[7] Awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1960-61 to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon,[8][9] he directed his first play while in England--the Midlands premiere of Brecht's Mother Courage.

[14] In 1966, he directed his first Macbeth for the Festival Theater in El Paso, treating the tragedy as a psychological nightmare, noted by a local critic as an "expressionistic... exciting departure from the traditional.

[19] 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.'"

[21] International attention arrived in 1975[22] when Soviet Cultural Consul Viktor Sakovich[23] provided coverage on Moscow Television for Fowler's English-language premiere of Maxim Gorky's Our Father (originally Poslednje).

[24] In 1977, refusing the museum administration's pressure to censor his premiere of Romulus Linney's play Childe Byron,[25] Fowler resigned to serve his Yale alma mater as chief of directing for a year.

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.

[29] 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.

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.

"[30] 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.