Project MUSE - "Play, but don't play games!": The Meisner Technique Reconsidered "Play, but don't play games!": The Meisner Technique Reconsidered Hilary Halba (bio) Introduction The "Meisner Technique." These two words may conjure up a myriad of images in the reader's mind, depending upon her knowledge and experience of this approach to actor training. Perhaps she recalls the croaky-voiced Sanford Meisner, inspiring and terrifying actors in equal measure during the decades he taught acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City.

The reader's knowledge of Meisner may be sketchier; it may be that the technique is known only as the actor-training method featuring at its core a repetition of phrases by pairs of actors: "You're wearing a yellow top"; "I'm wearing a yellow top"; "You're wearing a yellow top"; "I'm wearing a yellow top." In the contemporary landscape of post-dramatic theatre, performance art, cross-cultural performance, inter-disciplinary dialogues, and postmodern deconstruction, the Meisner Technique may seem normative, limited in its application and scope or perhaps perpetuating orthodoxies of response and behavior, one of the several schools of actor training that arguably fall under the rubric of the "American Method," derived from aspects of Stanislavski's System. At stake when reconsidering the Meisner Technique is its popular entrenchment within, and conflation with, the Method, especially since it radically deviates from the affective memory-based techniques usually associated with the Method.

This and the perceived emphasis on a reproduction of everyday behavior sometimes construed from Meisner's use of the word "truth," combined with the fact that so many Meisner-trained actors are prominent in American realist-narrative cinema, can lead to the assumption that the Meisner Technique is useful only for training actors in realism. The proposition that the Meisner-trained actor is not bound by the constraints of psychological realism, nor by the matrix of text-based theatre, lies at the heart of this essay's argument. I argue for a different reading of the Meisner Technique training system and its application. I propose that the Meisner Technique primarily both harnesses and re-teaches actors the principles of play through a series of exercises whose borders are constantly reinterpretable. I lay out ways in which play theory invigorates ideas to do with Meisner's training schema and seek to provide a fresher approach to the Technique for teachers, actors, and thinkers. My discussion concerns itself not so much in the mechanics of the Meisner actor-training activities (although at times they do need to be explained), but rather in how these activities are experienced and perceived.

A consideration of the Meisner Technique as having its basis in play—"double-edged, ambiguous, [and] moving in several directions simultaneously" ( Schechner 79 )—may also be seen to account for the uniquely mercurial, outwardly focused honesty that is a hallmark of the Meisner actor. Much of my study is experiential, based, in part, upon classes I undertook at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, and my subsequent study—also at the Neighborhood Playhouse—of the teaching of the Meisner Technique. In this essay, therefore, I occupy a number of positions, including Meisner student, teacher of the Meisner Technique, and as a researcher investigating the Technique. Meisner's primary maxim, "The foundation of acting is the reality of doing" ( Mesiner and Longwell 16 ; emphasis in original) certainly could have applied to me as I wrote this essay, reflecting as I do upon my own lived experience. [End Page 127] Acting and Games In his essay "The Reality of Doing: Real Speech Acts in the Theatre," David Saltz proposes a "game model" through which to consider the Meisner Technique.

In this model, actors "do not merely imitate actions as they would be performed offstage but really commit illocutionary acts within the theatrical context" (73; emphasis in original). Saltz argues that a play's actions be treated like the rules of a game, and that through this "game intentionality" the actors "remain committed by their stage actions . . . only while they are acting within their stage roles" (ibid.). Saltz's argument relies on a rule-bound site upon which the actor's organic response might take place (75-77). I argue that a perspective of a rule-bound game is not as useful an approach as theorizing actor training through the lens of play. The distinction between games and play is unstable, conditional upon the propositions of a range of thinkers on the subject. Stephen Nachmanovitch makes the following distinction: "'Play' is different from 'game.' . . . Game is an activity, defined by a set of rules, like basketball, sonnet, symphony, diplomacy. Play is an attitude, a spirit, a way of doing things, whereas game is a defined activity with rules and a playing field and participants" (43).

Play's characteristics are different from the rules of a game, which are unbending and the same for everyone who plays. In a similar way to games, the phenomenological conditions of play mean that each play instance, although similar in character to those experienced by other players, will be reacted to differently by each individual ( Apter 26 ). Yet the slipperiness of the "rules" in play provides a site wherein improvisational spontaneity has free play. While the game model might arguably illustrate how the actor functions in rehearsal or onstage in performance, I propose that a play model unravels the way in which the Meisner training uniquely operates in the classroom. Play In Nick Doob's 1990 documentary film Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre's Best Kept Secret, Meisner exhorts his students to "Play! Play! It's a play!" For actress Joanne Woodward, "Meisner's whole [actor-training] concept . . . 'was about play'" (Woodward, qtd. in Krasner 38 ). Yet what exactly is play, and how is play read and understood within the form of Meisner's improvisational "games"?

Obviously, different definitions apply to different kinds of play activities, and different schools of thought propose different theoretical propositions to do with the nature and function of play. This essay primarily uses theories drawn from Nachmanovitch whose 1990 book on play theory, Free Play:Improvisation in Life and Art, takes lila—or divine play—as its embarkation point, and from Brian Sutton-Smith's ( 1993 , 1995 , 1997 ) analyses of a range of rhetorics of adult play theory. "Play" is a slippery phenomenon, embodying both what is and is-not present, and as such requires simulation and the reframing and revaluing of time, place, objects, relationships, and behaviors. Nachmanovitch tells us that play is "a matter of context" and not "what we do but how we do it" (43). Play also involves an absorption into the act of playing, a state characterized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as "flow," in which "people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter" (1991, 4).

Nachmanovitch advances this idea by citing a traditional parable about a flute player whose master, despite the student's technical proficiency as a flutist, declares that there is nonetheless an element lacking. That lack—play—is characterized by Nachmanovitch as follows: "[W]hen he plays for approval, plays for prestige, plays to meet the expectations of his teacher or to avoid shame, there is always something lacking. But when he has nothing to gain and nothing to lose, then he can really play" (46; emphasis in original). For Nachmanovitch, play is a condition of liberty from boundaries and fears that might corral creative freedom. Louise Mallory Stinespring defines this moment-by-moment creative freedom as it applies to the Meisner Technique as "we perform ourselves in the moment of performance" (2000, 101). Sutton-Smith further reinforces this idea when he states that [End Page 128] "once the play starts, as the phenomenologists tell us, the game plays you rather than you playing the game" (1993, 113).

Taking up this point, my argument focuses upon the "paratelic and autotelic," characteristics that Sutton-Smith describes as "play exist[ing] to serve play itself (paratelia) or serv[ing] the individual players themselves (autotelia)" (102). These characteristics are present in the Meisner Technique and therefore elucidate aspects of this training schema that are not often analyzed in more orthodox studies of actor training. Play is characterized not only through its paratelic modality and its "metacommunicative"—to use Gregory Bateson's term (161)—signification, its playful spirit, but also because of the slippery borders between that which is within and that which is outside of the play-frame. Sutton-Smith recounts Victor Turner's categories of liminal and liminoid activities that occupy this in-between territory—"the threshold between reality and unreality" (1997, 1)—as a means of characterizing the territory that play occupies. Andrew Coulson calls this threshold between the real and the imaginary "cognitive synergy," a state that "can be defined as the experience of opposite, mutually exclusive, or incompatible characteristics in relation to an identity" (Coulson, qtd.

in Kerr and Apter 71 ). The following example from William Esper and Damon DiMarco elucidates how this might function for the actor: "Desdemona and Othello come offstage after the play. The actor playing Desdemona says to the actor playing Othello, 'God, you were so wonderful tonight! I really thought you were going to kill me! For real! I almost wet the bed! I loved it! Let's go get a beer!'" (55). No matter how much this playful frame might slip and shift, the actor nonetheless knows she is acting, and no matter how immediate, potent, palpable, and seemingly heartfelt the exchange in an actor-training exercise, it is nonetheless a framed activity. Play's "unreality" does not mean that the actor deludes herself that the situation is "real"; rather, Sutton-Smith proposes that "the message 'this is play' lets go a flood of internally instigated emotion and involvement. The continuity between such impelling automata and the more behavioral matters of play might well account for the ever present and sudden surge of ready engagement in virtual play experience" (1997, 58).

It is the same message that generates the particular experiential attributes of the Meisner Technique and provides the territory for potent, engaged, and mercurial exchanges that are neither real nor not-real in the Meisner training. The "mercurial" character of these exchanges exhilarates the actor, provoking Meisner to intone to his students his oft-repeated statement: "Acting is fun. Don't let that get around!" (Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre's Best Kept Secret). Teaching and Learning the Meisner Technique Neighborhood Playhouse director of acting Richard Pinter reinforces Meisner's emblematic yet seemingly paradoxical dictum to actors to "live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances" (Pinter, qtd. in the Neighborhood Playhouse website), 1 foregrounding the contingent transactions present in both play behavior and actor training, in which the imaginary and the real collide—a "subjunctive life" ( Sutton-Smith 1997, 32-33 ).

Pinter places an emphasis on the importance of the core "repetition" exercises, in which actors focus on a process of listening and answering within a fluid improvisatory landscape, and in which one is "played" by the playing that is the end in itself. 2 Repetition is taught first in the Meisner Technique; it forms the basis for all subsequent exercises, and is returned to as the foundational actor-training strategy. Paradoxically, the very thing that anchors repetition and seems to order it, the repetition itself, is the thing that also decenters it. No behavior is ignored, even the repetition's own behavior. Repetition is not a reproduction of everyday behavior, but rather the creation of a playfield that is beyond the quotidian, where the actor "liv[es] through [her/his] experiences of the other person's responses from impulsive moment to impulsive moment" ( Esper and DiMarco 164 ). Indeed, play—that is to say, the repetition—is all there is, as behavior stems from one's investment in the paratelic "world" of listening, observing, and responding, divested of everyday masks.

[End Page 129] Because uttered words can only approximate what behavior manifests, they are arguably "inadequate to the multiplicity of meanings they seek to convey" (Michael Holquist, qtd. in Bakhtin xx ). In the Meisner Technique, behavior, and the response it elicits, is the core language used by the actor to communicate with another actor. Esper tells his students that "[r]epetition takes two actors and rubs them together so that sparks of life begin to happen" ( Esper and DiMarco 59 ). This refocusing of the actor away from the primacy of the written text, and away from affective memory, results in the actor being free to make an unmediated and instantaneously mutable response to what she/he is actually receiving from her/his partner, behaviorally, during the repetition exercise. Rather than focusing upon herself, the actor is required to pay "limitless attention" ( Merlin 121 ) to her/his partner, to reach her/his partner with her/his energy, and to do nothing until something happens to make her/him do it ( Meisner and Longwell 35 ).

Repetition is played thus: the student is required to place her/his whole attention onto her/his partner, to choose something that really exists on the surface of her/his partner, and to make a simple, observational statement about that feature. Her/ his partner repeats precisely, first exactly as she/he heard it: ACTOR B: You're wearing a gold necklace. And then using the first-person pronoun: A: You're wearing a gold necklace. B: I'm wearing a gold necklace. A: You're wearing a gold necklace. B: I'm wearing a gold necklace. Play, therefore, begins with focused observation, a state—for Jacques Lecoq—in which "we can rediscover those moments when the words do not yet exist" (29), and whose absorption is the fountainhead of Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow (1975, 1991).

Neighborhood Playhouse senior instructor Ron Stetson cautions against what he calls "loaded" statements in this initial phase, preferring his students to practice the straightforward action of exchanging a "simple truth with another human again and again," likening the impulse to one of communicating "Here I am, here I am again." Playfulness, then, is generated through the actor maintaining a sense of concentrated focus upon, and connection with, her/his acting partner time after time, and living from "impulsive moment to impulsive moment" ( Esper and DiMarco 164 ) in the repetition exercise. As the students progress in repetition a point-of-view statement is added, and they are encouraged to allow themselves to acknowledge being affected by their partner's behavior: "You seem a little offended." / "Yeah, . . . I seem a little offended?" (57). Always, the actor is opening herself up to be "pinched" ( Meisner and Longwell 35 ). Meisner tells his students that "there's no such thing as nothing" (29). Even being lost and not knowing what to say or do is an active moment to be acknowledged (Pinter).

That said, the performative utterance in repetition is never just what it is (that is, constitutive), because the statement is loaded, multiple, and slippery. It "makes itself " as it utters itself, hence evoking the "pinch-ouch" quality that Meisner sought, inasmuch as the actor is required to respond instinctively and without premeditation—the "pinch" from fellow actors and the "ouch" to any stimuli. Meisner gives his students two pieces of advice of what to do with pinch-ouch: "Don't do anything unless something happens to make you do it, . . . [and] What you do doesn't depend on you; it depends on the other fellow" ( Meisner and Longwell 34 ; emphasis in original). In part, the frame shifts from moment to moment in repetition as pinches and ouches are exchanged (35), and the players rearrange and further rearrange themselves as they adapt to these unanticipated stimuli.

During the repetition exercise, actors are variously offended, delighted, or mortified depending on the nature of the pinch; this is both real offense and also play-offense that are acutely felt though evaporate the instant the exercise is over. [End Page 130] "An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words" reads the sign in a classroom at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and early in the Meisner training Stetson questions his students about what they perceive in their partner's behavior. This point of focus means that the student not only trains her/ his own acting instrument to be more observant, to be more acutely "on her[/his] partner" (Stetson) and hence to facilitate an organic reactivity in the actor, but it also provides her/his partner with an insight into what someone else perceives her/his behavior to be. Behavior never lies, Stetson notes, and the root of the repetition exercise requires the actor to get in touch with her/his own behavior, the sounding board for this behavior being the observations provided by the other person.

"What matters," Stetson says, "is what you see going on with the other person," which information always comes from one's acting partner. In focusing on one's partner's behavior and, in the first instance, excluding what is outside of it, the partner's acting instrument, as well as one's own, is honed and trained. Here, play involves the need for decentering, inasmuch as the player is required to view her/ his partner's behavior from a different perspective than she/he would in an everyday way. Nachmanovitch tells us that such creative spontaneity "liberates us from outmoded frames of reference and from memory that is clogged with old facts and old feelings" (192). In this context, decentering does not involve pretense, but the removal of everyday pretense in order to observe and name behavior without social masks. Placing all of one's attention upon one's partner, perceiving the minutiae of that person's behavior, and attending to its articulation without premeditation requires an extra absorption and immersion that removes one, in part, from the exigencies of everyday stimuli, but involves one in a different set of exigencies—that of the playfield.

This is exactly the process of absorption and transportation experienced through a creative activity played by the playing, the autotelic enterprise whose end is the playing itself, that the Meisner training elicits from the actor. Although there is a clear process at work—namely, that actors must repeat, they must work off each other's behavior, and teachers outline the ways in which the words repeated may change—the shifts are almost wholly based upon the exigencies and vagaries of behavior. Any attempt to "get better" by "obeying by the rules of the game" proves ultimately useless. Understanding the game is only an embarkation point; thereafter, a blurry site predominated by a free play of impulses determines the course of the work. Stetson encourages a generous, adaptable, and available dynamic among actors, rather than one that is riddled with a desire not to be changed—"Here I am for you," rather than "Gotcha!" (Stetson). He refocuses a competitive "game-like" impulse to "win," which is "centered through hierarchical thinking" ( Mallory Stinespring 2000, 107 ).

"Play," Stetson tells his students, "but don't play games!" The actor understands that the premise of the play activity of repetition requires a different kind of perceptual behavior than that which is outside the frame of the play-field. Bateson argues that "[t]he picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside the frame" (160). But it is also the case that the behavior inside the play-frame is, in some way, defined by the moment-by-moment shifts embedded in the borders of that frame—that is, the behavior we might be unaware we manifest. The Meisner Technique's framing provides the locus for an immediate and un-predetermined response from the actor to their fellow actor's behavior. Nachmanovitch identifies this as the basis for play: "[i]n play we manifest fresh, interactive ways of relating with people, animals, things, ideas, images, ourselves. It flies in the face of social hierarchies" (43).

The game, as Sutton-Smith suggests, does indeed begin to play the player (1993, 113) as actors react from moment to spontaneous, unforeseen moment; any sense to do with logic of character is deferred by illogic of human behavior, and each interaction is governed by this immediate moment-by-moment interpretation and reinterpretation of behavior and repeated words. As the Meisner training progresses and as the actor becomes increasingly acute in her/his observations of her/his partner and more authentic in her/his own responses, a further slippage occurs, as an imaginative frame is introduced into the actual frame of the repetition. In this variation, repetition with "independent activity," one partner absorbs her-/himself wholeheartedly in [End Page 131] an activity that involves an object and that is difficult though not impossible to do. Esper tells his students that this activity ought "to be something you can't perform without putting one hundred percent of your attention on it" ( Esper and DiMarco 59 ).

During my study of the Meisner Technique at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I chose the difficult activity of performing a series of maneuvers with the Maori performance instruments from New Zealand called "the poi," and gave myself the imagined stake that I was soon to perform these at the United Nations in New York City as part of a New Zealand promotion. 3 Jack, my scene partner, sat on a classroom table and watched me, smirking as I concentrated upon manipulating the poi in the correct formation. His task was to "give [me] a little time to get into it and then play the Word Repetition Game" ( Meisner and Longwell 39 ). As with repetition, the actor is encouraged to allow herself to acknowledge what arises through the unmediated encounter with another actor, and to respond to this behaviorally. My repetition with Jack focused on his scathing observations having to do with my lack of skill with the poi. I grew more and more frustrated within the confines of the repetition, finally screaming at Jack, "Fuck you, Jack! Fuck off!" Jack, also working within the bounds of the activity, laughed and repeated my phrases.

I was furious at Jack though understood that I was also, as Schechner might have it, "not-furious," that this was only an acting exercise and that after the class Jack and I would acknowledge its success, comment on how exhilarating it had been to us as actors, and then go out for a beer. Of course, much of the actor's practice is framed by this "self-contradictory proposition" ( Bateson 157 ) that their embodied responses within the frame of any performance event are simultaneously both actual and imagined, so that the actor is in a position of straddling subject-positions and hierarchies of "belief." Jack and I both understood that the moment in which I told him to "fuck off " was an authentic and felt moment, yet it was simultaneously framed not by rules, but by the "subjunctive mood" ( Sutton-Smith 1995, 290 ) of play-activity itself. The focus on this "cognitive synergy" of the real and the imagined takes us into the realm of the metacommunicative exchange at the heart of the Meisner Technique.

Although I allowed myself to become absorbed in the exercise and to be pinched by Jack's behavior, to be "a vehicle for the music" ( Nachmanovitch 192 ) of the repetition, I understood simultaneously that the contingent situation was alongside, not outside, everyday behavior. Both Jack and I were "Jack and I"—no pretense was at play (I was genuinely mad). The framing of the exercise made it entirely playful, in that the borders between "me experiencing" and "me knowing I was playing" were precarious and in no way absolute. Bateson gives the game-based example of two players who play a game of canasta, then stop to discuss the rules, subsequently playing on though modifying their behavior based on their discussion (164-65). In the paratelic world of Meisner training, the discussion and the act of play are one and hence absolute spontaneity, for spontaneity's sake, is invited. Nachmanovitch claims that "[a]s play, the act is its own destination. The focus is on process, not product. Play is intrinsically satisfying. It is not conditional on anything else. . . .

Play is without 'why.' It is self-existent" (45). Play is utilized for a purpose other than, and arguably predominant and supplemental to, playfulness per se; play, in the Meisner Technique, obfuscates the subject's inhibitions into an arena of the adaptable ever-present listening and answering. For Eberhard Scheiffele, "[t]he stage is a safe place to be dangerous. We can express ourselves in new ways without suffering the consequences in real life" (184)—just as Jack and I did. Refocusing the activity of repetition away from the bounds of rigid control and the act away from the self-spontaneity of the actor and the need to "[play] a result" ( Stanislavski 144 ) into a more anarchic playfield results in a sense of freshness and in-between-ness that is at the core of play, and this is where the Meisner Technique comes into its own. Leo, a participant in a Meisner class I instructed, found himself in the slippery border between game-frame and play-frame. Hitherto in class his work had been characterized by a sense of guardedness, and he found it difficult to subsume himself into the repetition.

"I just don't get it," he said to me. In the Meisnerian independent [End Page 132] activity, his task—a cornerstone activity set out in Sanford Meisner on Acting ( Meisner and Longwell 38-39 )—was to search a telephone directory for the number of a person whose address and first name only were given to him. He was asked to come up with a compelling imagined reason for this task, and set about intently and systematically searching the directory. Something drove Leo; his demeanor suggested he wanted to get this exercise "right." Rachel sat beside and regarded him with interest as Leo ignored her and focused on his task, bending close over the directory and running his finger down the columns of names. Rachel finally began the repetition activity by saying, "You're really intent." "I'm really intent," Leo responded absently. Typically, this exercise continues for some time, with the actor both searching the directory and engaging in repetition with her/his acting partner.

However, Leo suddenly let out a whoop, looked at me, and said elatedly, "You're not going to believe this, but I found it!" He was beaming and proudly displaying the name in the book. Leo had been pinched, yet he made the mistake of thinking that finding the name—that is, the completion of the task of the game—signaled the end of play, thinking he had "finished" the activity. "Repeat!" I told Rachel, and without missing a beat she responded to Leo: "You found it!" "I did find it," Leo told me, ignoring Rachel, again limiting himself by the perceived frame of a game that he, mistakenly, thought was "won." Eventually, he was drawn back into the repetition with Rachel, which focused on the treacherous margins between his real-world glee and a commentary on the parameters of the game.

By finding his way into a situation where he was "driven only by the play itself and not by any desire for external achievement" ( Sutton-Smith 1993, 110 ), Leo was able to relocate his compulsion to get it right into a paratelic frame of playing for its own sake and accept the "playful disruption" ( Sutton-Smith 1997, 148 ) of his expectations for the exercise. The Meisner Technique's framing provides the locus for an immediate and un-predetermined response from the actor. Repetition with independent activity foregrounds this potential, as it asks the actor not to predicate her/his behavior on a series of assumed social norms. In a Meisner class, Sam was working with Tracie, and his independent activity involved him stripping down to his underwear and then redressing in fifteen seconds, then doing it again. Sam gave himself an imagined justification and stake in the action of undressing and dressing, reset the stopwatch on his iPhone, and began undressing at frantic speed.

Tracie's task was to wait outside the door, knock, enter, and then begin the repetition with whatever she found her partner doing in the room; she had no idea what Sam's activity would be. Upon entering, her facial expression communicated shock and she began the repetition, "You've taken all your clothes off," to which Sam, in his underclothing, responded, distractedly peering at his stopwatch, "I've taken all my clothes off." However, in the instant after she entered the room and before she spoke, before she appeared shocked, before she layered onto herself the behavior she thought she should exhibit, spontaneously and unconsciously Tracie stepped closer to Sam to get a better look at him. Her moment of authenticity was pointed out to her, thus honing her acting instrument through acute awareness of her unmediated response to what actually was before her, not an attempt—as was Tracie's mistake—of seeking to reproduce some behavioral trappings of perceived realism or social acceptability.

Hence Tracie's initial reaction to Sam captures that unpremeditated moment that is the birthplace of play, wherein the Meisner actor, rather than working with prescribed signals from one's fellow actor, focuses on involuntary signs that body forth and provide her/him with greater acuity in awareness. Stetson tells his students: "It doesn't matter what you think you're doing; it matters what you are doing." The actor becomes aware that she/he must answer the behavior she/he is actually receiving from her/his partner, rather than that which she/he thinks she/he should be receiving, with her/his own unpremeditated impulses. In the fictional world of the stage, where everything stands in for something else, the only real element that anchors the actor is her/his partner and the partner's behavior. The simultaneous absence and presence of the real is recognized in Meisner's maxim, adapted by Pinter to "live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances." This, in turn, affects the placement [End Page 133] of focus, which is a crucial element of Meisner training. The actor seeks to place her/his focus outside of her-/himself and onto her/his scene partner.

The test of her/his work, then, is always the partner. The "false actor" ( Mallory Stinespring 1999, 26 ) may outwardly appear to do many of the same actions (for instance, seem to be listening, or in Tracie's case, appearing shocked at Sam's nakedness), but her/his focus is on her-/himself; she/he is "acting" by listening or "acting" by doing, rather than simply paying attention to her/his partner. Like a participant in a fast-moving sport, the doing-based and -focused Meisner actor responds before she/he thinks, metaphorically batting the ball back before she/he can consciously analyze what she/he is doing. Action precedes analysis. Conclusion In preparing this essay and seeking to unravel playfulness in the Meisner Technique, I found that every time I thought I had the concept of play pinned down, I was thwarted. Play is human behavior's wild child; play slips and subverts expectations; it dwells in the border zones.

The moment we seem to have play's properties categorized, have wrapped a set of criteria around play and stated what it is and is not is when another renegade aspect of play emerges that trips up our attempts at categorization. It dwells in the play between presence and absence; we acknowledge the behavior we perceive to be present, yet any real framing circumstances for the exchange are absent, save those of the play-frame. Play is real and not-real; it is immediate, changes from moment to moment, and depends on, and is framed by, the tenuous moment-to-moment complicity of those at play. Schechner tells us that "playing is . . . an embodied behavior inseparable from the players" (82). For Apter, the "protective frame" located around relationships in play is slippery, and ultimately "is a matter of one's own phenomenology" (15). Each of these characteristics, of course, could equally be applied to the Meisner Technique.

Using the seeming paradox of "live truthfully under [given] imaginary circumstances" as its foundational statement, Meisner's actor training requires from the actor a bricolage of pragmatism, unerringly honesty, and a grounding in "the reality of doing" ( Meisner and Longwell 16 ). Obviously, the inevitable end-point of the Meisner Technique is the emergence of a trained actor. Yet within the technique itself, nothing exists but the technique. It demands a deep playfulness from its participants: the actor must concentrate her/his attention in an extra-daily way, to allow each moment to affect her, and only from that moment's honest acknowledgment and authentic admission can the next unanticipated moment be experienced. Changes happen on a dime; there is no way for the actor to control the improvisation, so she/he must give up the impulse to do so and thus give her-/himself up to the genuine circumstance. Is it possible to try harder and succeed? Again, paradoxically, no, it is not. I learned at the Neighborhood Playhouse that the only way to succeed was to give up trying to win, and to give myself up to the unknowable contingencies of the play world.

Play, and actor training, represents an unmediated yet beguiling investment by the player in a phenomenon that is simultaneously both real and illusory—that subjunctive reality governed by what both Stanislavski and Bateson refer to as "as if " ( Stanislavski 53 ; Bateson 163 ). And finally, in reaching these findings, I was compelled to ask the next logical question: Why? For what reason? Perhaps we act for the same reason we play: because it is exhilarating, transgressive, transportative, and transformative. It elicits flow. It is a self-acknowledgment of our aliveness, our spontaneous creativity, and finally of our shared humanity. [End Page 134] Hilary Halba Hilary Halba is a senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Otago in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and is an actor and director with over twenty-five years of professional experience in theatre. She studied acting and the teaching of acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, and has performed in New Zealand, the United States, and Europe.

She has also had a long association with bicultural theatre in the southern South Island, and has directed and researched this form of theatre in partnership with the Maori for over fifteen years. More recently, she has embarked on practice-led projects with her colleague Stuart Young. With a team of theatre-makers, they created the verbatim theatre pieces Hush and Be Longing. Notes 1. Pinter adds the word "given" to Meisner's original maxim; see the Neighborhood Playhouse website, available at < > (accessed 23 April 2012). William Esper substitutes "doing" for living ( Esper and DiMarco 23 ). 2. Pinter: "Repetition! My favorite! Repetition teaches the first thing . . . how to focus. . . . So, we have to start to train to do that . . . so, we begin with repetition" (from the Neighborhood Playhouse website). 3. "Poi" is defined as "a ball of woven flax swung rhythmically in . . . dances"; see < > (accessed 20 April 2011). Works Cited Apter, Michael J.

"A Structural Phenomenology of Play." Adult Play: A Reversal Theory Approach. Ed. John H. Kerr and Michael J. Apter. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger B. V, 1991. 13-29. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1972. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975. ———. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Doob, Nick, dir. Sanford Meisner: The American Theatre's Best Kept Secret. Documentary film. PBS American Masters series, season 5, episode 7, 27 August 1990. Esper, William, and Damon DiMarco.

The Actor's Art and Craft. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Kerr, John H., and Michael J. Apter. Adult Play: A Reversal Theory Approach. Amsterdam/Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger B. V, 1991. Krasner, David. "I Hate Strasberg: Method Bashing in the Academy." Method Acting Reconsidered. Ed. David Krasner. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. 3-39. Lecoq, Jacques, with Jean-Gabriel Carasso and Jean-Claude Lallias. The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre. Trans. David Bradby. London: Routledge, 2002. Mallory Stinespring, Louise. "Principles of Truthful Acting: A Theoretical Discourse on Sanford Meisner's Practice" (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1999). ———. "Just Be Yourself: Derrida, Difference and the Meisner Technique." Method Acting Reconsidered. Ed. David Krasner. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

97-109. [End Page 135] Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Merlin, Bella. Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training. London: Nick Hern Books, 2001. Nachmanovitch, Stephen. Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1990. Saltz, David Z. "The Reality of Doing: Real Speech Acts in the Theatre." Method Acting Reconsidered. Ed. David Krasner. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. 61-79. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Scheiffele, Eberhard. "Acting: An Altered State of Consciousness." Research in Drama Education 6.2 (2001): 179-91. Stanislavski, Konstantin. An Actor's Work: A Student's Diary. Trans.

Jean Benedetti. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008. Sutton-Smith, Brian. "Suggested Rhetorics in Adult Play Theories." Journal of Play Theory and Research 1.2 (1993): 102-16. ———. The Future of Play Theory. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. ———. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. [End Page 136] Copyright © 2012 Johns Hopkins University Press The Sanford Meisner Center - Classes The Sanford Meisner Center Search for: Our Tradition… While many ‘Meisner based’ schools use exercises and elements of the traditional Meisner technique, very few adhere to the original program as it was created at the Neighborhood Playhouse by Sanford Meisner. The traditional training is taught as a twice a week program, which runs for 9 months. Upon completion of the 1st year, students may be invited to continue into the 2nd year program consisting of an additional 9 months of training.

The proper training has a clear, beginning, middle and end. This is vastly different than most acting classes which are ‘ ongoing ‘ or ‘ open ended ’ and allow students to come and go as they please. Any school that claims to teach the Meisner Technique, but allows students to enroll at any time, mixing students who’ve just started their training with students who may have been in the same class for several months, is not teaching the Meisner technique properly. Some schools also claim to improve on the Meisner technique by combining it with other techniques like Alexander or Chekhov , or even their own technique. Some add ‘ cold readings and scene study ‘ to improve the “practical application” of the technique. This is done to expand the list of classes they offer and to compensate for a lack of full, deep understanding of how to teach the Meisner technique properly. We adhere to the traditional program, because of its proven ability to create powerful actors. While the technique evolved over the years, Martin Barter maintains the final version that Sandy himself oversaw before his death in 1997 . Martin Barter was the last instructor to teach under Sandy’s watchful eye. No prior acting experience or training is required.

Everyone, including experienced actors and non-actors alike, start together at the beginning. For the trained or working actor, letting go of pre-conceived notions and a willingness to approach this work with openness and honesty is required. You will not be learning a series of ‘tricks’ to add to an existing bag. Instead, you will build a foundation from which you act. Admission is determined after meeting with the potential student. Call or email to schedule an interview. Interviews for international students can be conducted via Google Hangouts or Skype. We do not provide student visas but can provide additional information and support for international students. Professional Acting certificate program First Year: (9 months) The training begins with a three-month period of intensive improvisational work, including the”Repetition Exercise” in which actors learn to take the attention off themselves and put it on their partners’ real behavior, allowing it to affect them and cause a truthful reaction. Students then apply this strong beginning in their ability to “live truthfully” to modern scene work. The rest of the year is devoted to a heightening of this sense of truth and the actors’ emotional depth through more improvisational work and scenes. There is no character work in the first year.

After nine months, the actors emerge more honest human beings with instruments ready to act truthfully in film, television, and the stage. Classes meet twice a week for 3 hours a class Professional Acting certificate program Second Year: (9 months) The second year is by invitation only; students will be asked back, based on the quality of their work in the first year. The work moves into advanced and highly emotional improvisational work, script interpretation, character work and advanced scene study. The second year culminates in a graduation demonstration presented to the public. Classes meet twice a week for 3 hours a class Level 1 – Intensive In five weeks you will learn all of Sandy’s “foundational” exercises. Beginning with the “Repetition Exercise” going step-by-step, brick-by-brick in building a strong foundation for your career. You will be blown away by how much you have grown as an actor and have a foundation to apply to all your future auditions, callbacks, and jobs. This class covers the first three months of the Meisner Technique’s first year in only five weeks. This class meets for 5 weeks. Level 2 – Intensive You will continue with behavioral improvisations learned in Level 1.

