Grove Shakespeare Festival Names Artistic Director

After more than nine months without a permanent artistic director, the Grove Shakespeare Festival has appointed an Off-Broadway veteran to the post.

W. Stuart McDowell, 45, will succeed Jules Aaron, who has filled in as acting artistic director since June, 1991, when founding Artistic Director Thomas F. Bradac was forced to resign by the Grove board of trustees over managerial and other differences.

For nine years, McDowell was head of the Riverside Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan, a small but well-regarded professional troupe he launched in 1977. He is, in addition, a produced playwright and German translator with a special interest in Bertolt Brecht.

Larry Capalbo, chairman of the Grove board’s search committee, said McDowell’s appointment was the culmination of a lengthy process of interviews with seven candidates drawn from a nationwide pool of more than 70 applicants.

McDowell, who expects to step into the $30,000-a-year Grove job by mid-April, said in a telephone interview from his home in Teaneck, N.J., that he intends “to fully professionalize the organization year-round” and “to do ever more Shakespeare as the cornerstone” of intensified and expanded classical programming.