Intro - The Beginning - Turning Point - Enter Mr. Meisner

As the Founding Director of Playhouse West we must first give credit where credit is due. After moving from New York to Los Angeles as a result of film work, one of the first actors I looked up was Jon Voight. Asking him for advice, the primary suggestion he made was get a group together and find a way to keep working seriously at my craft. He said this is what he did when he first moved to L.A. after starring in Midnight Cowboy. This planted a seed which came to fruition shortly thereafter.

I had studied in New York for a five year period with the Head Acting Teacher at The Neighborhood Playhouse. This was my first experience with the approach of Sanford Meisner, having worked previously for years with Stella Adler and later with Harold Clurman, the Founder of The Group Theater. Now that I was in L.A., this teacher of the Meisner approach, who lived in New York, asked me to help him set up a summer class in L.A. where he would vacation in the summer. I found a place to hold the class, put the ads in the paper, and scheduled the appointments. And that summer of 1981 a six-week introductory class in the Sanford Meisner approach was held in Los Angeles.

The class was made up of some people new to the technique, but there were also a group of Neighborhood Playhouse graduates who had moved to L.A. and were hungry to touch base again with the work they had learned. Among these was Jeff Goldblum. Jeff had done a good deal of film work and starred in his own television series with Ben Vereen. But, despite all the work he had done, he wanted to reconnect with his technique.

When the six week course ended and my teacher friend returned to New York, the class was enthusiastic enough about the work they were doing that they wanted it continued. The driving force behind this effort to keep the class going was two Playhouse graduates, Cheryl O'Neil and Norah Foster. Cheryl made arrangements for a free meeting place at the offices of the radio station, KIQQ, where she worked, and I was selected to run the classes due to my extensive background and friendship with the teacher who held the summer session.

We met Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings on a regular basis. The graduates did their own brand of advanced work and scenes and the newer people continued their training from the ground up. It has often been said of L.A. actors that they’re not as serious as New York actors. This is a generalization, and has some truth in it, but the people we worked with were most enthusiastic, as if they had been yearning for a kind of serious structure or discipline to which they could apply themselves.

Without making any effort to expand the size of our group, word began to travel, and before we knew it our class was getting bigger. Early members of that class included the D.J., Jay Coffey, who was working at KIQQ at the time, and has since moved to KEARTH, and Francesca Carppuci, who also worked there and has gone on to be a music reporter for Channel 7 news in L.A.

Now our group was made up of actors new to the technique we were teaching and more and more graduates from The Neighborhood Playhouse who heard about this unique new meeting ground in L.A. Those of us who were graduates began work on a play written by one of our members. We were rehear-sing one evening at KIQQ when Jeff received the call at the station that he had been cast in The Big Chill, the movie which was to establish him as a major star. When he got the news, Jeff mentioned that he felt it was the continual work he had been doing with us which sharpened him sufficiently to audition well enough to get that role. This event confirmed one of the founding principles behind Playhouse West, a principle I had realized in New York. The actor must continue his training, just as the singer and dancer continue theirs.

The traditional way of teaching the approach of Mr. Meisner was based on the routine established at The Neighborhood Playhouse. Students would work for two periods of 8 months with a summer break and then that was the end of their training. This same approach was followed in the private classes of their teachers, of which I had been a member. But what I noticed, after I “graduated” from my two years of work in Sandy’s method, that when I would attend the plays my friends from class were doing they immediately lost most, if not all, of the work they had learned. It is for that reason that I decided to continue my training for the additional three years I was in New York, not wanting to lose, due to performance pressure, the technique I had worked so hard to learn.

So the founding principle of Playhouse West, its reason for being, was to provide a continual training ground for actors, not a temporary one. And in the case of Jeff, and many of the rest of us, it became apparent that our work twice a week substantially contributed to our careers.

It may be a source of amusement to mention how it is we came to expand our meeting location out of the offices at KIQQ. On a Wednesday night, two students were doing an exercise. The actress doing the activity tried to throw the other actor out of the room, but that actor resisted and kicked a hole in the door. The next morning at KIQQ there was an uproar, for the manager there had been contributing space for free to us and was most displeased that we had damaged his office. As a result of this we lost our first home.

There’s a silver lining in every dark cloud, and Cheryl O'Neil used her initiative and located another free space for us at a recreation building in North Hollywood Park. We used that Wednesday nights and I located a space for Saturday mornings at The Macadam Place Theater. During this time our group continued to multiply to the point that we couldn’t accommodate all who wanted to work with us. We had worked for over a year and no one was charged for the training. In the two years to follow this remained true, although at a certain point we had to ask for five or ten dollars a month to defray the cost of our spaces. I was earning a living as an actor and saw no reason to charge our graduates and new actors to work on their craft. So at our earliest beginnings we stood firmly against a standard Hollywood practice of exploiting actors for every dime they’re worth. And our price, although increased substantially due to my having to turn down acting work if I was to continue training those who wished to be taught, has always been on the lowest end possible.

It was at some point early in our development that the founding graduates met to come up with a name for what we had been calling “our group.” We arrived at “Playhouse West” as homage to our roots in New York and the work of Sanford Meisner at The Neighborhood Playhouse. We thought of ourselves as the group which would try to keep alive and promulgate the technique in the hostile climate of L.A. Keep in mind this was in the early eighties before “The Sanford Meisner Technique” became the imitated rage it has since become. As a completely unique group in L.A., with a relatively new to L.A. training approach, we became very much in demand on our own merits, rather than on the basis of association with a name which has later become a calling card almost everyone uses to attract students. Our early classes, although free in charge, were as disciplined and rigorous as they are now, and only the serious could participate.

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