Meisner Technique with William Esper - So You Want to be an Actor?

00:15:

If you want to be an actor, there are a lot of things that you have to decide for yourself because there are lots of different kinds of actors. You have to ask yourself, "Well, what kind of actor do I want to be?" Now, if you want to be a indicated actor, you want to ... you really admire British acting, you want to be able to do classical work, then that determines the kind of school that you've gone to want to seek and find for yourself. If you wanting to be a realistic, truthful actor, then that's another thing altogether. Then you have to make a search there to try and find the school that's going to take you towards your vision of what a good actor is, and as many schools as there are, there are as many points of view about that.

01:24:

Now, [inaudible 00:01:25] studio, we have a very particular point of view about acting, about what makes a good actor, what constitutes really good acting. The work at the studio is primarily based on the 17 years that I spent with Sanford Meisner. Sanford Meisner was one of the founding members of the Group Theater, which was a very, probably the most important theater that we've ever had in America, in this country. This was a group of very talented people who wanted to make a particularly taught particular kind of theater. It was socially driven, and they were concerned with ... They're reflecting their times, their issues, their problems that they were going through as citizens of America at that time.

02:29:

They were very influenced by Stanislavski. Many of them had seen the Moscow Art Theater when it visited here in the early 1920s, and they were very deeply, deeply impressed. They founded this theater, and they were considered to be very eccentric, kind of a crazy group of people because they used to go off, every summer, they would go up and find a residency and some bungalow colony, or some hotel where they would agree to keep the guests entertained in return from their housing, their board, and a rehearsal space where they could work on themselves, exercise themselves, and prepare one or two plays to bring back to New York in the fall.

03:25:

In that theater, members of that theater, founding members included Lee Strasberg. Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Sanford Meisner, Elia Khazan, and a large number of very talented actors. They never got really financed. At that time it wasn't as easy as it is now to set up a nonprofit charitable organization that would provide art for the community, especially not in the theater. They were financing all their plays just as if they were regular commercial productions that were coming in, meaning they had to raise money for each play that they did. Of course in time, that got to be very wearing and difficult path to tread. The whole thing began as the country moved out of the depression, and more, jobs and more better paying jobs became available in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, and in New York, the company began to fragment and each of them began to go in there in their perspective ways.

04:43:

But out of that, out of that theater came the great triumvirate, if you will, of American master acting teachers, and that was a Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Stella Adler. They were very different even though they all espoused and honored the work of Stanislavski, it was not in terms of being ... doing what Stanislavski did in a literal way, but rather trying to emulate and find his inspiration because Stanislavski was a great experimental, and he loved theater, and he loved acting, and he loved actors, and he looked around at a lot of the actors of his period, of the late 1800s and, early 1900s, and he saw that there were certain actors that he liked much better than other actors.

05:48:

People like the great Italian tragedian, Tommaso Salvini who's supposedly the best, the all fellow of his generation. He also [inaudible 00:06:05], the great Italian tragedian who was kind of the person who carried outside of Russia the whole idea of being a truthful, authentic, active, who not only created the outside manifestations and habits and mannerisms of a character. The way they look, the way they walk, all of those things, but also created within themselves the living experience of that character as the character moved through the particular work that they were doing.

06:46:

That has been a very important thing about American acting, and those teachers who came out of the Group Theater dominated American acting training for 40, 50 years, and there's still a tremendous influence today.