Some are born with the least common of all talents—a proclivity for compassion, a sort of evolutionary gene that moves us closer toward ideal humanity. Among them are a few rare ones who are endowed with something even less common—an uncanny ability to feel exactly  what others feel as if they can slip into the skin of a fellow human being, do more than simply walk in their shoes, and in fact become them. There’s a sadness about this though. These empaths, because of the very quality that makes them so uncommon, can become easy prey for sinister parasites who feed in a narcissistic frenzy on these rare few. They attempt to devour them, swallowing them whole. Yet, these karma vampires don’t always succeed: Consider Lou Keeton.

We are seated at a table in her living room, a sun-bright space in this 1926 Sears home she purchased this past winter. Since that time her family and friends have restored it to its former glory on this picturesque street in the heart of Northside.

From the time she was a little girl, each morning Lou would wake to, and at night go to sleep beside, a small framed picture of Cinderella and Prince Charming. And she knew them both very well, and loved them deeply. They were, after all, her mother and father, actors both. Shortly after her father, Craig, played Prince Charming to Cinderella, a young woman named Barbara, he got down on bended knee and proposed to her. 

“So that’s how I grew up,” Lou tells me. “I saw them literally as fairy tale royalty. It was lovely, and it really connected me with storytelling because Cinderella is a tale that’s existed since the beginning of time in every single culture. So I did a lot of research from a very early age on that storytelling, and the cultural persistence throughout time and history. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Lou also recalls a photo album her parents keep. “It contains all their theatre productions, and it’s just beautiful to look through,” she says. “And I really wanted to be in that album as a child. So it would be my ultimate joy if my production photos made it into that album.”

As a child she was immersed in live theatre and film. One of her favorites was Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart. “After watching the film, my mother took me to go see a high school production of Harvey to reinforce that learning,” Lou recalls. “I had all kinds of critiques of it even as a little girl.”

She was inspired, as a girl, by the actors who graced the silver screen during the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

“Every Audrey Hepburn movie was a huge inspiration for me,” she says. "Katharine Hepburn was a huge inspiration for me. Spencer Tracey, be still my heart. Jimmy Stewart. All of these old Hollywood actors made me want to act and tell my own stories.”

These stars of old also influenced Lou on another level. “I really liked classical older films, and you can tell by my personal styling,” she says. “I’m into that kind of aesthetic.” 

But it was the artistic quality of the films themselves, and a lot of theatre from that same period, that drew her in, and helped mold her as a theatrical artist.  “The thing I love so much about that kind of storytelling is that it’s character driven,” says Lou. “Human stories are in everything that I do.”

When Lou attended high school in Ashland she discovered a talent she had, one that had been overlooked by our conventional schools. “This is when I think I really started getting the theatre bug,” she says. “I wrote little scenes for a show that we did every year called Madrigals.  It was pure madrigals, and then a jester would come on and do something silly.”

She ended up playing the jester that one year. “I decided to write my own scenes,” Lou says.

The audience response blew her away. 

“It was just wild to me when people actually laughed at my weird sense of humor and got what I was trying to do,” Lou remembers. “And I thought, well this is how I can share my voice, which was surprising to me.”

That’s because she had trouble reading, and was difficult to understand until she was in fourth grade. “I experienced a lot of language deprivation,” says Lou. “I have a processing disorder so it effects all of my senses. I do not hear or see or taste or touch the same way that anyone else does. It just processes differently in my brain. My perception is not conducive to the system we’ve created for our education. That’s something my mother reminded me of, that there was nothing wrong with me. There was something wrong with the system.”

Live theatre itself, in a very real sense, became her teacher. “I didn’t think I could be a writer until I did the Madrigals,” Lou says. “Once I realized that I could bring characters to life with dialogue that changed everything.” 

After high school, Lou attended the Conservatory at Shenandoah University up in Winchester. That’s where she would begin earning her theatrical chops, and working in professional theatre, where she would spread her wings for her first solo flight. It was also where she would be devalued and pigeonholed, and later raped.

Lou fell into a major that would help her in her professional career, and would lay the groundwork for what she ultimately wanted to do—the telling of stories that would empower the young. 

“I was a theatre for youth major,” she says. “And it really reinforced for me that if I wanted to be sharing these messages of empowerment and starting these conversations and providing language to children, then I would have to start writing it myself.”

One of her professors, who would become her mentor, lamented the fact that there wasn’t any children’s theatre he liked that drew on the deep wellspring of American folklore.

So, Lou penned a production called Cattywampus: Tall and True Tales of American Folklore, which tells the stories of John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, and Annie Oakley. And that became the first show ever fully produced through the college’s touring children’s theatre. 

At the same university, there were other professors who did their best to diminish Lou’s self-perception.

