page_title: Keith Fowler
section_title: Unity Audience
hierarchical_section_title: Keith Fowler / Unity Audience
caption_attribution_description: English: Fowler outside Empire-Revels
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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."
caption: Keith Fowler, outside American Revels Company at the Empire Theater, greeting neighbors at a free performance of "I Have a Dream," 1979