Meisner acting technique: what is it and how does it work?

In the book's foreword Sanford Meisner on Acting, the actor and director Sidney Pollack collects some of his experiences with the prestigious professor of theater acting. In 1952, Pollack was 18 years old and had just entered New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, the acting school where Meisner taught. In Pollack's own words, Sandy (that was what they called Sanford) was "terribly precise”, and his classes had such an intensity that he was not prepared for it when he came the first time.

Pollack recalls how Sanford Meisner had the uncanny ability to read the thoughts and emotions of his students.. When a surprised student asked him how he did it, he simply replied that it was twenty-five years of training in the profession. And indeed, it was. Meisner, along with other greats like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, had been changing the theater scene in the United States for more than two decades.

What is the Meisner technique of acting?

Sanford Meisner was the creator of a technique of teaching theater performance known as the Meisner method or technique

. This line of teaching revolutionized the concepts of acting, although, strictly speaking, it was not an entirely new technique. As we will see below, Stanford borrowed his ideas from Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), a prestigious drama teacher of Russian origin who laid the first foundations for the renewal. A renewal that, much later, figures like Meisner and Adler would follow.

On what, then, is the Meisner acting technique based? In this article we will try to offer a clear summary of the main characteristics of him and a brief biography of the man who made it possible.

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The dream of being an actor

Sanford Meisner was born on August 31, 1905 in Greenpoint, New York., son of a marriage of Hungarian-Jewish origin. Shortly after Sanford was born, the family moved to the Bronx, where the couple's second son, Jacob, was born. This brother will have great importance in Sanford's life trajectory, as we will see below.

In 1908, Sanford's health (who is three years old) is not very good, and his parents decide to move for a while to the Catskill Mountains, where they believe the air is purer. However, it is in this natural area where the tragedy is unleashed. Little Jacob, who is then just a baby, is accidentally fed cow's milk without pasteurize, which transmits bovine tuberculosis that will lead to death with only three years old

In the book cited in the introduction, Meisner remembers the episode bitterly. The death of his brother digs a deep wound in his heart; not only because of the loss itself, but because of the feeling of guilt that he would never leave her. His own parents, with a more than doubtful criteria, feed this feeling by telling him that, if he doesn't up to him (since the trip to the Catskill was to improve Sanford's health), Jacob would continue alive.

Tortured by guilt, little Stanford slips out of existence with music. It is common to find him playing the piano that the family has at home; even, years later, when his father takes him out of the conservatory where he has started musical studies and puts him to working in the family business, young Sanford survives emotionally by remembering in his mind the melodies he has studied.

Despite this, Meisner's true dream is to be an actor. At nineteen he got the big break: the Theater Guild was conducting interviews to hire teenage actors. Without hesitation, Sanford goes to the casting, and is chosen for a small role in the play. They Knew What They Wanted. If he was already clear that his vocation was to be an actor, from this experience he will put all his efforts into achieving it.

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The Group Theater (1931-1940) and the theories of theater performance

The news fell like a stone on his parents. In Sanford Meisner on acting, Meisner remembers the silence that fell at dinner when he blurted out his intention to dedicate himself to acting. But nothing was going to stop him now.

The scholarship he received to study at the Theater Guild allowed him to carry out his first theater studies, as well as fostering a reunion with Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), with whom he had met at the Chrystie Street Settlement House and who will be someone crucial in his development as actor. Strasberg defined his own technique of theatrical interpretation, known as The Method, who based his theories on those of Stanislavski, the great and true father of stage renovation.

In 1931, Strasberg and two other actors had founded the Group Theater, a theatrical project that was to revolutionize the stage in the United States. Meisner is delighted to join the company. The first work of the group, The House of Connelly by Paul Green (1931) was a complete critical success. Many more productions followed, some of them quite controversial: Night over Taos (1932), men in white (1933) or Big Night (1933).

The Group Theater only lasted nine years, partly because of the disagreements that soon separated some members of the group. In 1934, Stella Adler (1901-1992), who later became one of the most prestigious (with students like Robert de Niro, Warren Beatty or Marlon Brando), she returned from studying with Stanislavski in Paris. The ideas that she brought from the great Russian master did not coincide with those of Strasberg. While the latter advocated more for an interpretation based on "emotional memory" (that is, the recollection of personal experiences to bring the character to life), Adler favored the use of imagination that she advocated Stanislavski.

Differences of opinion about interpretive methods led to the split of the group in 1940. Meisner, who had aligned himself with Stella Adler's theories, continued to teach acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, that he would no longer leave until his retirement.

The Meisner technique of acting emerges

From Stella Adler and, therefore, from Konstantin Stanislavski, Meisner acquired the conviction that imagination was an indispensable element in building a credible performance. This went through the disinhibition of impulses and, consequently, live in the moment.

In an interview with Steven Ditmyer, a Sanford alumnus, the director repeated one of Meisner's favorite statements: “To act is to do”. In other words, the actor must not pretend because, at the moment he does it, the performance is staged. On the contrary, to make a correct interpretation it is necessary to connect with what you are doing; immerse yourself in the character and what he is living and feeling at that moment.

Therefore, the good interpretation does not arise from the brain, but from the impulses, from the less rational part of the human being. The moment you stop to think "rationally" about what the character is feeling and doing, your interpretation is doomed to fail. Instead, If you let go and act as you really would if that happened to you, you are letting the interpretation flow naturally. and, therefore, this will be credible. Roughly speaking, this is what the Meisner technique of acting is based on.

As we can see, it is radically opposite to what Strasberg advocated, when he maintained that the actor should evoke his own memories of him. By withdrawing into your memory, you are thinking, and according to Meisner, thinking ruins performance. The Meisner technique of acting is still valid today. The creator of it conceived it as a two-year study plan: in the first course, the tools available to the actor are practiced and they are taught to connect with their impulses. The objective is for the actor or actress to be able to develop adequately in a scenario that is the fruit of the imagination. Later, during the second year, these techniques are put into practice through diverse and varied interpretations (classical texts, monologues, improvisations...).

Meisner's technique has proven to be highly effective, and many actors have gone through his classes.; among them, authentic classic film stars such as Gregory Peck or Joanne Woodward. In the report on Sanford Meisner made in 1990 (see bibliography), the actress Suzanne Pleshette (1937-2008) commented that Meisner was not the "father" of anyone. His teaching prepared students to face the outside world, and certainly everyone who studied with him came away fully prepared for it.