“When I was in college I was told that I would always be the ugly best friend, and they were training me to just own my ugliness,” she tells me. 

I’m stunned by this, and tell her as much, for she is a lovely woman in every way.  

Lou nods her head.  “If there was a spectrum of beauty, I was on the lower end,” she says. “This was in college. The professors’ idea was that, we will take what we perceive to be your type and we will train you on how to make that your product, how to sell that image.”

It was during her college years, too, that Lou endured one of the most violent assaults imaginable.  “I was raped on two occasions,” she says. “I don’t know a single woman in my entire life who has not been assaulted in some degree, if not raped. And I know many men who experienced assault from very early ages. I’ve survived at least nine near death experiences, so I’m a survivor in a lot of ways and every single time I’ve come out of these experiences I think, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way, how can I help foster another reality?’ And I think it’s so much in the stories that we tell our children.”

After college, Lou returned to Ashland and began touring nationally with Theatre IV, which she would do for the next three years. She did scores of plays, but one of her favorites was The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in part, because of the role she won.  “It blew my mind because remember when I was in college I was told that I would always be the ugly best friend,” Lou says. “So I got cast as Katrina Van Tassel in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and that was very exciting.” 

But the most important play she did while touring with Theatre IV was Hugs and Kisses, which further cemented in Lou’s mind the need to reach children at a very early with important messages through the medium of theatre.

“I did over three hundred shows,” she recalls. “I played Emma also known as Judy, also known as Jemma; but at the time it was Emma.”

Hugs and Kisses, a musical for children first produced in 1983, tells the story of a little girl who has been sexually abused.

Every time the play was performed, about five children would come forward with their own stories of abuse, according to Lou. “I spent three years with crying children in my lap,” she says. “Children who were scared to leave me because I was the first adult that had ever heard them say this out loud. These are real children who will never be the same.”

But the productions of this musical allowed, in certain instances, intervention.

“Sometimes I saw the children again,” Lou says. “And I remember one little girl chased me down as I was breaking down the set and said, ‘I talked to you last year and I’m safe now, and I wanted you to know that.’ She was an elementary school child, maybe ten years old.”

In one part of the show, Lou would dress as a large dog, and though she could see out of the eye holes, the audience could not see in. “I would use that time to scan the audience because after a certain amount of shows, and after a certain amount of training, you kind of get a sixth sense,” says Lou. “I also see auras. It was almost like these children who had been assaulted were glowing an entirely different color than anyone else.”

During one performance, Lou spotted a girl in the audience who was bundled up and was actually shaking in her seat as she watched the production. After the show, Lou approached a social worker and mentioned the little girl she had seen. 

The social worker nodded.  “That little girl’s over there speaking to somebody right now,” she told Lou.

Later, as the crew began breaking down the set, the social worker came up to Lou and said, “We’ve got that little girl’s story now and we already have a plan, but she wants to speak to you.”

Lou folds her arms and her eyes moisten. “So we found a little private corner and for the first time I heard the whole story and in painful detail,” she tells me. “And by the end of it she had crawled into my lap and she was clinging to me and crying and saying, ‘You can’t leave me, you’re the only person who loves me and believes me.’”  But Lou had to leave; the company was heading out for another gig.

Just three months later, something out of a fairly tale occurred. Lou was dressed up as Snow White at the Fairy Tale Ball, a party sponsored by the theatre company. There was no way anyone could have possibly recognized her in wig, makeup, and costume.

“And this little voice calls out my name,” Lou says. “And it was the same little girl, but she was taller, her hair was braided, she had glasses on, and she was wearing this beautiful pink dress. When I first met her I thought she was six or seven but three months later I thought she could be ten or twelve. I said, ‘How are you here?’ And she said, ‘I’m here with my foster parents.’”

In a scant three months social services had removed the girl from a horrifically abusive household and placed her in a loving home.

The girl’s foster mom introduced herself to Lou.

“Why don’t you two spend the evening together?” she said, and the girl beamed. Though Lou had work, she simply canned it. 

“This little girl and I danced all night; we ate cupcakes, we cried together,” Lou says. “I have a picture of her on my phone—something I can’t show anyone. It’s my reminder of the power of theatre, the power of storytelling, the power of supporting people.”

Lou pauses and then says, “Every day I told those children, ‘You are so brave,’ and it’s something I tell myself when I’m viewing myself as a best friend. I like to think if I ever saw that little girl again, that I could say, ‘I’ve been there, you’re an inspiration, and I love you.’“

While she was still touring with Theatre IV, Lou went to work as a writing apprentice with Theatre Lab. That’s when she and Dax Dupuy first teamed up. “Dax had a lot of songs she had written about food and as we were talking about how food was a major element in all the important milestones in our lives,” Lou remembers. “You have food when a baby is born, you have food at weddings, you have food at funerals. So we wanted to depict these two friends through the course of their friendship.”

