Peter Dan Levin

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.

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.

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Comments

Anne Caston (not verified)

Thu, 09/05/2024 - 1:43pm

Dan Murano

Thu, 09/05/2024 - 5:11pm

Thank you, Anne.