Education
Yale School of Drama.
Yale School of Drama.
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 80s, 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 (Los Angeles 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 United States presidential election.
A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Mesnik"s theatrical resume encompasses Broadway (Louisiana Bête.
Oh! Calcutta!), Office-Broadway (Modigliani. A Weekend Near Madison.
Smoke On The Mountain. The Good Times Are Killing Maine.
The Rimers of Eldritch - and others), major regional venues such as Yale Representative, The Old Globe, McCarter Theatre, The Kennedy Center, and Actors Theater of Louisville, and European-American collaborative productions of Shakespeare"s King Lear and Chekhov's Ivanov (Moscow Art Theatre).
He became a familiar face in the 90s and 2000s from his numerous commercial, episodic television and film appearances, including: Los Angeles Law, Law & Order, Lois and Clark, Murphy Brown, That "70s Show, Spin City, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dharma & Greg, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Minority Report, Titanic, Stonebrooke, and two films by John Schlesinger: The Next Best Thing and Eye for an Eye.