Douglas McKeown

In January, 2005 he found the time to return to the stage as an actor in Kafka’s “The Trial,” the inaugural production of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, and has subsequently appeared with that company in “Antigone” (2007) and “The Lifeblood” (2008).

He also directed (and co-wrote) special scenes for the indie film, “The Watermelon Woman” (1997), shot on location in Philadelphia. While at Sony Music in New York, he joined the team that produced “Sony Music 100 Years: Soundtrack For A Century,” a 26-disc box set.

” He also wrote and directed his first feature film during this time: “The Deadly Spawn” (1983), recently restored to DVD (Synapse Films, 2004). In later years, as a videographer, McKeown recorded significant public events for the LGBT Center in New York City, as well as taping their fund-raising documentary “Center Challenge: an Architectural Tour” for the Center’s major renovation effort.

After a brief career teaching film, theatre and literature in the early 1970s (several of his students went on to distinguish themselves in television, the movies, and on the Broadway stage), he moved to New York and joined the Jean Cocteau Repertory, first as an actor, playing a range of characters from Tony Lumpkin in “She Stoops To Conquer” to the aged Emperor in “The Brass Butterfly” to doubling Duncan and the Porter in “Macbeth” – and then as a designer of scenery, costumes, and makeup for revivals of classics such as “The Cenci,” “Salome,” “As You Like It,” “The Tempest,” “Hamlet,” “The Dybbuk,” “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” and “The Roman Actor. ” He worked with Tennessee Williams, designing the playwright’s last world premiere production in New York, “Something Cloudy, Something Clear. ” Among the plays Mr. McKeown went on to direct were “The Witch of Edmonton,” “The Oresteia of Aeschylus,” and “Cymbeline.

Douglas McKeown terrorized several Metuchen, New Jersey neighborhoods in the 1950s and as a teenager, filmed a T-Rex devouring his brother.