Sanford Meisner on Acting

"This book should be read by anyone who wants to act or even appreciate what acting involves. Like Meisner's way of teaching, it is the straight goods."--Arthur Miller


"If there is a key to good acting, this one is it, above all others. Actors, young and not so young, will find inspiration and excitement in this book."--Gregory Peck

In the first chapter (Setting The Scene: Duse's Blush), we are giving a chronology of Meisners life and how he came to be such a great and beloved teacher. It is also in this first chapter that Meisner recounts the story of Elenora Duse, a legendary Italian actress who played the role of Magda in Hermann Sundermanns Heimat. In the first scene of this play, as the story goes, she is a young girl that has an affair with a guy from the same village, and she has a child by him. Twenty-five years later, or thereabouts, she comes back to visit her family who live in this town, and her ex-lover comes to call on her. She accepts his flowers and they sit and talk. All of a sudden the actor realizes that she is blushing, and it gets so bad that she drops her head and hides her face in embarrassment. Although we learn that this does not happen every performance, it is this blush that is the epitome of living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. This is Meisners definition of all good acting.

The foundation of acting, is the reality of doing. It is this basic premise that is the spine of this book of exercises intended to bring the actor closer to their emotional self. It is an approach that is based on bringing the actor away from the intellectualizing of character analysis back to his emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the instinctive. Through preparation, the actor is bought to a full state of emotional aliveness for those first precious moments on the stage at the beginnings of any scene. It would be impossible to escape the powerful impact of emotion or the importance of being able to realize and use effectively this impact in your performance.

Once those first precious moments of emotional aliveness that the actor has prepared for have elapsed however, the actor must be willing to enter into a state of, what Constantine Stanislovsky refers to as public solitude (as opposed to public exhibitionism). A complete surrendering of ego and willingness to make oneself vulnerable to the ultimate revealing of truth in who we are in the context of the words and circumstance written and demanded of the actor by the playwright.

Everything in acting is, of course, a kind of heightened intensified reality but it is based on one that is fully justified. Good acting isn't just the emotionless reciting of lines of text as mindless chatter. It is responding truthfully to the other person or persons on the stage. To fill words with the truth of your emotional life Meisner suggest that you must learn text coldly without expression in a completely neutral way. This learning should than be taken further through repetition mixed with a distracting independent activity. It is this repetition coupled with a distracting independent activity that takes the actor out of the intellectual mind into that of the of instinctual. That is, not thinking but simply acting and reacting honestly to what's happening on stage in every moment. But again, in order to get out of your head and into the emotional life of the instinctual, you have to know the lines so well that you don't even have to consciously think about them. As the logic goes; if you don't know your lines cold you can not get to the emotions. If you can't get to the emotions than you are nowhere near the heart of your instincts and can therefore not act or react honestly.

As with any great teacher, Meisner's lessons can be applied to more than just the subject material. There are several Life's Lessons in this book, and I would even recommend it to people who are not actors or students of theater.


Someone who actually studied with Sandy Meisner comments   October 26, 2001
19 out of 21 found this review helpful

Since I studied with Sandy for two years at the Neighborhood Playhouse and continued to study with him in his private class after I graduated from the Playhouse, I believe that I can speak with some authority. The book that Dennis Longwell has edited does an admirable job of describing the organic process of learning to act. Please note that reading is not a substitute for "the reality of doing."

Sandy was an extraordinary pragmatist and a man of deep sensitivity. However, he was unsentimental; astringent; and gifted with a wonderfully mordaunt sense of humor. He once said, "I like to think that I prepare artists to survive in a world that doesn't always want them." In a way, he was preparing his students for battle. If he was tough, he did so only in order to be kind. Personally, I really liked him and I always think of him with real affection. Learning from him personally was a privilege and an honor.

All in all, he was one of the most extraordinary people whom I have ever known, as well as one of the most influential. In a field all too often occupied by charlatans, he took a stand against pseudo-intellectuality and some self syled amateur psychiatrists posing as men and women of the theatre. His close friends included Harold Clurman and Stella Adler, whose influence he never failed to credit.

Sandy didn't live in an ivory tower, or teach in some backwater college. He was truly a man of the theatre, with more than 30 Broadway credits. In fact, he was a very good actor. You can see for yourself in the 1958 movie THE STORY ON PAGE ONE, written and directed by his close friend, Clifford Odets.

If you aspire to be an actor, you can get an idea from this book of what is involved in learning the Meisner Technique. Sandy had no "b.s." He cut right to the heart of the matter. There is no technique that will give you acting talent if nature has failed to provide it. On the other hand, if you have talent it will take dedication and hard work in order to learn how to use it well.

If you are an American, forget about reading Stanislavski. The Hapgood translations are terrible. They leave out nearly half of what he wrote. Furthermore, Stanislavski belonged to a time and culture so remote from our own lives that you can waste years trying to understand him. Instead, read Sandy Meisner, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Harold Clurman. There's no "b.s." in it. Then you will actually need to study. Hopefully, you will find someone whom Sandy actually trained as an actor and teacher!