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August 28, 2017
 Good
news for Canadian TV viewers. Last fall Peter
spent a good deal of his time up in Montreal filming a
6-part original mystery series for CTV. It's
called THE DISAPPEARANCE and it'll debut on
Sundays at 9 p.m. beginning October 1 on CTV and CTV GO.
You can watch the trailer
at this link.
"The Disappearance" is a dark, emotionally charged drama
that focuses on a family’s struggle to cope with an
unthinkable tragedy when a 10-year-old boy goes missing
during a birthday-party treasure hunt; Peter plays the
family patriarch, a retired judge who has been estranged
from his son and his wife but is drawn back into their
lives when the horrible event forces them to turn to
each other for support and comfort.
Peter says he was immediately intrigued by the first two
scripts his agent forwarded to him, but admits he
underestimated the workload that signing onto the
project would bring.
He says, "The producers were very clever. I thought,
‘Oh, I’m the grandfather; it’ll be great — I’ll work a
couple of days a week and I’ll collect my checks. It
won’t be too hard.’ And then I came up here and got the
scripts for the other four episodes, full of night
shoots in Montreal in the winter, outside. And I
thought, ‘Oh, you want to kill an old Jew.’"
This project and this city have been something of a
revelation for Peter. Even after nearly four decades in
the business, he embraces the possibility of
eye-widening surprises such as this that keep him
interested in his craft.
"Every actor should be lucky enough to film in Quebec,"
he says. "I really can’t think of a more enjoyable film
I’ve had, in terms of the camaraderie of the crew and
the cast, and the lack of authoritarian bull on the part
of the director and the producers. It feels like a
charmed environment... it’s exactly the way I like to
work."
 As
previously reported, Peter has narrated another Ken
Burns project. This time it's a 10-part documentary
called THE VIETNAM WAR, which will be broadcast
on PBS starting September 17. At a KQED event last
month, Peter was asked about his own experience with the
Vietnam War draft. He’d applied to be a conscientious
objector and written an essay expressing his beliefs,
and was turned down. He started graduate school and
dropped out, and then "they drafted me. I went into the
psychiatric interview, and said I would go ... 'but I am
not going to go and kill people.'" He was classified
1-Y, to be called only in extreme emergency, he said. "I
told the exact truth, with the worldview I could have
written today."
Peter said he has done 170 narrations, some of which —
for "The Roosevelts," for example, which he felt touched
upon his parents’ lives and beliefs — involved him
emotionally. "But when this one came up, this is one
time I was flabbergasted at the degree my emotions and
my memories were in my throat," he said.
On
July 27 playwright and actor Sam Shepard passed
away at age 73. Peter, who Shepard cast in the 1980
world premiere of his play "True West" at the Magic
Theatre, remembered Shepard in an interview with The
Frame as someone whose "genius was unmistakable."
"You didn't have to be close and intimate [friends with
him] to realize how gifted and how original and how
profound he was," Peter said. He recalled that Shepard
"had a kind of tarnished eye toward the business of
Hollywood," and was "very much dedicated to real, as
opposed to commercial, art."
April 4, 2017
Peter
was recently in Paris to participate in an event called
"American Stories" held on March 26, 2017 at the
Philharmonie de Paris. He was delighted to once again
read Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait", this
time with the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France. He has
previously performed it in 2015 at the Napa Valley
Performing Arts Center as well as with the Greensboro
Symphony in NC. Both of these previous times he
performed with conductor Dimitry Sitkovetsky, seen in
the third photo taken in March 2015 in Napa Valley.
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