Who the F is Scott Williams?

In 1990, a documentary found its way to centre stage: "Sanford Meisner, The American Theater’s Best Kept Secret." The documentary is a series of interviews with his students and snippets from classes – with Robert Duvall, Sidney Pollack, Gregory Peck, Joanna Woodward, Mary Steenburgen, and Eli Wallach, amongst others.

It seems fair to say that this best-kept secret remains just that. A secret.

How can it be that a man, whose contemporaries at the time, (Meisner was a member of The Group Theatre, whose founding members included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Elia Kazan) were pivotal in the development of actor training in the 20th Century and yet he remains relatively unknown?Lee Strasberg is considered to be the father of “The Method” as we know it today, with students such as Marilyn Monroe, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, and Al Pacino, and Stella Adler’s work is grounded in imagination, memory, and research – with students such as Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Christoph Waltz, and Warren Beatty.

When it comes to Meisner, however, it would seem that most people know little about the man or the technique (oh, it’s Stanislavski-based, right?) other than its tent pole exercise of “repetition” (they got us to repeat our lines over and over until they changed) with no real understanding of how or why it works and even less understanding of the technique as a whole.

Given that Sanford Meisner passed away in 1997, it is fair to say the one true expert in the work is no longer with us. His surviving students who trained directly with him and now teach his work are few and far between. One of his protégé’s, William Esper, passed away in 2019, leaving an even smaller pool of direct lineage teachers left.

 Enter Scott Williams. 

Scott trained as an actor with Sanford Meisner at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in the 1970s, always with a view to teach the work. He recalls, as a young actor, “I had been told to be in the moment, but there seemed to be no one who could tell me exactly how to do that – until I landed at The Playhouse. It seemed to me, that here was the way I could learn that much-lauded, elusive concept".

Scott holds an extensive resume – directing from age 17, whilst training at American Conservatory Theatre, onward to Neighborhood Playhouse at 19, a BA in English Literature, MA of Arts in Dramatic Literature at San Francisco State University, Chairman of the Drama Department at Foothill College, a Masters thesis on Shakespeare, Beckett and Shepherd and Associate Director of L'ACT, a professional repertory company operating south of San Francisco.

In 1988, he was appointed the Artistic Director of Hillbarn Theatre, where amongst countless productions was the adaptation of the classic Elizabeth von Arnim book, The Enchanted April, which opened on Broadway in April of 2003. Scott has directed award-winning productions of Amadeus, The Elephant Man, Dial M for Murder and Prelude to a Kiss. Also at Hillbarn, he worked with the Broadway legend Cy Coleman on the creation of an original musical based on Coleman's work called CYcles.

After his move to London in 1996, Scott founded The Impulse Company, a conservatory and repertory Company where he trains actors in the Meisner Technique. He continues his multi-dimensional schedule of teaching and directing on a global scale, teaching throughout the UK, France, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Australia, and the USA.

So, with 40 years of extensive work behind him, and his techniques now taught by Acting Tutors at RADA, Mountview Academy, Arts Ed and ALRA, to name but a few, it would seem that Scott, too, is one of the best-kept secrets of modern acting training.

 Scott is a teacher who shies away from any hint of guru-dom and believes in letting the work speak for itself.

"Our work has always been about what happens in those two chairs, between those two actors in the exercise, not the size of the room we teach in, or the famous shoes that have sat there before them”. 

“Teachers will teach through their filter, adjusting, adding, or removing elements of what they have learned to then teach and develop for themselves. Many will also claim to be the one true way. I have spent 40 years teaching this work, and in opposition to many, I have removed exercises rather than adding, distilling the technique into five exercises that cover Meisner’s definition of acting, which is living truthfully under given circumstances.

Scott has visited Australia for over ten years and teaches across the country. His workshops are suitable for actors who are completely new to Meisner’s work through to those who have been working with these techniques for years.

When asked about the energy within the room, Williams replies:

“This work is fun! There’s a deep satisfaction in authenticity, and I find my acting classes specialise in that quality. We laugh a lot, in between a lot of other feelings, because the joy of acting is a nearly unparalleled experience.”