Shakespeare and Meisner

A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers

Aileen Gonsalves, Tracy Irish

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350118423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

This practical handbook is invaluable for anyone performing, teaching, studying or simply wanting a new way to enjoy Shakespeare. It provides an outline of Meisner's work and legacy, a discussion of that legacy in the light of the enduring global popularity of Shakespeare, and a wealth of practical exercises drawn from Meisner's techniques. Shakespeare writes about the truth in human relationships and human hearts. Sanford Meisner's work unlocks truthful acting. They would seem a perfect match. Yet, following Meisner's note to his actors that 'text is your greatest enemy', Shakespeare and Meisner are often considered 'strange bedfellows'. The rhetorical complexity of Shakespeare's text can often be perceived as rules an actor must learn in order to perform Shakespeare 'properly'. Meisner's main rule is that 'you can't say ouch until you've been pinched': in other words, an actor must genuinely feel something in order to react in a performance which is alive to the moment. This book explores how actors can use Meisner's tools of 'acting is reacting' to discover the infinite freedom within the apparent constraints of Shakespeare's text.

1

Introduction

Acting is not talking. It is living off the other fellow.

SANFORD MEISNER (1987: 42)

Sanford Meisner’s name is now synonymous with an approach to acting that requires the truthful response of an actor bringing their own life to bear on inhabiting a text. He described his technique as ‘in a nutshell … the process of filling a cold text with your life’ (1987: 169). He was one of the founding members of the Group Theatre in New York in the 1920s, along with Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman. The Group (described more fully in Chapter 2) were passionate young theatre makers, highly influenced by European developments in theatre, most especially through the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky. They challenged the status quo and their explorations developed into the various approaches characterized as Method Acting, all of which seek to make acting less about artifice and more about genuine emotional engagement. Meisner’s own key development was to focus on what happens between actors. The acting approaches he developed have been taken forward by many teachers in their own ways, but the sense of an actor bringing a truthful, personal response to their work, which is dependent on the other actor, is the core of any Meisner approach.

For Meisner (1987: 15), acting is ‘living truthfully under a given set of circumstances’ with those circumstances defined by the director’s interpretation of a playwright’s words. He developed exercises to support an actor in finding ways to live truthfully, the most well-known of which is Repetition. Repetition is so called because the words the actors speak aloud express an observation made by one actor about the other, which their partner then repeats from their own perspective, for example, ‘You’re smiling’, ‘I’m smiling’. The phrase is repeated until something happens to make one of the actors change the words to another observation, perhaps, ‘You moved your hand’, ‘I moved my hand’. This deceptively simple activity removes any need for either actor to ‘act’ – consciously creating a performance by improvising the speech and behaviour they think their character would use in that moment – and instead to respond instinctively in the moment. With Repetition, the actor has a simple phrase to say and does not need to ‘go into their heads’ to search for other words that are clever or witty or ‘in character’. Instead, they focus on their partner and respond to how their partner makes them feel through their voice and behaviour as they open and close their mouths around whatever phrase it is they are repeating. The words in Repetition are unimportant – you may, for example, still be repeating ‘You’re smiling’ when the smile has fallen away. Rather than having their attention on the words, Meisner wanted his actors to develop awareness of the emotional response expressed through those words and the close connection that this creates.

Meisner’s technique, as it has been variously adopted and adapted, focuses on three sequential exercises: Repetition, Independent Activity, Knock on the Door; and the key concepts of Preparation and As Ifs. His inspiration came from the Group Theatre’s explorations into Stanislavsky’s legacy; however, these particular exercises, the rationale behind them and the supporting work with Preparation and As Ifs, can be regarded as created by Meisner and are specific to his technique. These activities are what Scott Williams, taught by Meisner himself, describes as ‘the full work out for developing the actor’. Like an athlete using weights in the gym or a pianist doing scales, they are about the rigorous training of mind and muscle to respond unconsciously in the moment as the foundation that allows artistry to flourish freely.

