioneered the way for downtown professional theater, most significantly for Theatre IV/Virginia Rep, the subsequent occupant of the November. For such a legacy, many Richmonders remember the company fondly, counting the Revels years as a time of theatrical excitement, and Fowler—in the words of Richmond Lifestyle magazine—as a "Rebel with a Cause."

Teaching

After closing Revels, Fowler returned to acting at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and joined Yale classmate Robert Cohen, then chair of drama, on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine.
Among the research topics that drew Fowler's focus was the relationship between acting and hypnosis, through which he developed protocols for characterization. In collateral studies he learned that actors are, as a group, significantly more susceptible to trance than the general population. He established that actors who display versatility playing characters are those who show a high "Femininity" index on the California Psychological Inventory. , directed by Fowler, 1992
In 1984, he joined Jerzy Grotowski's "Objective Drama" project in the barn and fields south of the UCI campus, working with Grotowski day and night to explore the essential organons and yantras of performance. He later memorialized the experience in American Theatre magazine.
From 1996 to 2004, Fowler was the original director of ArtsBridge America, later expanded nationwide, a program created by then dean Jill Beck at UCI in 1996 for granting scholarships to university dance, drama, music, and studio art majors to reintroduce arts education into the depleted curricula of K-12 pupils in local schools.
In 2011, Fowler completed a record tenure of over thirty years as head of directing for UCI's top-ranked drama program, mentoring hundreds of undergraduate and graduate directing students—many of whom have gone on to become award-winners, producers, and artistic directors of their own companies His standards for choosing new students included a concern for diversity of training and experience, enrolling foreign students as well as non-traditional older students in the belief that students learn as much from peers, especially dissimilar ones, as from faculty.
Fowler retired from active teaching in December 2015 and is now a professor emeritus.
Plan B vs. Plan A
, UC Irvine 1981: Jeffrey Meek, Lyda Woods, Alphonoso Rodriguez
One of Fowler's teachings is that directors must be over-prepared to guide a production team in designing and rehearsing a show. Co-author of A Director's Guide, Janelle K. Eagle points to his statement, "The notion of a modest Plan B to 'fall back on' is a mistaken concept," as a highlight of the Guide. Eagle finds the notion applying to a variety of fields, quoting again: "The magnificent exchanges for which one wishes, those that lead to real discovery and leaps into true art, can only occur spontaneously when all are ready, when sparks are struck right there in the moment with colleagues. That is Plan A."
Among Fowler's major productions at UCI have been Molière's Le Misanthrope,, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Arcadia, Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera, Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine, and Fowler's own translation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck.

Personal life

Born in San Francisco's French Hospital to Jack Franklin and Jacqueline Hocking Montgomery Fowler, Keith is a graduate of George Washington High and SF State. After residing for his first 21 years in San Francisco, he went to The Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, UK, and Yale University's School of Drama for graduate work. He has lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK; New Haven, Connecticut; Williams Bay, Wisconsin; Holyoke and Williamstown, Massachusetts; El Paso, Texas; Sarasota, Florida; Warren, Ohio; Richmond, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Vienna, Austria; and Irvine, California.
He is the father of two sons, Jeremy and Matthew, by first wife Janet Bell. He is currently married to Janice Elizabeth Byrd Fowler, and they reside in the University Hills neighborhood of Irvine, California.

Honors and awards