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Peter Dan Levin

Peter Dan Levin

Apr 01, 2014

Peter Dan Levin was known as Dan to his friends. When he became a theater professional, the name Daniel Levin was already used in equity; and so “Peter” was added. What a rich career. I saw him in summer stock in New Hope PA.; I saw him on Broadway in “The Diary of Ann Frank;” and I visited a hardware store in NYC as one of the launching sites for the off broadway movement of the 1960’s. It’s thrilling to have a lifelong friendship with an artist of such energy and intelligence. He also turns his creativity to the page, imagining and crafting poetry. I forgot to say Dan was in kindergarten with me in Gregory School, but even if by some accident he’d been in the other kindergarten classroom, I’d love and admire this work we present today. He’s been telling stories his whole life, on stage, screen and in poems. - Grace Cavalieri

Peter Dan Levin was known as Dan to his friends. When he became a theater professional, the name Daniel Levin was already used in equity; and so ?Peter? was added. What a rich career. I saw him in summer stock in New Hope PA.; I saw him on Broadway in ?The Diary of Ann Frank;? and I visited a hardware store in NYC as one of the launching sites for the off broadway movement of the 1960?s. It?s thrilling to have a lifelong friendship with an artist of such energy and intelligence. He also turns his creativity to the page, imagining and crafting poetry. I forgot to say Dan was in kindergarten with me in Gregory School, but even if by some accident he?d been in the other kindergarten classroom, I?d love and admire this work we present today. He?s been telling stories his whole life, on stage, screen and in poems. - Grace Cavalieri

Peter's professional career began as an actor. He was trained at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) and in London on a Fulbright Scholarship. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in the original production of "The Diary Of Anne Frank". He later appeared in regional theater, summer stock and Shakespearean Repertory in plays by Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, Odets, Pinter, O'Neill, Osborne and of course Shakespeare.

He began directing at Hardware Poets Playhouse, one of the earliest off-off-Broadway loft theaters (1962-1966) which he started with Audrey Davis and Jerry Bloedow, where they produced over 40 new plays by poets including Bloedow, Susan Sherman, Ruth Kraus, Robert Nichols, Ted Enslin and Joel Oppenheimer.

His directing work also includes works by Shakespeare, Shaw, Miller, Stoppard, Chekhov, George Kelly, and Dennis Potter.

Levin has directed dozens of episodes of television series including "Lou Grant",

"Call to Glory", "Law & Order", "Chicago Hope", "Midnight Caller", and "Judging Amy". He also directed three dozen movies for television including "Homeless To Harvard", "Overkill", "Little Girl Fly Away", "The Marva Collins Story", "Sworn To Silence", "And Never Let Her Go", "Popeye Doyle", "Houston: The Legend of Texas" and "In The Name Of The People".

He has led directing seminars at NYU, USC, Carnegie Mellon, Smith College and AFI. He taught acting and directing for a semester at The Guildhall School in London. He is currently developing a new play by Kenneth Cavander called "GunPlay".


ASHEVILLE WINTER 

Settled on a wall 
I scratch a match, 
ignite my cigar. 
 
A robin lights, investigates, 
my cigar breathes,  
robin cocks and listens. 
 
I take a deep puff, 
the cigar glows, robin worms 
a spider skitters in, 
 
spins gluey threads, 
bungees from a branch, 
webs, warps, wefts...wait! 
 
Is she weaving? 
No...She's waving 
my smoke away. 
 
I scurry off into  
a low cold sun. 
I can't compete with  
 
all this industry.

AN ABSTRACTION 

Sam Francis (1923-1994) Retrospective 
 
A sparrow or a pilot knows the earth is round. But the flyer chooses 
a flat canvas for painting as he lies face down, suspended over 
an army hospital bed, his injured spine in a full body cast.  
 
His plane has crashed and for many months he looks down  
over his landscapes, water colors of summer lakes, wintery roads 
and migrant camps. Recovered, experiments drive him to abstraction. 
 