Out of that collaboration was born Food Baby. “I wrote the book, and Dax Dupuy wrote the score and we performed in it and starred in it as well,” says Lou. “That was the first production for Theatre Lab.”

It was also the very first production of The Whistle Stop Theatre Company. It was Dax and Lou, her parents, and Lorie Foly, who launched the company. “And on opening night the entire town of Ashland came to see the show,” Lou says. “All of Ashland was crammed into this tiny little space that was a converted firehouse garage. We realized that Ashland was crying out for its own theatre company.”

The first children’s theatre The Whistle Stop Theatre Company produced was Lou’s own version of Cinderella. And over the years Lou has rewritten classic children’s stories that contain more contemporary and poignant messages. 

”Adding a modern relevance is a huge goal of The Whistle Stop,” says Lou. “Finding these stories that have informed our culture and updating them so that they can really speak to our present day conversations is important to us. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll take a show from the 1800s and make it modern day. It’s more about concepts. For instance, in The Little Mermaid, her whole motivation was to marry the prince. In my version her whole motivation is to gain a soul—so what does that mean, and how does that inform my empathy for my audience? As a person who has the opportunity to create new media I want to make sure the messages that I’m sharing make a difference.”

We talk about other fables and fairy tales that have worked their way into our universal psyche. “Many of them were rooted as cautionary tales,” Lou says.   

When I mention one of the eeriest and the most enduring of all fairy tales, Lou’s eyes fairly widen. 

”I keep coming back to Little Red Riding Hood,” she says. “It is a story which I’ve never attempted to adapt because I feel so intensely about it. There’s a theory that Little Red Riding Hood was written as a cautionary tale for rape. It seems really obvious, right, but then they’re banning Trina Schart Hyman book because she depicts grandma drinking wine. This is how we keep informative storytelling from our children.”

There’s something about this girl and this wolf that strikes a particularly strident chord with Lou, who, for several years, was in throes of a dangerous relationship that nearly pulverized her.

“While I was in an abusive relationship, I experienced abuse from the very beginning, but I didn’t identify it that way because I was always surrounded by love and support,” says Lou. “In Trina Hyman’s edition of Little Red Riding Hood there’s one part that says Little Red Riding Hood didn’t know that the wolf was dangerous so she was polite to him just as she was to everyone else. And I think that was ultimately my downfall, and why I’ve experienced so much mistreatment in my life. I just don’t see people as dangers.”

“My abuser was very manipulative and they used a lot of gas lighting,” Lou says. “I would see what was happening and try to articulate it with the limited experience and knowledge that I had, and they would say, ‘You’re wrong. This is love.’ And I would believe them. And I would treat them with the same kind of kindness that I hoped would be given back to me. It was never enough.”

She remembered a song from the musical Six. “Jane Seymour’s song, where she sings about having a heart of stone, is so parallel to my experience in an abusive relationship,” says Lou. “It really hit home to me because the whole time I was experiencing this abuse and being told that it was love, I felt so strong for enduring it. It didn’t matter that they were yelling at me, or diminishing me, or objectifying me or putting me in dangerous situations because I was strong enough to endure it. That’s what love is, right; love is endurance. That’s what I had in my mind. It wasn’t until I realized that I was not strong enough and that I was literally dying, that I had to make a choice for me for the first time in my life.”

And then Lou Keeton mentions the song I Know Things Now from the Sondheim musical Into the Woods. It’s about Little Red Riding Hood, and Lou sings it through in gut-wrenching a capella that brings me to tears.

“Mother said,

‘Straight ahead,’

Not to delay

or be misled.

I should have heeded

Her advice . . .

But he seemed so nice . . .”

Lou remembers that when she first learned the song, her mother would frequently point out to her that nice is different than good. 

“That was a very important line because I was nice to everybody and if they showed me any shred of kindness I was like, ‘We’re best friends forever,’“  she says. “And I put all of my energy into them, so of course it made me a prime candidate for abuse. But it’s also one of my favorite things about myself that I have so much energy and empathy to give other people.”

During her last meeting with her abuser, Lou said, “I know you do not believe in therapy, but it would be beneficial to you.”

“I just left and I haven’t seen them since,” says Lou. “I think of my abuser sometimes and I see the way they looked at me. I thought that that was love, but now I realize that it was ownership, it was control. It was fear. I learned a lot from this, and I hope to pass on those lessons so that nobody else has to experience it again. I know that that’s impossible, but I’ll touch whatever tiny part of the world that I have access to.” 

And as playwright, actor, photographer and director, Lou Keeton has all the tools in her belt necessary to touch more than a tiny part of the world.