what my teacher taught me

the foundation of everything i practice in art

I’ve always been a weird interdisciplinary unicorn. These days, doing a bunch of different things is pretty common (and usually necessary for survival if you’re at all outside the box), but I grew up in a time (the end of the 20th century/beginning of the 21st) when it was still outside the norm. I switched colleges more than once and wound up patchworking acting, writing, critical theory and philosophy into an independent major, talking my way into grad school classes on state school tuition. But I was always an actor.

I was an actor because I was a storyteller, and acting is usually the way young people find their way into that. I was also an actor because it seemed to me to be the most radical training in the practice of empathy: if I could feel another person’s feelings, actually live out stories different from my own, that seemed the most profound training I could find in being human.

I chased training and rigor from about age 14, and had the great good fortune of having parents who were also weird interdisciplinary unicorns and wholeheartedly supported me becoming an artist. I apprenticed everywhere and went to all kinds of programs; in college, I studied with every acting teacher I could find. I learned a lot. But none of them could teach me what I really wanted to learn, which was how to really be an artist. The kind that does alchemy. That has one foot in our full, most personal and individual humanity, and the other in something much bigger. The kind that braids both those things together. That makes work that moves from the inside of my own imagination into the world’s.

Toward the end of college I connected with a PhD candidate in the U of M’s theater department; he and his wife were brilliant weirdos (they must’ve been pushing 40, which seemed SO WISE back then) who took me under their wing. Doug was an old punk who’d moved back to Minneapolis from New York City; he’d been in the downtown NYC avant-garde theater scene in the 90s (and maybe the 80s) and complained about how SoHo was no longer the cool ultra-cheap downtown art scene that it used to be. I think he’d been Richard Foreman’s assistant. He was at the center of a crew of thirtysomething folks who’d been avant-garde NY denizens, come to Minnesota for rehab, and stayed. He ran a free, come-when-you-want acting class out of someone’s loft in Minneapolis, and he invited me to join. He gave me a scene by Marguerite Duras, cast me opposite his formidable, fierce wife, and had me work on it for probably six months in a way I’d never worked before. He taught me to be still. He taught me to listen. He taught me to stop thinking and to think at the same time, something I didn’t know was possible. Partway through he told us what he was teaching us was “Meisner Technique.” And I thought: this. This is what I need to learn.

When I made my way to New York, scrappy and just out of school, all I knew was I wanted to find the best Meisner teacher in the city. I was brand new in a giant city of strangers and I followed my nose and kept asking anyone I could find. I am forever grateful that eventually led me to Bill Esper.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, he was one of the great acting teachers of the 20th century. Sitting across the desk from him, interviewing for his two-year program, I just knew he knew the things I wanted to learn.

I studied with Bill for three years. The second I got in his class, I knew he would finally teach me how to act—that he had mastered a technique that opened up the pathways to radical empathy I’d been searching out for years.

It’s taken me many years—and a lot of work as a writer, director, producer and now teacher myself—to understand that he also taught me a lot more. It’s no mistake that the core texts for our class were Letters To a Young Poet and Zen in the Art of Archery, a philosophical text about mysticism, presence, focus, and a lot of other things that apply not only to acting but to the practice of any art.

The principles I learned from Bill are the foundation of everything I do. Almost 25 years after I graduated from his studio, I still find them seeping into all the work I make and everything I teach. He passed away in 2019; his memorial was full of beautiful artists who have made extraordinary, world-affecting work. It was pretty amazing to see how the hand of someone who most people outside the theater world have never even heard of has rippled out to so, so many.

I’m unbelievably grateful that young me somehow found her way to the feet of a master.

Here’s what I learned from him: