PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 23, June 16, 2005

Physics staff member leads double life (on stage)

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@uiuc.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Kwame Ross Tough act to follow Steve Keen, a program administrative assistant, has spent his entire 30-year career at the university in the department of physics, but people may also recognize him from theatrical productions at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Station Theatre, Urbana. Keen is appearing in two plays at Krannert Center this summer – “Broadway” and “My Three Angels” – and said he may try auditioning for parts in Chicago productions when he retires from his “day job.”

Steve Keen is a storekeeper. But he’s also a homicide detective. And in the past he’s been a brilliant physicist, a self-made millionaire and a power-wielding lawyer who influenced a judge to execute convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

However, Keen is considering retiring only from his “day job” as a program administrative assistant in the department of physics in the College of Engineering.

Even people who have not worked with Keen may recognize his face from theatrical productions at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Station Theatre in Urbana.

Since his first acting role in a 1978 production of the rock musical “Hair” at the Station Theatre, Keen has portrayed many complex and unforgettable characters on local stages, including the venomous lawyer and AIDS victim Roy Cohn in the epic “Angels in America,” hapless salesman Willie Loman in playwright Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” and the flamboyant female impersonator Zaza in “La Cage Aux Folles.”

This summer, audiences can catch Keen in two productions at KCPA: “My Three Angels,” a comedy in which he plays a luckless storekeeper whose dysfunctional family rekindles its Christmas spirit with the help of three convicts in 1910 French Guiana; and “Broadway,” in which he portrays a detective investigating a murder in a Prohibition-era speakeasy.

The productions have rigorous, rotating rehearsal schedules of only 3 1/2 weeks that keep Keen hopping between his office in Loomis Laboratory and the stages at Krannert.

Of the many roles that Keen has played over the years, he has a particular fondness for his role as Niels Bohr in the play “Copenhagen,” which was performed at the Station Theatre earlier this year. The play by Peter Frayn speculates on what may have transpired between physicists Bohr and Werner Heisenberg when they met in German-occupied Copenhagen during September 1941, on the brink of World War II. Bohr and Heisenberg, who were Nobel laureates and longtime friends, found themselves working on opposing sides of the war effort – Bohr helping the Allies and Heisenberg helping the Germans in the race to build atomic bombs – which caused a rift in the men’s friendship.

The play was challenging, Keen said, because the dialogue contained a great deal of detail about nuclear physics; however, it was especially intriguing as well because “it was sort of a rewarding mesh between my work, what I do during the day, and what I do at night. It was interesting for me because some of the professors in the department knew these two individuals (Bohr and Heisenberg), and actually worked on the development of the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago. We had a couple of professors come in and talk with the cast. The physics department just really sort of rallied around the production.”

The camaraderie among people in his department is one reason Keen chose to spend his entire 30-year career at the university in the same job and department.

“The business office in physics has always been a close-knit group of people, so that makes it easy to stay. It’s a large department and very well respected, so it’s an exciting place to be, even though I don’t really understand physics,” Keen said.

Keen, who grew up in the tiny bedroom community of Grant Park, caught the acting bug when he saw his first professional production of “Man of La Mancha” shortly before he went to college. During his freshman year at Illinois State University, he discovered the university’s theater department and chose to add a minor in theater to his major in journalism.

With retirement from the university a possibility this fall, Keen is considering taking his act on the road.
“My dream is to see if I can get into acting in Chicago. I’m at a good age, I think, because many young people stop acting before they reach their mid-fifties,” Keen said. “I used to like musicals a lot more. I’ve become less comfortable singing than I used to be. The plays that are most attractive to me are those that exist better on stage and have a high level of theatricality.”

Of the many productions that he has been in, Keen said he is proudest of his work in “Angels in America.”

“It was a huge project,” Keen said. “It’s an eight-hour play done in two four-hour segments, and it requires a lot of imagination from the audience.”

Two roles that he has coveted, but which he has not had the opportunity to play, are King Henry II in “The Lion in Winter” and Miguel de Cervantes in “Man of La Mancha.”

Like any seasoned thespian, Keen has stories to tell about onstage mishaps and prop malfunctions that injected surprises and, sometimes, unexpected hilarity into productions. Laughing, Keen recalled that one misstep he made earned him the nickname “Punchy,” by which he is still known years later. In the midst of singing a romantic ballad in “Follies,” Keen took a miscalculated step and fell off the edge of the set. At the end of the season, the other cast members jokingly presented him with a toy called “Punchy takes a sky dive” to commemorate his fall.

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