The two key ‘muscles’ that Meisner’s technique trains are: seeing clearly and responding honestly from your point of view. One of Meisner’s basic principles is: ‘What you do doesn’t depend on you; it depends on the other fellow’ (1987: 34). This means you need to see clearly how ‘the other fellow’ is behaving – not how you think the other fellow as a character should behave, but your personal perception of how that fellow human is actually behaving in that moment. Another of Meisner’s basic principles is: ‘Don’t do anything unless something happens to make you do it’ (1987: 34). This means allowing yourself to be affected by what you see clearly in the other fellow and then responding honestly from your point of view. The principle is most simply illustrated in Meisner’s concept of pinch and ouch, where someone genuinely saying ‘ouch’ is justified by actually being pinched, not any pretence of pinching or ouching. Although Meisner uses this as a literal example, his point is to underline the metaphor of pinch and ouch: if you see clearly the ‘pinch’ of someone threatening you, your ‘ouch’ might be a feeling of fear, defiance, perhaps pity, but it will be your honest response to the other fellow in that moment. Crucially, this means an actor must agree to put their performance into the hands of another actor: your Lady Macbeth is dependent on their Macbeth; your Falstaff is dependent on their Prince Hal; your Helena is dependent on their Demetrius. This results in the maxim that acting is reacting.

Truthful connection to text

With Shakespeare, a reverence for the text can trap actors and directors into approaches that seek a ‘right way’ to give voice to his characters, searching for the right or appropriate interpretation of actions and behaviours.

Most successful theatre makers recognize and embrace the ephemerality of the art of theatre that can only create characters from the living blood and breath of actors in a particular moment. Meisner’s technique is definitely incompatible with any approach that sees acting as setting aside an actor’s personal experiences to seek some kind of platonic ideal of what a playwright meant a character to be, or to animate a marionette manipulated as a director determines. Meisner-trained actor and playwright David Mamet (1998: 9) captured a key Meisner principle in explaining, ‘There is no character. There are only lines on a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor.’ Every actor brings a unique treasury of personal experience to how they inhabit their lines, and for Meisner, it was crucial for an actor to draw from this treasury. He instructed his students to find ‘your personal example chosen from your experience of your imagination which emotionally clarifies the cold material of the text’ (1987: 138).

Meisner’s focus was on developing truthful emotional connections in his actors, and he has often been seen as uninterested in text, which has led to a sense that his technique is not compatible with Shakespeare. An oft-referenced quote from Meisner, ‘The text is your greatest enemy’ (1987: 136), can seem hard to reconcile with a common directive from Shakespeare practitioners to ‘trust the text’. Meisner, however, is not trying to discredit the work of a playwright; in fact he often emphasizes the need to trust that any playwright worth the name will give an actor the words they need when they are ready to say them. His concern instead is a caveat that an actor should not be misled by their own insecurities into trying to understand a text intellectually before they have understood it emotionally. He recognizes that the text can be your greatest enemy if you let your intellectual understanding dominate and close down the truthful, spontaneous responses that emerge from using the text to react truthfully to ‘the other fellow’.

Meisner and Shakespeare

Meisner’s interests and skills lay with modern rather than classical texts. He was sensitive to the rhythms that made modern play texts successful and saw the value of working with poetry to hone the impulses of his actors with spoken text. In working with Shakespeare, however, Meisner’s techniques can only take us so far.

In opposition to Meisner’s and Mamet’s words, Shakespeare director and text specialist John Barton (1984: 63) said, ‘The text is the character. It fills him out and gives him life.’ Barton was not denying the unique emotional life an actor brings to a part, but he was always looking for balance in what an actor brings and how Shakespeare’s heightened text supports the actor in finding the feelings and thoughts needed. In his survey of contemporary directing practices with Shakespeare in the US, Charles Ney (2016: 10–11) credits Barton and other text experts with ‘a significant impact on the development of a generation of actors, directors and teachers … who had realized the limits of method acting with the classics, and in particular Shakespeare’. As we will explore, if due attention is paid to how the text works, Meisner’s emphasis on personal truth and response in finding the non-intellectual life of text provides a highly useful complement to how the sounds, shapes and rhythms of Shakespeare’s words can support an actor’s work.