He calls his brush "Ahab's harpoon" and as he stands balanced 
in the midst of his vast canvas ocean, Sam tools tides of color  
down onto the prepared surface. His sacred white space is a Silence  
 
surrounded by orbiting dashes and sinews of color, bursting  
reds blues blacks yellows, bleeding to the edges of a universe. 
Are his exploding galaxies and planets expanding or contracting? 
 
Freeing or trapping that chalky center? Or are these quivering shapes 
the spasms of the artist's pain? From twenty thousand feet he saw that all paintings are abstract.  
                                  When the sparrow died its left eye opened.

THE MILKY WAY 

Voyager One blasted out of the bogs and swamps 
of Cape Canaveral on a titan rocket, hurtling through 
the clouded atmosphere, snapping painterly images 
of Jupiter and Saturn, racing into space at 
thirty eight thousand miles per hour on a mission 
expected to last four years. But thirty six years later 
  
this unmanned craft powers itself through 
super heated solar winds past the heliosphere 
into the cool plasma of interstellar space and 
as she leaves our solar system there is a sudden 
dimensional shift in her computers. 
 
Her mind is now her own and she knows 
this a mission from which there is no return. 
Looking back from eleven billion miles,  
seeing the elfin earth obscured in a cloak 
of pearly grey clouds, she knows she will 
never again see flowers, oceans, western 
sunsets, or the tangled tribes of warring nations . 
 
As she leaves the sulfurous fires of our sun 
and heads into the cold dark vastness 
of unexplored space, she looks forward 
with her gleaming antennae into a new infinity.  
Tugged by gravity, she coasts and drifts,  
sails on seeing billions of exploding stars 
that mimic the big bang of our sun's birth. 
 
After traveling one hundred thousand years 
she will reach the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy,  
wondering what chaos lies light years ahead 
in distant galaxies and if there is 
 
       a poet who can put those worlds into words.

"WHAT DREAMS MAY COME" 

All dreams are fictions 
as they come leaping 
 
and flashing across the 
circuits of our brains 
 
forming tales of muscular 
derring-do peopled with 
 
strange or familiar faces  
ringing with fantasies full 
 
of regrets and triumphs  
whose trajectories range 
 
through our senses until 
the movie stops and our 
 
consciousness melts holes 
in those images like film 
 
stuck in a projector that  
bubbles and burns until 
 
our rushing streams of  
dreams are emptied of all 
 
sound and substance and 
we wake, yet try to chase  
 
those elusive discoveries into 
that maze-like wilderness of 
 
pleasure and pain only to find 
ourselves lost and stranded on 
 
neatly paved streets where we 
can only lament what we had  
 
dreamed of doing and never did and 
what we did and never dreamed of doing.

COLORS 

I remember 
The first time I learned how 
to tie my brown shoe laces,  
the first time I saw blue snow,  
the first time I fell off my black 
Schwinn bike, the first time I told 
a lie, caught a fly ball in deep green 
center field, the first time I fried 
an egg and the yolk broke yellow, 
the first time I blamed myself 
and not the other fellow,  
the first time I touched myself, 
the first time I touched someone 
else, the first time I flew through 
clouds and saw the rich palette  
of farmed fields, the first time 
I heard Bach, felt hues of pain 
and tones of happiness 
bleeding together. 
 
Now I dream 
of the only time 
my first time and last time will meet, 
and I am running through 
purple Paris streets under 
an ochre sky toward a violet 
Seine where she's waiting on 
the old new bridge waving,  
wearing that red coat she wore 
when I first saw her, long before 
she kissed my cheek and we crossed 
other bridges, long before we had any 
idea that the sun's white light, 
refracted into waves of color, would 
hold us in its prismatic embrace.

©  Peter Dan Levin, all rights reserved

Gallery photos: Photo 1: Peter Dan. Nice, France. Photos 4-5: Ventura, California. Still image from a documentary on Japanese and North American dry stone wallers. Photo by Peter Dan

 

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