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Vincent Dowling has resigned as artistic director of the Abbey Theater, the troubled flagship of Irish theater. Dowling is the fourth artistic director of Ireland’s most famous theater to resign in the past four years. He will now run the Abbey’s tours and fund raising in North America. Few recent Abbey productions have enjoyed major critical and box-office success. And Dowling’s decision to bring in directors from the Soviet Union and the United States has met with bad reviews. The Abbey was founded in a former morgue in 1904 by Nobel Prize-winning poet W.B. Yeats. The announcement of Dowling’s departure made no mention of a successor.