Keith Fowler
Keith Fowler (Keith Franklin Fowler; born February 23, 1939 in San Francisco) is an American actor, director, producer, and educator. He is a Professor of Drama and Head of Directing Emeritus in the Drama Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and he is the former Artistic Director of two LORT/Equity theaters.
Early career Fowler began acting professionally with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1958 & 1960), playing Antony in Julius Caesar and Lorenzo in Merchant (with OSF founder Angus Bowmer as Shylock), before leaving to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, U. K. In England, he directed a local troupe in 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 non-professionals for daring a type of theater that Sir Peter Hall hesitated to bring to the just-founded Royal Shakespeare Company. Fowler attended the Yale School of Drama, studying under Nikos Psacharopoulos, executive director of the Williamstown Theater Festival, who chose Fowler to serve as resident director of a theater in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Fowler staged productions of J. B., by Archibald MacLeish, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In 1964, Fowler joined the faculty of Williams College. He directed a Macbeth for the El Paso Festival Theater in 1965 and served as assistant director of the Williamstown Theater Festival in 1966. In 1968, he acted and directed for the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida. Virginia Museum Theater Virginia Years. In 1969, he was appointed artistic director of the Virginia Museum Theater (VMT, now the Leslie Cheek Theater) in Richmond and guided it to become the city's first resident Actors Equity company and a home for classics and new plays.
Marat/Sade 1969; scenery by Sandro LaFerla
His productions, beginning with Marat/Sade (the first racially integrated company on the Virginia Museum's stage), brought controversy into the heart of Richmond's art district but also drew increased attendance, more than doubling audiences from a subscription base of 4,300 in 1969 to more than 10,000 in the late 1970s. VMT Rep Dubbing the professional company VMT Rep, he drew national attention when in 1973 his second staging of Macbeth, starring E.G. Marshall, led Clive Barnes of The New York Times to call it the "'Fowler Macbeth'... "splendidly vigorous... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'." 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 (originally Poslednje).
Fowler in 1970, in his first year as director of VMT
Fowler subsequently staged the Gorky production at the Manhattan Theater Club, New York. In 1977, refusing museum 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. American Revels Company He returned to Richmond in 1978 with his associate director Betty Osborn to lease the Empire Theater, fronting historically black residential Jackson Ward onto the majority business section, where together they founded the American Revels Company.
1978. Fowler sells the first ARC subscription to Richmond Mayor Henry L. Marsh
ARC attracted progressive support for appealing directly to both black and white communities in Richmond. Without intending to enter into Richmond's post-Segregation politics, Fowler nevertheless found ARC becoming a rallying point in the late '70s 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. <span class="mw-headline" id="Civ
