HANDOUT – More on Meisner

Taken from:
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2006/05/09/sanford_meisner.php

Sanford Meisner on Acting

Meisner was all about being truthful – stop acting, stop being polite and start
and doing what feels honest. Don’t just read though, DO.

Meisner came from the Group Theatre; The Method Tradition. For Pollack,
Meisner’s variety of the Method is, “the simplest, most direct, least pretentious
and most effective”.

With Meisner, you learned technique as a means to an end, not an end in

itself. Maxim Gorky said, “in Chekhov’s presence everyone felt himself a
desire to be simpler, more truthful, more one’s self.”

1. Setting the Scene

Stanislavski was co director of the Moscow Art Theatre. Richard
Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya were taught by him, emigrated to
New York and in 1924 founded the American Laboratory Theatre. Stella
Adler, Ruth Nelson, Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Eunice Stoddard
were students there, and were in the Group Theatre, formed 1931 with
Meisner, among the 31 founding members.

In 1942, Adler spent 5 weeks with Stanislavski in Paris to clarify difficulties

in the System. They de emphasised affective memory as Stanislavski
now thought true emotion as to be found in the given circumstances
contained in the play itself. Meisner agreed with Adler on this, but
Strasberg eventually resigned from the group.

2. Building a Foundation: The Reality of Doing

Meisner asks us to DO things. Do you really do it? Or are you just a
character doing it?

The Word Repetition Game. In pairs, A makes an observation of B (“Your

hair is long”), B repeats the words, A repeats them and so on. It’s
mechanical, it’s inhuman, but it’s the basis for something. We’re starting to
listen to each other. Next, answers. For example, “You curl your hair”,
“Yes, I curl my hair”, “Yes you do” and so on. Human conversation.

The reality of doing – you really do something rather than pretend. You
don’t do it as a character. If you’re really doing it, then you don’t have time
to watch yourself doing it. You only have the time and energy to do it.

3. The Pinch and the Ouch

Next in the Word Game, use your instinct to break form the repetition and
say something else. If your partner looks bored, say, “You look bored”,
and if you take your time, the spontaneous change will happen. The
 opposite of this instinctual action is to only say what is acceptable socially.
In the game, don’t think about what to say. Your only task is to repeat
what is said to you. If your instinct is to say something different, then do,
but don’t think. If you get no answer from your partner, use the silence as
a new moment. Meisner says, “don’t be polite, follow your instincts, you
cannot be a gentleman and be an actor”.

Key Principles:
1. Don’t do anything unless something happens to make you do it
2. What you do doesn’t depend on you; it depends on the other fellow.

This is demonstrated by giving a student the line, “Mr. Meisner.” He then

pinches the student who will shout suddenly, “Mr. Meisner!” The pinch
justified the ouch. The reaction is spontaneous and truthful.

The repetition removes the need for the brain. It removes the intellectuality of
improvisation – saying what you think will be effective – and relies solely on
impulses.

4. The Knock on the Door

Find an activity to do that is difficult, maybe impossible. It should take up your
attention and there should be something at stake. Once you’re into it,
someone else should come in and begin the repetition (“What are you
doing?”). Don’t look up, carry on, but continue the repetition with them.
Neither person must say anything. Silence until something happens to make
you do something.

Now, the person coming in must knock at the door. The person doing the
activity lets them in, then goes back to the activity. Or, the person at the door
knocks 3 times before being let in. Either way, but nothing happens until you
feel it must. The knock should have some kind of meaning.

5. Beyond Repetition
Next, the person coming in must have a reason, simple and specific. Not
death defying. Strasberg and The Actor’s Studio people “introvert the already
introverted”. You can go inside and can get stuck there.

A good actor believes in the given circumstances and eliminates any doubt in
the audience about the circumstances’ truth. Intellect has nothing to do with
acting. Given scripts, the students are told to learn the words with no
emphasis at all – completely mechanical and neutral. Without any emotions
attached to the lines, we’re free to perform them in any way, almost
improvisationally. In a scene, you don’t pick up cues, you pick up impulses. If
it comes early on their line, sustain it until you speak.

