William Esper Teaches The Meisner Technique

Posted by William Esper on September 16th, 2019

William Esper Studio was established in New York City in 1965 and has grown into a world-renowned acting school focusing on the Meisner Technique. Grown out of his 17-year mentorship with Sanford Meisner, William Esper established the school to create a place where dedicated, aspiring artists could train with passionate, expertly-trained teachers. Like Meisner, Esper believed that acting is a creative art and true excellence in its practice may only be achieved through total mastery of technical craft. The result of decades spent developing his world-renowned technique, Esper’s rigorous system of exercises builds a solid foundation for any actor facing any professional challenge. The approach can be applied to any role in any medium, helping actors create characters with truthful and compelling inner lives.

As an extension of his teachings at the New York City-based studio, William Esper wrote two books: The Actor’s Art and Craft and The Actor’s Guide to Creating a Character. As someone with a deep passion for teaching the craft of acting, Esper’s books relay his specific understanding and interpretation of the Meisner Technique to students and fellow teachers around the world.

The Actor’s Art and Craft, the first of Esper’s two books, closely aligns with the work done during the first year of training at William Esper Studio. In support of Esper’s tenet that acting is a technical craft that must be mastered, acting teachers must put forth a concrete, step-by-step approach to training. Meisner developed exactly this kind of clear path, and Esper further clarified it, then definitively laid it out in his book. In The Actor’s Art and Craft, as in the first year of work, Esper puts forth a series of increasingly layered exercises that allow the actor to discover and then work from the core of their own truth, who they really are. Actors learn how to listen and respond from their own sense of truth, how to work off the other person, how to pin down requirements of a role so they can freely improvise within a given framework. These tools give the actor the ability to work across mediums, from Film and TV to Shakespeare on Broadway.

In the second book, The Actor’s Guide to Creating a Character, Esper expands on the ideas set forth in the first book, just as the second-year work expands on the first. After spending the first book (and year) focusing on the actor’s own emotional core and truth, during the second year the actor learns to find a character’s true perspective and understand a character’s motivation. Learning how to create a character, bring to life a person other than the actor themselves, is learning how to make choices that create the actor’s interpretation of that character. In making these kinds of choices about a character responds to the written situation, actors are able to explore the vast range of humanity outside of their own tendencies and experiences.

William Esper, one of the leading acting teachers of our time, explains and extends Sanford Meisner’s technique. In his two books, he offers a clean, concrete, step-by-step approach to becoming a truly creative actor. The Actor’s Art and Craft guides actors through a process of self-exploration, finding their own inner truth and emotional core. The Actor’s Guide to Creating a Character offers actors the opportunity to apply that exploration to a character, to make choices about response and motivation outside of their own personas. As do the combined two years of training at William Esper Studio, the two books together help to lay the foundation for an actor who is flexible, spontaneous, truthful, imaginative and open-hearted.