Education:
Oberlin College, A.B.;
University of Minnesota, M.F.A;
Florida State University, Ph.D.

"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.... Now, you tell me what you know." - Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers (1930)

Leah Lowe
Associate Professor of Theater
Chair of Theater Department

• Acting and directing
• Theater history and performance theory
• Gender studies
• Theories of comedy

Leah Lowe holds an M.F.A in Directing from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Dramaturgy from Florida State University. She has worked in a variety of professional and educational theaters. Among the many productions she has directed are The Glass Menagerie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Shaugraun, The Triumph of Love, and her own adaptation of Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro.

She worked on the dramaturgical staff of Florida State University's Theatre Southeast, and in the Twin Cities, at the Guthrie Theatre and the Great American History Theatre. For several years, she was an active member of the Mickee Faust Club, a grassroots theatrical collective specializing in original political satire.

Professor Lowe's scholarly interests include theories of comedy, gender studies, and popular American culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Performance interests include devised theater, comic techniques, and American drama.

She has published articles on Gracie Allen's radio comedy, the plays of Anita Loos, and nineteenth-century American melodrama. Her work has been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Theatre Symposium. She is an active member of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

She accompanied Connecticut College students on SATA Vietnam 2009 on which she taught a course, "The Art of Theater." As travelers in Vietnam, the students explored and analyzed topics such as performances of nationality suggested by various sites they visit, the cultural dynamics of tourism, and the representations of our shared historical pasts.

She also teaches a first-year freshman seminar,
"Making Theater: From Process to Performance," an exploration of the process of creating a theatrical performance from the perspectives of the different artists involved, including actors, designers, the director, and the playwright. The class culminates in a public performance created collaboratively by the students in the class.

View the theater department Web site.