Mohammad Kowsar — esteemed theater professor at S.F. State
Mohammad Kowsar, a longtime theater professor at San Francisco State University, died Jan. 14 after falling from a balcony in a new apartment he and his wife, Yasaman Arami, acquired in Tehran. He was 73.
Todd Roehrman, director of the university’s School of Theatre and Dance, confirmed the details of Kowsar’s death.
Kowsar was known for his impassioned style of lecturing and directing plays, his encyclopedic knowledge of theater history — particularly the history of directing — his outspoken far-left politics and his trademark flamboyant uniform: brimmed hat, skinny tie and, improbably, a razor scooter, which he used to zip around campus.
He also had a vast film collection, including many bootleg copies, which he would often incorporate into his lectures, via a groaning, jerry-rigged projection system that he had to wheel back and forth from the library.
Kowsar joined San Francisco State’s faculty in 1988.
“I can’t think of an alumnus who wasn’t influenced by Mohammad,” Roehrman said.
He impacted “hundreds, if not thousands of students,” said fellow theater Professor Joel Schechter.
Larry Eilenberg, the professor in the department who recruited Kowsar to San Francisco State, said in an email that Kowsar was “a man of many passions: from Goethe’s ‘Faust’ to graphic novels, from movie Westerns to French newspapers, from a good burger to a good joke. Most of all, he was in love with theatre, with teaching and with his Yasaman.”
“His scholarly publications, of course, are a part of his legacy,” Eilenberg added. Those include most notably his book, “The Critical Panopticon: Essays in the Theatre and Contemporary Aesthetics.”
“But most of all, he leaves so many he touched with a sense of the importance of passionate engagement,” he said.
Local director, playwright and actor Mark Jackson, who got his bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State before later going on to be a lecturer there, said that his first college class, first day of freshman year, was taught by Kowsar.
“Before the hour was up, he was standing on his desk,” Jackson recalled, so full of passion was Kowsar for his subject. “He ended up being one of my most influential teachers. He gave me a respect for lecturing and lectures. Lectures don’t need to be dry.”
Artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian, who got her masters of arts degree at San Francisco State, said Kowsar’s advice stuck with her as she founded her theater company, Golden Thread Productions, which is the first American theater company dedicated to the Middle East.
Kowsar “actually advised me against it,” telling her, “as artists we are citizens of the world,” she said. “He warned me against boxing myself in, limiting myself to a particular region or group of people.” If at first she “may have felt a little bit defensive,” she said she eventually defined Golden Thread’s mission “as broadly and inclusively as possible.”
At Golden Thread, she said, “if you’re a Middle Eastern artist, the play you write can be about anything.” That ethos is “partly a response to the advice that (Kowsar) gave me.”
If he could intimidate with his velocity, volume and vocabulary, he also believed his students could meet his high expectations. Kowsar was “generously throwing the ladder down behind him,” said playwright Nara Dahlbaka, who got her masters of fine arts degree from San Francisco State in 2015. “He made me feel like I was at the Yale School of Drama.”
“He was the sort of director who would sit with a sound designer “in the sound lab ... for hours, late into the night, long after the building closed,” said Matt Stines, a prominent local sound designer and a San Francisco State alum who became a lecturer there.
Mohammad Kowsar was born in 1944 in Quetta, Pakistan, to Iranian parents. His father, Javad Kowsar, was a diplomat, and Mohammad and his siblings, Roya and Kamran, had a peripatetic childhood. In addition to Tehran, the family lived in Karachi, Pakistan, Stockholm, Rome, Geneva and San Francisco, where Javad Kowsar was for a time the consul general of Iran.
Kowsar spoke French, Italian, Farsi and English. He received his bachelor of arts degree in international relations at San Francisco State in 1966, going on to get a master of fine arts degree in directing from the University of Hawaii in 1969 and a doctorate at Cornell in 1973.
Before joining the faculty at San Francisco State, he taught at San Jose State University, California State University Hayward (now Cal State East Bay) and City College of San Francisco. Earlier still, he taught at the University of Tehran, where he was instrumental in introducing experimental theater to the curriculum, as well as including more physical training in voice and movement, recalled his student at the time, Hamid Ehya.
An unapologetic critic of the forces taking over Iran at the time of the revolution, Kowsar eventually had to leave the University of Tehran, but not before teaching many students who would go on to become leading figures in Iranian theater and film.
Kowsar was in semiretirement from San Francisco State when he died. He is survived by his wife, a sister and a brother.
A public memorial celebrating Kowsar’s life will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at San Francisco State, Creative Arts Building, Little Theatre, 1600 Holloway Ave., S.F. Reception immediately to follow.