Sanford Meisner On Acting

Sanford Meisner On Acting

Vintage Original, August 1987

792 in the Dewey Decimal System will get you to a stack of titles that may look a little unusual or specialized. Stage Presentations. Lots of thin paperbacks maybe twenty, thirty years old. Has arts education has been cast into the shadows by other fields that promise earning power, marketability, and “staying power” (STEM-- Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, for starters)? Actually, film and (cable) television have never been more eagerly consumed, here in the 21st century. Theater, if not as “sexy” as it once was, when there was less competition for attention, is still held in great esteem by performers and devotees as a noble and rich terrain for the true measurement of talent.

Wandering these stacks, I picked up Sanford Meisner’s On Acting because the cover drawing is of the author in a dated overcoat with a raised faux fur collar. He is balding and wearing heavy plastic-frame glasses that are very much of a certain era (Eisenhower? Kennedy?). He looks like a shabby flannel suit accountant yet also somehow like the dedicated theatrical mentor that he is. His book is essentially a recounting of classroom experiences at the Neighborhood Playhouse with his students; their insights and problematics, and gradual evolution into players their tutor will be proud of. Some are fresh out of school; some are seasoned performers but whose limitations are diagnosed by Meisner’s trenchant observation. It’s two-hundred-and-fifty pages of dialogue and authorial insight during student exercises and gradual scene-making that feature Meisner’s barking tuitions and guidance as an American theater legend. Meisner was an original founder of the Group Theater, along with such luminaries as Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, and Lee Strasberg-- all adherents of an American version of the Stanislavski Method of acting, which, in a nutshell, ascribed to personal emotional experience as the wellspring of performing a fully-realized stage character within what Stanislavsky called “public solitude.” In this concise volume, you can just picture the folding metal chairs, smog-frosted industrial windows, and naked lightbulbs illuminating a Honeymooners set. Over the course of a semester, teacher and actors slowly drill to the kernel of quality acting: What Meisner calls “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

For Meisner, this truth is found in repeating simple lines initially between the players during their training, and their responding according to their emotional reactions--instincts-- that arise in given moments of their dialogue. “You’re late.” “I’m late?” “You’re late.” “I’m...Late?” This strikes me as very different from my thumbnail understanding of the Stanislavski Method used by Lee Strasberg, in which personal emotional memory is what drives choices and depth of performance. Says Meisner, “the illogical nature of the (repeated) dialogue opens you up to the impulsive shifts in your instinctual behavior caused by what was being done to you by your partner, which can lead to real emotion. This is fundamental to good acting.” I remember my father once suggesting that Spencer Tracy was a great actor because he listened. Here, Meisner’s theory seems less adversarial than Strasberg’s; being fully present in the “moment” (to use a very current concept) situates you squarely in your actions with the other performer, rather than tunneling within to re-create a personal moment from your past that matches that of the character you are living in. Some luminary alums of his tuition include Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Sydney Pollack, Jeff Goldblum, Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, James Caan, and Dylan McDermot. Impossible question: is there a perceptible thread of the Meisner acting technique that runs through each of their performances? Was perhaps Strasberg’s most recognizable alum (Marlon Brando) more “Stanislavsky interior” then, in his vivid roles on stage and in film? I doubt it. Stell-aaah?

One of Meisner’s quotations that really jumps out to me is “It’s the reality of the emotion that makes the lie (of the theatrical moment) more convincing.” Not all of the students in Meisner’s class make the cut, and a number of them are summarily dismissed mid-semester, despite his overall empathetic if not black-humored nature. Among the casualties are a motivated but stricken young man who was handicapped by “an intense self-consciousness that cuts him off from his partner and the possibility of transcending his own scared self.” In order to succeed as an actor, Meisner avers that you have to lose consciousness of your own self in order to transform yourself into the character in the play, and to him, family upbringing and social order are the source of this psychological shackling. Does this mean that the actors of the 60s and 70s, when cultural norms in the west were being centrifugally hurled into the ethers, are better actors than in decades prior? I Have heard it suggested that the era of my youth was the “Golden Age of Quality Film” (think Hoffman, DeNiro, Pacino)...

I am drawn to how Meisner valorizes real-time communication between the actors on stage as the seat of emotional truth and making an “imaginary moment” fully believable. It seems inclusive and affirming of the other as you refract off each other and even silence is “a thing.” If I were a working actor, I would find it less burdensome than scoping the inner life in order to paint a character from interior personal experience. Relationship is key, and additionally, Meisner does suggest that meshing with your acting teacher is critical from the outset. The book includes lots of delicious insights into the beast that is theater, as well of course as rumination on human nature. He rips Laurence Olivier as devoid of emotional believability and (surprisingly) places limits on Meryl Streep’s character range; Helen Hayes was defined by her English style of using verbal handling of the text to convey a character’s emotional state. “We are limited by our theatrical nature, which can be very narrow or very broad. Duse could not play Shakespeare.” There are also differences in national theatre acting styles, apparently-- English actors purportedly have what he calls a “stage energy” that is not supported in tandem by an emotional underpinning.

More than once, Meisner confirms that life experience is the prerequisite for having the emotional range to be a good actor. If it takes twenty years to become a good actor, as Meisner avows, how do you select the training that is going to be the most effective for you? If you look at Stanislavski as the lodestar behind acting theory in general, much as Freud is the gravitational tug undergirding psychology, there is still the division of theory in the original Group Theater founder-teachers: Meisner summarily rejects Strasberg’s pedagogy (what [he] did was… to introvert actors who were already introverted, to make them have private experiences onstage that aren’t expressed); yet Meisner says he learned a lot from, and remained good friends with, co-founder Stella Adler, who touted full understanding of the circumstances behind each character’s actions and truthful expression.

Time is thus a key element on a macro as well as micro level in Meisner’s theory; whether as a means of (hard-earned!) acquiring the maturity and experiential depth needed for the more challenging roles, and additionally in the simple context of what literally happens onstage between fellow actors as they figuratively “bounce off” each other with their lines and intuitive and spontaneous responses which create the sparks of momentary believability. Says Meisner, “over time the meaning of the past changes. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like ‘emotion memory.’” One slice of Meisnerian philosophy seems to me to hew Strasbergian however: When preparing for a stage entrance, actors are advised to motivate themselves and “hit the ground running” by summoning a state of mind (even, evidently by rattling a backstage ladder) to meet the exigency of the moment. 

What lingers in my mind is yet one of the author’s knocks against Lee Strasberg, disparaging even his performing skills and describing him as not an actor but… a librarian (!). I’m going to refute his implication that the latter work does not entail instinctive interpersonal responses between parties engaged in a library setting. I like to think of my role as entailing equal parts info specialist/psychologist/civic steward. Pace, Sanford. I will leave with his description of what at semester’s end a hard-earned believable and successful scene looks like:

“...The acting of both students is full, clear, intelligent, simple and deeply felt, something like great music. On the one hand, it seems effortless; on the other, it is emotionally devastating, as if a great tragedy has just occurred. This is underscored with irony at the end of the scene.”

- Tom G. Hopewell Branch