William Mesnik

William Mesnik (born May 21, 1953) is an American character actor, musician and playwright who appeared in numerous films and television series of the 1990s and 2000s. He started his career as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1970s, playing in such Greenwich Village coffee houses as Paul Colby’s The Other End. He honed his playwriting skills as a regular contributor to The West Bank Downstairs Theater Bar repertory during the 1980s, then went on to create several genre-bending musical theater pieces, including his music-drama about folk singers during the blacklist Three Songs (Fremont Centre Theatre, 1997, revived in 2002), garnering “Critic’s Choice” in the Los Angeles Times and a “Best Ensemble” nomination (LA Weekly Theater Awards). In 2000, he released an album, Campaign Songs, as an accompaniment to his drama Muckrakers: an evening of presidential campaign songs and family dysfunction, which debuted at FCT on the eve of the 2000 United States presidential election. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Mesnik’s theatrical resume encompasses the Broadway theatre (La Bute; Oh! Calcutta!), Off-Broadway theatre (Modigliani; A Weekend Near Madison; Smoke on the Mountain; The Good