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

[Music] [Applause] [Music] you know if you want to be an actor there are a lot of things that you have to decide for yourself you know because there are lots of different kinds of actors so it the you have to ask your yourself well what kind of actor do I want to be now if you want to be a do you want to be a indicated actor you want to really admire uh British acting you want to be able to do classical work then that uh that determines the kind of school that you're going to want to to seek and and uh find for yourself if you want to be a realistic truthful actor uh then that's another then that's another thing altoe then you have to make a search there to try and find the school that's uh going to take you towards your vision of what a good actor is and as many schools as there are as many points of view about that now William es studio uh we have a uh very particular point of view about acting about what makes a good actor uh What uh 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 of uh very talented people who wanted to make a particularly particular kind of theater it was uh socially driven and they were con they were concerned with their reflecting their times their issues their problems that they were going through as a citizens of uh America at that time they uh were very influenced by stanislowski many of them had seen the Moscow theater when it visited here in the early 1920s and they were very deeply deeply impressed and so they founded this uh this theater and uh 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 uh find a residency somewhere at some Bungalow Colony or you you know some hotel where they would agree to keep the guests entertained in return for their housing their their board and the rehearsal space where they could work on themselves exercise themselves and prepare one or two plays to bring back to New York in the uh in the in the in the fall and in that in that theater members of that theater founding members included Lee straber Stella Adler Harold Kerman Sanford Meisner Ilia Kazan and a large number of very talented uh actors um they never got the really financed you know at that time it wasn't it wasn't as easy as it is now to set up a nonprofit kind of charitable organization uh that would provide art for the for the community especially not in the in the in the theater and so 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 that they that they did and of course in time that got to be a very wearing and difficult uh path to tread and so the whole thing began as the as the country moved out of the depression and more jobs and more better paying jobs became available in Los Angeles and Hollywood and in New York the company began to fragment and each of them began to go in their in their in their prospective ways but out of that out of that theater came the great uh triumphant if you will of American master acting teachers and that was uh lee strawberg Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler and you know they're very they're very different even though they they all espoused and honored the work of stanislowski it was not in terms of being doing what stanislowski did in a literal way but rather trying to emulate and uh uh find his uh inspiration you know because Stanis lki was a great experimentor you know and he loved theater and he loved acting and he actors and he looked around at at at a lot of the actors of his period you know of the late 1800s and uh early early 1900s and he saw that there were certain actors that he liked much better than other actors people like uh the great Italian tragedian Tomaso salvini who was supposedly the best the greatest othell of his generation and uh he uh also Elenor du the great Italian toan who was kind of the person who uh carried outside of Russia the whole idea of being a truthful authentic actor who not only not only created the outside manifestations and habits and mannerisms of a character the way they looked the way they walked all of those things but also created within themselves The Living experience of that character as the character moved through the uh the particular work that they were that they that they were doing so that that has been a u uh 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 they're still uh um tremendous influence today