TV Reviews : ‘Best Kept Secret’ Celebrates Sanford Meisner

“Still as wonderful and funny and terrifying as ever” is how Suzanne Pleshette, one of the many actors and directors interviewed on “Sanford Meisner: The Theater’s Best Kept Secret,” characterizes her widely respected acting teacher (and actor).

This hourlong “American Playhouse” valentine to the 85-year-old Meisner (airing tonight at 10 on KCET Channel 28) shows a tough, principled man who, by his own admission, is happiest in a roomful of students. He has been the legendary head of the acting department at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse since 1936 and, despite age and disabilities (cancer has left him speaking through a voice box), he remains diligently at his post.

The program is director-cinematographer-editor Nick Doob’s unabashed act of adulation. Doob routinely completes his portrait by weaving segments of Meisner teaching, Meisner alone at his modest retreat on Bequia in the Caribbean, and Meisner discussed and characterized--sometimes with a measure of discomfort as both revered and feared--by such illustrious former students (among others) as Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, Joanne Woodward, Elia Kazan, Gregory Peck and Sydney Pollack (who also serves as the program’s executive producer).

Far more interesting is the subtext that bleeds through: the image of a disciplined, low-profile loner, a founder of the celebrated Group Theatre, who lives to teach but does not pursue a Strasberg-like guru style. He rejects teaching that relies on “intellectual manipulations, rules, theories, at its worst in the colleges” and nurtures spontaneous work that allows a role “to take root” in the actor. Playwright David Mamet calls him “the first authentic man I ever met.”

“Acting is doing,” Meisner tells a student. “Meaningful acting is doing under emotional circumstances.” As in meaningful teaching.