Keith Fowler

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Keith Fowler in 2011

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 (known as UCI),[1] and he is the former Artistic Director of two LORT/Equity theaters.[2][3][4]

Contents

[edit] Early career

Fowler began acting professionally with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival[5] (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.[6] 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[7] 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.[8]

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.[9] 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.

[edit] 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[10] 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[11] 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.

[edit] 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'."[12] International attention arrived in 1975[13] when Soviet Cultural Consul Viktor Sakovich[14] provided coverage on Moscow Television for Fowler's English-language premiere of Maxim Gorky's Our Father (originally Poslednje).[15]

Fowler in 1970, in his first year as director of VMT

Fowler subsequently staged the Gorky production at the Manhattan Theater Club, New York.[16] In 1977, refusing museum pressure to censor his premiere of Romulus Linney's play Childe Byron,[17] Fowler resigned to serve his Yale alma mater as chief of directing for a year.

[edit] 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.[18]

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.[19]

[edit] Civil Rights Issues

Keith Fowler, outside the Empire Theater, greeting neighbors at free performance of play, "I Have a Dream," 1979

The first season[20] started with strong audiences, including full houses for A Christmas Carol and The Club in the thousand-seat Empire, but attendance dwindled halfway through when play titles leaned toward those least likely to afford tickets—the African American community. ARC countered this by offering free performances to neighboring residents.[21] Richmond's racially split City Council issued a challenge grant[22] to ARC, and a patron helped the company raise matching funds in the summer of 1979 by sponsoring a performance by entertainer Ray Charles to benefit ARC. In the second season, ARC dealt with historic racial issues head-on by presenting an inter-racial satire entitled The Black and White Minstrel Show, conceived and written by Fowler and Osborn as a parody of the City Council.[23][24] The season continued with works aimed at all of Richmond,[25] but even when attendance was at its best, the tasks of balancing a black-white unity repertory for Richmond proved insurmountable, and ARC closed its second season. Virginia Lifestyle journalist Martha Steger sums up Fowler as a "Rebel" but "with a Cause."[21]

[edit] Teaching

After the demise of ARC, 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.[26] In collateral studies he learned that actors are, as a group, significantly more susceptible to trance than the general population. Actors who display versatility playing characters are those who show a high "Femininity" index on the California Psychological Inventory (CPI). Because these results were unpublished, it is worth noting that Fowler only surmised why femininity = versatility. "It may be," he says, "because CPI Femininity is traditional--marking one who is nurturing, empathetic, and used to adapting."[27]

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.[28]

Fowler was the original director of ArtsBridge America, now 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.[29]

Fowler served UCI as head of directing for over thirty years until he stepped down in 2011. As HoD, he selected and taught a number of young directors who went on to become producers and artistic directors of their own companies[30] His standards for choosing new students included a concern for diversity— not traditional racial or ethnic diversity, but 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 as from faculty.[31]

Plan B vs. Plan A

The Tooth of Crime, 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[32] 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!"[33] Among Fowler's major productions at UCI have been Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime,Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Arcadia, his own translation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera,[34] and Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine.[35]

[edit] Honors and awards

  • Borden Prize, San Francisco State University
  • BA magna cum laude, San Francisco State University
  • Fulbright Scholarship, The Shakespeare Institute, U.K.
  • Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Yale University
  • John Shubert Memorial Scholarship, Yale School of Drama
  • DFA, Yale University
  • Phoebe Award, "Best Direction," Childe Byron, Richmond (VA) Newspapers
  • Drama-Logue Award, "Outstanding Direction," Bloody Poetry
  • UC Irvine Award for Outreach Leadership (Artists in-Training)
  • ArtsBridge Award for Excellence

[edit] References

  1. ^ "UC Irvine Drama Department Faculty :: Keith Fowler". Drama.arts.uci.edu. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  2. ^ Virginia Museum Theater, 1955-1980, "Twenty-Five Years of Service to the Commonwealth," 1980, 21
  3. ^ Panhelas, William, "Fowler Resigns...," The Commonwealth Times, March 29-April 4, 1977
  4. ^ Proctor, Roy, "Empire Leased for Theatrical Group," Richmond News Leader, Aug 24, 1978
  5. ^ "Merchant of Venice (1958, Oregon Shakespeare Festival) :: Shakespeare in Performance :: Internet Shakespeare Editions". Internetshakespeare.uvic.ca. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  6. ^ "Eagles That Soar". Gwhs75thanniversary.com. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  7. ^ "Amateur Players break new ground with 'Mother Courage'," Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, April 21, 1961
  8. ^ Gardiner, Edmund, "Pepys Behind the Scenes," Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, April 28, 1961
  9. ^ Program of the Casino-in-the-Park Playhouse, summer 1963
  10. ^ And a member of LORT, the League of Resident Theaters, the professional organization of professional repertory companies with Actors Equity contracts, http://lort.web.officelive.com/ --the Virginia Museum Theater was classed as a LORT "C" company.
  11. ^ See editorial, "The Thing at the Museum," Editorial Page Richmond News Leader, October 10, 1969
  12. ^ By CLIVE BARNES Special to The New York Times (1973-02-12). "Stage - Fowler 'Macbeth' - A Vigorous Production Staged in Richmond The Cast - Article - NYTimes.com". New York Times. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  13. ^ Program of the Virginia Museum Theater Repertory Company, "Our Father," February 7–22, 1975
  14. ^ Kass, Carole, "Play Prompts Praise..." in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Feb. 9, 1975
  15. ^ Translated by William Stancil, VMT's Music director.
  16. ^ Gussow, Mel (1975-05-10). "Stage - Gorky's Difficult 'Our Father' - A Family Split in Two Is Under Scrutiny - Article - NYTimes.com". Select.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  17. ^ Rosenfeld, Megan, The Washington Post, Thursday, March 24, 1977
  18. ^ A LORT "B" company
  19. ^ Merritt, Robert, "Revels' 'Dream' Is Worth Wait...," Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 24, 1979, A-7
  20. ^ Offering Fowler's version of A Christmas Carol, The Club, Holy Ghosts, by Romulus Linney, Shakespeare's Othello, and a drama of Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a Dream
  21. ^ a b Steger, Martha, "Keith Fowler: Rebel With a Cause, Virginia Lifestyle magazine, June/July 1979
  22. ^ For $25,000 to be matched to $50,000; Steger.
  23. ^ And offering excerpts of it on the steps of Richmond City Hall.
  24. ^ Modeled after the The Minstrel Show or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, premiered in 1967 by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
  25. ^ Including Twelfth Night, Tales from the Vienna Woods, by Ödön von Horváth, El Grande de Coca Cola, Ashes of Soldiers and a special rhythm and blues dance concert, Strutters Ball, featuring local black and white headliners, Larry Bland and Steve Bassett. A new play by Kevin Heelan, Hope I Hear it Again Sometime, concluded the year.
  26. ^ The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis and National Auxiliary Publication Service.
  27. ^ Notes on collateral issues, 1990
  28. ^ Slowiak, James, and Jairo Cuesta, Jerzy Grotowski, p. 59
  29. ^ "ArtsBridge America Program « Lawrence University News". Blogs.lawrence.edu. 2005-03-24. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  30. ^ Including Constantine Arvanitakis, director, Athens Conservatoire, Greece; Roberto Prestigiacomo, artistic director, AtticRep Theater, San Antonio, TX; caryn morse desai, artistic director, International City Theater, Long Beach, CA; Allison Liddi-Brown, DGA Award winner, Los Angeles CA; Donna Soto-Morettini, dean emeritus of theater, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama); James Slowiak, co-artistic director, New World Performance Lab, Akron OH; Trevor Biship, winner of awards for Jerry Springer...; R. Michael Gros, dean and artistic director emeritus, Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, Solvang CA; Stephen Burdman, artistic director, New York Classical Theatre, NY, NY; Amanda McRaven, Fulbright Scholar; Bryan Doerries, artistic director, Theater of War; Roger Smart, artistic director, Shattered Globe Theater, Chicago; Joanne Yarrow, director artístico, Prometeo Teatro, Miami FL; Mark Valdez, executive director, Network of Ensemble Theaters, CA; Theresa K. Pond, artistic director, Mill Brook Playhouse, PA; José Cruz González, playwright and professor, California State University, Los Angeles; Peter Anthony, director, OpenStage Theatre and Company, Fort Collins, CO; etc.
  31. ^ "UC Irvine Drama Department :: MFA in Directing :: Introduction". Drama.arts.uci.edu. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  32. ^ Conversation in Hoag Hospital 02/19/2012, followed by email from filmmaker and community activist Eagle to Fowler, 02/24/2012
  33. ^ Fowler, Keith; Eagle, Janelle K. "A Director's Guide". Eee.uci.edu. p. 8. 
  34. ^ "UC Irvine Drama Department Faculty :: Keith Fowler". Drama.arts.uci.edu. Retrieved 2013-04-27. 
  35. ^ Müller in America, American Productions of Heiner Müller, copyright 2003 by Castillo Cultural Center

[edit] Bibliography

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Keith Fowler
  • Hypnotic Transformation: Three Studies of Theatrical Role-Playing by Keith Fowler in The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1988, vol. XXXVI, No. 4.
  • Precise functions of hypnosis in dramatic acting, National Auxiliary Publication Service, 1986.
  • "Who is he supposed to be?," by Keith Fowler, in Müller in America, American Productions of Heiner Müller, copyright 2003 by Castillo Cultural Center
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