"Play, but don't play games!": The Meisner Technique Reconsidered

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.

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...