GREEN BAY – If Dorsey Levens’ post-football acting career continues to grow the way it has on stage of late, the former Green Bay Packers Pro Bowl running back and aspiring thespian will someday be known for more than just the awful horn-rimmed glasses he wore in his uncredited role as a Xavier football coach in We Are Marshall.
Levens is currently going through what he calls the acting equivalent of training camp, preparing for the opening of his play Stripped, a behind-the-scenes look at the life of NFL players. Levens co-wrote, produced and stars in the play as Jaden Dorsey, a retired player struggling with his post-football life. The show opens in Atlanta on the campus of Levens’ alma mater, Georgia Tech, on July 27, and he’s hoping for a successful run so he can bring the show to Wisconsin thereafter.
“It’s about a professional athlete, played by myself, who loses everything – his money, his wife, his best friend and literally his mind from all the hits he’s taken in the NFL,” Levens explained during a visit to Green and Gold Today earlier this week. “It’s really just a fly on the wall perspective of what it’s really like to be an NFL player. A lot of people think that your life is perfect and everything is great because you’re in the NFL, and that’s far from the truth. There are good sides, but there’s also a cost associated with being a professional athlete.”
Four former NFL players – Ryan Stewart, Karon Riley, Ed Hartwell (a former University of Wisconsin linebacker) and Levens – are in the show, some of whom were in Levens’ last stage production, Torn, a contemporary Christian drama about the perils of modern relationships that ran last year at Atlanta’s 14th Street Playhouse.
Stewart is half of the popular Atlanta sports-talk radio show 2 Live Stews on Sporting News Radio 790 AM The Zone, while Hartwell’s wife, Lisa Wu-Hartwell plays the female lead. She is the ex-wife of singer Keith Sweat and appears on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Atlanta.
Levens, who once appeared on Oprah to talk about the challenges of dating as a professional athlete, faced his share of relationship challenges during and after his NFL career and drew on his experiences and others’ for the script. Levens’ fiancée, Ann-Mary Johnson, also contributed to the script.
“Everybody’s acting, but we’re not really acting,” he said of the plotline. “It’s real life experiences for everybody. The story is not made up. It’s not totally my story but it’s based on stories I know personally from around the league. A lot of people are intrigued by the story.”
ESPN540Milwaukee wrote: