Meisner Sanford - Sanford Meisner on Acting

A Vintage Original, August 1987
First Edition

Copyright 1987 by Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Meisner, Sanford.
Sanford Meisner on acting.
A Vintage originalT.p. verso.
1. Acting. I. Longwell, Dennis. II. Title.
PN2061.M38 1987 792.028 86-46187
eISBN: 978-0-307-83063-0

Pages constitute an extension of this copyright page.

v3.1

For James Carville

I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tightrope dancer, so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832): Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, book 4, chapter 2

This quotation Meisner has framed and hung on the wall of his office.

I want to thank Kent Paul, who first suggested that I write this book, and whose friendly encouragement helped to keep me going when its end was only dimly in sight. I thank him, too, for lending me his archive on the Group Theatre, material which enriched the biographical sections of this work, and for generous permission to incorporate material drawn from transcripts of the excellent documentary film he produced, Sanford Meisner: The Theaters Best Kept Secret.

I am grateful also to Dorothy L. Swerdlove, Curator of the Billy Rose Theater Collection, for swiftly answering tough questions, and to her colleagues on the Staff of the Performing Arts Research Center of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center for their unflagging assistance. I received help also from the staff of the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, New York, who secured for me dozens of urgently needed books from libraries throughout the state of New York.

Sanford Meisner joins me in expressing deep appreciation to James Carville for his guidance and discipline in adhering to the clarity with which the technique was expressed. We also admire and thank our tireless agent, Connie Claussen, and our insightful editor, Joseph Fox.

Dennis Longwell

Sag Harbor, New York

October 1986

We called him Sandy but it felt daring and dangerous, like ordering a martini in a nightclub when you were sixteen and trying to pass for twenty-one. He was too awesome a presence for the familiarity of a first name. It was 1952 and I was eighteen years old and had blundered into his classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Nothing had prepared me for the intensity of this experience. It wasnt that he was harsh or mean; it was only that he was so frighteningly accurate. You felt he knew every thought, impulse or feeling in your head, that he had an ability to x-ray your very being and there was absolutely no place to hide. Each time he spoke about acting he crystallized ideas that you somehow knew were true, even though you had no idea that youd ever sensed them beforelike those physicists who discover new particles simply because the theory for their existence is so beautiful. When Sandy spoke it was often difficult to keep from jumping up and shouting, Thats true! Thats right! Thats absolutely right! It was stunning to have him hurling those lightning bolts directly to the inside of your brain. One poor guy simply couldnt contain himself and actually did blurt out, My God, thats right! Sandy simply mumbled, Thank you, youve just confirmed twenty-five years of my work.

Sanford Meisners work was, and is, to impart to students an organized approach to the creation of real and truthful behavior within the imaginary circumstances of the theater. Like his contemporaries from the Group Theatre, he has been changing the face of American acting ever since he was first exposed to the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavsky in the nineteen thirties. Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis and Sanford Meisner emerged from the Group Theatre as the preeminent teachers of what has come to be known as the Method, a kind of lazy label that refers to most of contemporary American acting. Each one of these teachers has really made his own method, honing down and personalizing his approach over the years. Though they all were extraordinary teachers, Sandys approach has always been for me the simplest, most direct, least pretentious and most effective.

The Neighborhood Playhouse offered a two-year intensive course in all aspects of the theater. It was unequalled anywhere, and even though the faculty boasted such luminaries as Martha Graham, Jane Dudley and Pearl Lang, it was Sandys daily acting classes that kept our adrenaline pumped up for two years. When I graduated in the spring of 1954, I was invited to return the following fall on a fellowship as his assistant, and so I had the extraordinary opportunity to continue to learn from him for another six years until I moved to California in 1960 to begin directing. I had no aspirations to teach, and certainly none to direct, but the chance to continue to observe and learn from Meisner was impossible to pass up. When truths about one art are deep enough, they become true about all art, and so although Sandy addressed himself only to the art of acting, I was, without knowing it, absorbing the foundation of what would become a very specific approach to directing. The fact is that every area in which I function as a directorwriting, production design, costume design, casting, staging, cinematography, even editingis dominated by, and concerned with, the principles and ideas Ive learned from Meisner.

Sandy used to say, It takes twenty years to become an actor. We thought he was exaggerating. We should have known better; he wasnt. He was referring to that time, if it should come, when all the principles and ideas would be chewed up and digested into a kind of actors instinct, a technique that functioned almost by itself. He never wanted the work to be about technique. If you were his student, you learned technique as a means to an end, never as an end in itself. Youd be surprised by how many acting teachers dont understand that.

In 1981, I went back to New York to film some of Meisners classes for a documentary. We worked in a small downtown theater given to us by Joe Papp. It had been twenty-one years since I had observed Sandy in action. Of course he had aged. Hed had a laryngectomy (the removal of his vocal cords), had been struck by a van that shattered his hip, had two cataract operations and wore thick glasses with a microphone attached to them to amplify the new way hed learned to speak by swallowing air. But the same high was there in the class, the same intense concentration and the sense of falling forward into new areas of understanding and experience. Some contemporaries of mine, old-timers who had made the pilgrimage back to take the classes again, were present. They were just as nervous in front of him as they had always beenand they were learning just as much as they always had. The only vivid difference to me was that because of the effort involved for Sandy to speak, there were fewer words. When they came, they were like rich, boiled-down broth. (As I write this, I think of a remark made about Chekhov by Maxim Gorky: In Chekhovs presence everyone felt in himself a desire to be simpler, more truthful, more ones self.)