Part 1

Later on in life I was permitted by the great master to call him Sandy, but in the beginning it was Mr. Meisner, definitely Mister Meisner. He was one of the three most influential men in my life and I suppose that if I were forced to rank the three, he’d be number one. He was my teacher.

He taught me the craft of acting and along the way he taught me more about writing music, more about how to perceive and analyze human behavior and how I ticked as a human being than any other person.  When you studied with Sandy, you learned acting, but mostly, you learned about life.

Sanford Meisner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, the oldest of four children of Hermann Meisner, a furrier, and Bertha Knoepfler, Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Hungary.

As a child he found release in playing the family piano, and eventually attended the Damrosch Institute of Music (now the Juilliard School) where he studied to become a concert pianist.

When the Great Depression hit, Meisner’s father pulled him out of music school to help in the family business in New York City’s Garment District.

Meisner would later recall that the only way he could endure days spent lugging bolts of fabric was to entertain himself by replaying, in his mind, all the classical piano pieces he had studied in music school. Meisner believed this experience helped him develop an acute sense of sound, akin to perfect pitch.

Later, as an acting teacher, he would often evaluate his students’ scene work with his eyes closed (and his head dramatically buried in his hands). This trick was only partly for effect; the habit, he explained, actually helped him to listen more closely to his students’ work, and to pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting.

“Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

Despite his parents’ misgivings, Meisner continued to pursue a career in acting, receiving a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting. Here he would meet up again with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.

Strasberg was to become another of the century’s most influential acting theorists and the father of Method Acting, an acting technique derived from acting theory and techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski. The three became friends. In 1931, Clurman and Strasberg, joined by Cheryl Crawford (another Theatre Guild member) would select 28 actors, one of whom was Meisner, to form the Group Theatre.

“The seed to the craft of acting is the reality of doing.”

This theater group exerted an influence, not only on Meisner, but on the entire art of acting in the United States. Meisner, along with a number of other actors in the company, eventually resisted Strasberg’s preoccupation with Emotion Memory exercises when, in 1934, fellow company member, Stella Adler, returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris.

She announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, rather than delving exclusively into one’s past memories as a source of emotion, one could just as effectively summon up the character’s thoughts and feelings through the concentrated use of the imagination and the belief in the given circumstances of the text. As a result, Meisner began focusing on a new approach to the art of acting.

“Act before you think.”

When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1940, Meisner continued as head of the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. In teaching he found a level of fulfillment similar to the fulfillment he had found in playing the piano as a child. It was at the Playhouse that he would develop his own acting technique, based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski, his training with Lee Strasberg, and on Stella Adler’s revelations about the uses of the imagination. Today that method is called the Meisner Technique.

“An ounce of behavior is worth more than a pound of words.”

The goal of the Meisner technique has often been described as getting actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.’ The technique emphasizes that to carry out an action truthfully on stage, it is necessary to let emotion and subtext build based on the truth of the action and on the other characters around them, rather than simply playing the action or playing the emotion.

“Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.”

Throughout his career, Meisner worked with, and taught, students who would later became well known, such as James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Bob Fosse, Diane Keaton, Peter Falk, Jon Voight, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Kelly, James Doohan, Manu Tupou, Tony Randall and Sydney Pollack. Pollack together with Charles E. Conrad would serve as Meisner’s senior assistants.

A number of directors also studied with him, among them Sidney Lumet, and writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet. The technique is helpful not just for actors, but also for directors, writers, and teachers.

And might I add here: composers, lyricists and I would think painters and poets, sculptors and anyone connected with any artistic endeavor. For he taught us how to dig into character and story, form and behavior, and understand our deepest emotions and our simplest moments of life.

“You know it’s all right to be wrong, but it’s not all right not to try.”

I feared him more than any other man. He could be devastatingly prescient in his analysis of one’s work and he was not afraid to tell the truth no matter how devastating. Sometimes I would think it a bit of a mean streak, but looking back now, I see it as more of a frustration with some of his denser students over their inability to grasp his concepts or oft times their inability to dedicate themselves to the learning of the fine art of acting.

“Acting can be fun. Don’t let it get around.”

I admired him and yes, loved him more than any other man.  I studied with him for four years – two years as a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater and for two years in one of his professional classes.  Every class was an adventure in insight.

He once asked me. “Link, why do you not take notes in my class?”  It was meant as a reprimand.  I answered him truthfully, “Because, Mr, Meisner, everything you say is so important to me that I could never forget it.”  This was no B.S. on my part, no apple polishing, just the plain and simple truth. He recognized this, as the master studier of human behavior that he was, simply raised his eyebrows to the rest of the class, nodded and moved on. “Less is more!”

I have a thousand stories of this man to regale you with.  I shall pick a few of my favorites over these two nights and tell them.

To be continued…

“There’s no such thing as nothing.”

The quotes in this article are all from the mind of Sanford Meisner.  I’m also grateful to Wikipedia for historical information on Mr. Meisner.