G Profile: Dr. Roy Fluhrer

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Outside the Box

Walking down the halls of the Fine Arts Center in Greenville with the school’s director, Dr. Roy Fluhrer, it’s difficult to determine which is better—his mood or his memory. There are 400 students at the FAC, and Dr. Fluhrer knows all of their names. And his problem with them, he’ll tell you, is that he has no problems. That would put anybody in a good mood, wouldn’t it?

South Carolina’s first high school for the gifted and talented students in the literary, performing, and visual arts opened in 1974, and Dr. Fluhrer has served as its director since 1989. You might say he was born to play the part. A steamer trunk served as his bassinet when he was born in Chicago, where his theater parents were touring as part of the Federal Theatre Project near the end of the Great Depression. His father died early of a burst appendix, and his mother was left to raise him and his two sisters, Barbara and Sally—working three jobs to do so. “We were latchkey children before there was such a thing,” he says.

The pride he has in his theatrical past, which set the course for his future, still radiates. His mother, a photo of whom sits on the credenza in his office, along with photos of two of his four sons and one of his grandchildren, was raised by missionaries.

“She became the black sheep of the family when she was of age and took her $500, that she was supposed to use to enroll in the American Bible Institute, and enrolled instead in the American Academy of Dramatic Art!” Fluhrer’s voice raising with exuberance at his mother’s triumph.

He fosters the same notion of risk-taking and self-discovery that was handed down to him in his students. “Where else but in the arts do you get the opportunity—and, as a matter of fact, you are asked to fail, you are given the freedom to fail?” he asks. (After all, what is a rehearsal, if not a place to fail?) “In dance, you have rehearsal,” he says. “In music you have rehearsal. In creative writing you have drafts, so you’re failing. You’re testing. You’re discovering. You’re uncovering. And you go through layers of yourself.”

Dr. Fluhrer grew up in Iowa, but made his way back to the Chicago area to attend Northwestern University, and then received his masters and doctorate degrees from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He held various posts (the Toledo Repertoire Theatre, University of Idaho, and North Carolina School of the Arts) before coming to Greenville. He is newly remarried, and his wife, Elizabeth, is earning her doctorate at the University of South Carolina. “I like a woman who can do math in her head,” he jokes, clearly enamored.

As he walks the halls, it is obvious that the 72-year-old is a fan—if not in awe—of his charges: “What are you guys doing?” he asks a group of teens huddled together the way that teens do. “Set your goals,” he reminds them, before pleasantly winding his way to the music room.

“That’s Wesley,” he says indicating to the boy at the piano. “He spent two weeks at Julliard this summer.”
In the black box theater he inquires why one student is sitting out the drama group rehearsal, before turning to another to ask playfully, “Mitchell, what’s with the hair?”

Later that evening at the Strings Chamber Music Concert, he leans over to point out the violin student who has a big audition out of town the next day. “Listen to this, it’s incredible,” he had said only hours before, during a quick pass by their rehearsal room. Somehow you just know he’ll follow up on how the audition went.

Art is both created and on display at the FAC, as evidenced by the bass lines being played in the hall by one student, the group of leotard-clad dancers catching their breath at the water fountain, as well as the works of art by notable artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Alice Neal, and others) that line the walls. It is by all accounts a glistening atmosphere in which to be submerged and reminded of the arts—even if only for the 110 minutes a day for which students from high schools all over Greenville County are there.

“I have an incredibly adept and talented faculty and I have students who are just out of this world,” says Dr. Fluhrer, “and I’m constantly making sure that they have the things they need to succeed. Consequently, you put the two of them together and you get the kind of chemical spark, where the flame that ensues is a passionate, committed flame and these students go on to do some pretty incredible things.”

Incredible things that happen under the watchful, insightful, and invigorative eye of their director—though don’t ask Dr. Fluhrer to sing his own praises. “It’s about the students,” he says, his tone serious for the first time. “It’s not about me.”