Brooke Schmill
bschmill@uwyo.edu
Known for his entertaining, cosmopolitan and thoughtful approach to teaching, William Downs has been a theatre and dance professor at the University of Wyoming around 20 years.
“I’m not your typical professor. I break rules. If you put my teaching style into an uncreative rubric filled with squares and grids, I’d score a D,” Downs said. “Teaching cannot be reduced to a rubric.”
During his tenure at UW, Downs has won 21 teaching awards; several research awards and the Governor’s Arts Award.
This semester Downs is teaching two sections of Introduction to Theatre and co-teaching Varieties of Non-Belief with Professor Tyler Fall.
“I can’t say I have a favorite class. If a class goes well, that’s my favorite. If it does not, it is my least favorite,” Downs said. “I beat myself up pretty badly when a class does not go well.”
In addition to teaching, Downs is a professional writer, playwright and director.
Down’s path leading to the UW is an interesting and one of a kind story. Downs said he started his college career as an actor.
“A bout with viral encephalitis during my junior year in college left me with a slight stammer, which ended my performing career,” Downs said. “I wasn’t willing to admit it was over until I blundered my way through an MFA in acting.”
With few options left, Downs wrote his first play, winning him acceptance in the Circle Repertory Theatre in New York.
He moved to Manhattan with nothing but two pairs of jeans and a few hundred bucks.
“Life in New York was harsh. I was robbed; I had no money and little food,” Downs said. “Late one night, I stumbled upon the aftermath of the assassination of John Lennon. That’s a night I won’t forget.”
During this time Downs’ then girlfriend and now wife, Lou Anne Wright—also a professor in UW’s Theatre and Dance Department—moved in with him. They have been together for almost 38 years.
Their love story began two years prior while Downs was “acting in a crappy outdoor drama in Alabama. Lou Anne’s Dixie accent was so thick that I often needed a translator, but I couldn’t resist those sometimes green, sometimes brown eyes.”
Waiting tables, working as a janitor and even hauling dead bodies are ways Downs made ends meet in New York City. Downs said one day he saw a flyer advertising a MFA in screenwriting at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
Downs said he worked his way through UCLA as a script secretary.
“After several years of struggling I finally got an agent and my first Hollywood writing job,” Downs said.
A brief look at Down’s impressive resume in Los Angeles includes freelance writing on TV shows like “My Two Dads,” and “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
Downs and Wright left Los Angeles when Wright was accepted into the MFA program at the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. After Wright graduated, the couple was hired at UW.
“We thought we’d be here for a year, two at most, and then we’d head back to Hollywood,” Downs said. “I guess we just forgot to leave.”
Currently, Downs and Wright are updating their textbook, “The Art of Theatre” used by over a hundred universities. Downs is working on a new play “Below the Navel Above the Knees,” and getting ready for an Equity production of a play he wrote, “How To Steal A Picasso” in Kansas City early next year.
Downs will then direct an Equity production at the Salt Lake Acting Company, and co-directing a musical comedy he co-wrote entitled “Angry Psycho Princesses,” opening at UW in early May.
Aside from work, Downs is an avid traveler who has explored all corners of the world. Soon he is going to Hawaii for “no reason other than to hear the tropical birds sing and then it’s off to Spain to see more Roman ruins. Finally, we’ll go to Lisbon to stand where the great earthquake of 1755 inspired Voltaire to write Candide.”