6. Preparation
Stanislavski originally said that if you needed to access a particular emotion,
you recalled a time when you experienced it in the past – emotional memory.
But after 30 years he stopped using this, and nor does Meisner. One reason;
you don’t always have a relevant experience to draw on. Another; the
meaning of past events changes over time. So using your imagination can be
stronger than real recall. Preparation is private – you don’t have to reveal
your fantasies to anyone else. The preparation is only to carry you through
the first moment of the scene. It might not come up again.

7. Improvisation
Doing the same exercise, one person coming in, and the other at home
already involved in an activity. But this time the 2 characters live together, so
there’s probably no knocking. There’s a relationship of some kind. The
person coming in must have just come from a strong situation, which gives a
springboard for full preparation. It must really affect the person emotionally.
The situation must matter. Don’t hold back, it should be specific and
meaningful to you.

We should be losing much of the repetition by now, answering questions more

reasonably. The illogical nature of repetitious dialogue opened this up to the
impulsive shifts in instinctual behaviour caused by what was being done by
the other person, which can lead to real emotion, and this has been moved
beyond.\

If you don’t believe your partner’s activity, use that. Don’t be polite and gloss
over it, your character wouldn’t believe your partner’s actions either.

8. More on Preparation
On learning lines without emotion, the text is a canoe that floats on the river
that is your emotions. Its behaviour is dependent on the river (emotions).
Don’t make your initial emotions bigger than they need to be. You just need to
make sure you don’t come on empty. Don’t be an actor. Be a human being
who works off what exists under imaginary circumstances.

He has 2 people do their scenes, with learned lines, while each of them does
a task (tidying a room, writing a letter). The task is the river. Then he gives
each an emotional circumstance, instead of the task. Now the river is inner
and may change during the scene. They go off to practice.

9. Stanislavski: The Magic If, Particularisation

If a text’s circumstances are alien to you and you cannot get emotional use a
particularisation – as if – to evolve for yourself a situation that would bring you
personally to the emotional place you need to be in for the sake of the scene.
Something real or imagined that has the effect on you that the scene should
have.

After you’ve achieved basic reality on a conversational level, you must explore
a part for the things to which you can react personally. You must know what
you’re saying – and what you’re reacting to – means to you. Use ‘as ifs’ to
help create your emotional reactions. Having the basic reality keeps things
believable, but the emotions, on top, must be at a level above real life or they
don’t communicate.
10. Making the Part Your Own
Don’t pick roles in response to your ambition or what your head says. Pick in
response to your heart. The material should come from your gut. Prepare for
a piece of text, find what it means to you. Say it in your own words,
improvising. Then read it. Alternate, always prepared. Use the emotion of
what the piece means all the way through.

11.Some Thoughts on Actors and Acting

Anybody can read, but acting is living under imaginary circumstances. In a
script, cross out words like “softly”, or “angrily”, or “she begins to blush” in the
stage directions. Because they dictate a kind of life which can only be there
spontaneously.

12. Final Scenes: Instead of Merely the Truth

Don’t speak the lines and expect the emotion to come from that. Prepare,
reach for the right emotion for the start of the scene, then talk, and each
moment feeds and changes the initial preparation. The river comes by
working off and with your partner, moment by moment.

In Russia, in the late 1800’s, Constantine Stanislavski concluded that the

acting he saw on stage was unnatural and affected. He devised a system to
teach actors how to create characters and act realistically on stage. In the
1930’s American actors were introduced to these methods and a handful
formed a company called The Group Theatre, among them, Meisner.

The group devoted themselves to learning and developing this technique.

Meisner went on to distill the acting process down to a few simple rules. Chief
among them, behaving naturally under imaginary circumstances.

The Meisner Technique, as it has now come to be called, is now considered

the most effective process for teaching someone who to act today.