You will add more bricks to your foundation making it stronger and more solid as you continue to blossom and grow. The “Emotional Preparation” exercise will teach you to enter a scene emotionally full and then you’ll apply all this to a final scene. This class meets for 5 weeks. Level 3 – Intensive Using what you’ve already learned you will be working on an elite level by being an honest, truthful, simple, actor realizing that “You are enough.” Continuing with more advanced behavioral improvisations and adding more bricks of this step-by-step system your work will skyrocket with learning “The Relationship Exercise” and applying everything to a final scene. This class meets for 5 weeks. Click for Student Testimonials 8 Acting Techniques (and the Stars Who Swear by Them) | Backstage 8 Acting Techniques (and the Stars Who Swear by Them) By KC Wright | Posted Aug. 26, 2014, 1 p.m. Share: Uta Hagen Anyone who’s been to an acting class knows that there are as many approaches to the craft as there are actors approaching it.

Though all actors must develop their own understanding of the work, several master teachers have led the way in training since the turn of the 20th Century. These well-known gurus helped develop acting as we know it, and continue to grow some of the industry’s most respected stars. Stanislavski’s System One of the greatest acting teachers of all time, Constantin Stanislavski’s work signaled a shift in 20th century acting and inspired a whole new generation of techniques and teachers. In addition to changing the face of acting worldwide, Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre was at the forefront of the naturalistic theater movement in the Soviet Union and in Europe. His approach incorporates spiritual realism, emotional memory, dramatic and self-analysis, and disciplined practice. Lord Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud were both famous original practitioners of Stanislavski’s system. Lee Strasberg’s Method An actor himself, Lee Strasberg’s method was inspired by Stanislavski’s system and the Moscow Art Theatre. His “method,” derived from Stanislavski, encourages actors magnify and intensify their connection to the material by creating their characters’ emotional experiences in their own lives.

Prior to his death in 1982, Strasberg trained many of the 20th century’s and today’s most legendary actors: James Dean, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, and Dustin Hoffman were all his students. His technique boasts many famous alumni as well, including Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi. Stella Adler Stella Adler was the only American actor to study with Stanislavski himself, and developed her own “method” built on the work of Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg. Adler’s technique differs from Strasberg’s in that it emphasizes imagination in addition to emotional recall. She famously said, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don’t want to do it.” Though Marlon Brando’s lifelike acting style is often attributed to Strasberg’s Method, he was actually trained by Stella Adler; his devotion to Adler and her work was so strong that he wrote the preface to her manual “ The Art of Acting .” Other famous Adler students?

Robert DeNiro, Benecio Del Toro, Mark Ruffalo, and Melanie Griffith. Meisner Technique Sanford Meisner developed this unique approach in the 1930s, after working with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at The Group Theatre. Like Stanislavski, Strasberg, and Adler before him, Meisner taught his students to “live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.” His approach is an imminently practical one; his famous repetition exercise, in which two actors sit opposite each other and respond in the moment with a repeated phrase, breaks down overly structured technique and builds openness, flexibility, and listening skills. Meisner joined the faculty of New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse in 1935, and went on to train thousands of actors in his organic technique. Famous Meisner students include Robert Duvall, Grace Kelly, Gregory Peck, and Diane Keaton.

As Elia Kazan once said, “Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you’ve been blessed.” Michael Chekhov Anton Chekhov’s nephew and Stanislavski’s star student, Michael Chekhov developed his own acting technique after exile from Russia brought him to Europe and the United States in the late 1920s. Chekhov pioneered a psycho-physical approach to acting, focusing on mind, body, and a conscious awareness of the senses. Clint Eastwood, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, and Jack Nicholson are all students of the Chekhov Technique. Practical Aesthetics This action-based acting technique was developed by playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy, and incorporates elements of Stanislavsky and Meisner. It involves a four-step scene analysis that simply focuses on pursuit of an action; actors are taught to focus on what is literally happening in the scene and what is desired of the other characters. Practical Aesthetics is most famously taught at New York’s Atlantic Acting School , which boasts famous alumni Felicity Huffman, Rose Byrne, Jessica Alba, and Camryn Manheim.

Uta Hagen In addition to her work as a Tony Award-winning actor, Uta Hagen was a beloved teacher at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio and authored the best-selling “ Respect for Acting ” and “ A Challenge for the Actor .” Her popular technique emphasizes realism and truth above all else; “substitution” (or “transference”) encourages actors to substitute their own experiences and emotional recollections for the given circumstances of a scene. As part of her long and legendary teaching career, Hagen developed the talents of Matthew Broderick, Sigourney Weaver, Jack Lemmon, and many others, and was even a vocal (and accent) coach to Judy Garland. Viola Spolin Viola Spolin’s unique “ Theater Games ” approach focuses on directorial and improvisational exercises for the actor, and is considered to be a major contributor to the improvisational theater movement in the United States. Her “ Improvisation for the Theater ” is often called the “improv bible,” and teaches actors to live in the moment and respond quickly and truthfully to their present circumstances.

Spolin’s son Paul Sills was at the forefront of Chicago’s Second City, and taught his mother’s techniques to generations of illustrious comedy stars including Alan Arkin, Fred Willard, Dan Aykroyd, and Gilda Radner. Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

Question: In what field is "The Meisner Technique" used?
Answer: Acting