Meisner may not have worked directly with Shakespeare, but one thing that comes through clearly from Longwell’s first-hand account of his practice is an unquestioning assumption of Shakespeare’s central role in theatre. Meisner’s teaching, as reported by Longwell, is littered with examples from Shakespeare. Sometimes he uses names of characters as shortcuts to ask whether actors are responding as themselves or as a character: ‘Are you talking to me now or is Lady Macbeth talking?’ (1987: 19); ‘Are you looking at me now … As Othello?’ (1987: 20). At other times he illustrates a point with reference to a moment in a Shakespeare play he assumes his students will have knowledge of: ‘Every play is based on the reality of doing. Even Lear’s shaking his fist at the heavens – that’s based on the actor thundering against fate’ (1987: 25). With all his Shakespeare references, Meisner’s approach is to encourage his actors to reach beyond an accepted artifice of a character and find their version of Lady Macbeth, of Othello, of Lear.

Formalizing Meisner’s technique

Meisner himself was resistant to committing his approaches to a written format. After a first failed attempt to do so, he explains, ‘I decided that a creative text book about acting was a contradiction in terms’ (1987: xviii). After a second failed attempt, he explains, ‘I came to realize that how I teach is determined by the gradual development of each student.’ This interaction, this personal struggle of each actor which he carefully nurtured and facilitated, could not be captured through a set of exercises; hence the only direct written legacy we have of Meisner’s work is a short and absorbing account of the personal struggles of one class, described by his former student Dennis Longwell. Longwell’s account mainly records direct quotes from both Meisner and his students about the workings of his technique and is a must-read for anyone interested in Meisner. As intended, it gives a deep sense of the man, and the hows and whys of his technique, but not a clear account of what that technique was.

Formalizing that technique is a process others have adopted. The Sanford Meisner Centre (2020) in Los Angeles, for example, takes a particularly purist stance asserting that any deviation from Meisner’s approaches, or any combining of his approaches with other acting techniques is an inferior offer designed to ‘compensate for a lack of full, deep understanding of how to teach the Meisner technique properly’. Other Meisner teachers have taken on board the principles and spirit of Meisner’s teaching, adapting his technique and combining it with other approaches to best serve their own community of artists, including, as this book offers, ways of working with the classic texts like Shakespeare that Meisner himself did not tend to engage with. The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where Meisner spent more than fifty years developing his approaches, is staffed by former pupils of the man himself and continues to offer a variety of programmes with his technique at their core, but is open to other influences and includes classes on Shakespeare.

William Esper is probably the most renowned teaching heir of Meisner’s legacy. He founded the William Esper Studio in New York in 1965, continued to work closely with his mentor for nearly twenty years and has written two books, which perhaps, along with Larry Silverberg’s books, come closest to recording Meisner’s original teaching. Esper, however, is also keen to point out in the prologue to his first book, The Actor’s Art and Craft (2008), that he experimented with and adapted Meisner’s teachings to find his own way. In a remembered dialogue with his co-author and erstwhile student, Esper tells Damon DiMarco (2008: 4), ‘If you come here, you won’t be learning Meisner technique. You’ll be learning my technique, the Bill Esper technique. And – God willing – if you leave here, you’ll leave with your own technique.’

Scott Williams, often credited with bringing Meisner to the UK in the mid-1990s, was also taught directly by Meisner. American-born Williams trained with Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York in the 1970s. He relocated to London in the mid-1990s, where he founded the Impulse Company and began teaching Meisner classes at the Actors Centre in 1996. Over the years of his own practice, Williams has adopted the key principles and key exercises of Meisner’s work but has refined them into a five-stage process which sees Repetition as foundational. He says he teaches the ‘intent of Meisner’ (2020) but that his techniques are a distillation of what he finds most valuable for teaching actors today.

Mike Bernardin (2020) first learned Meisner techniques through classes with an American actor in London in 1989 but then joined forces with Williams at the Actors Centre in London around 1996. He has been acting and teaching acting ever since, keeping the essence of Meisner’s work but finding his own adaptations, influenced particularly by the physical theatre of Lecoq and Decroux. Aileen Gonsalves, co-author of this book, was in turn taught by Williams and Bernardin, finding her own process from their influences and her experiences, particularly in directing Shakespeare. It is important to state that the exercises explored in this book, although firmly based in Meisner’s techniques and principles, offer our interpretations and adaptations for working theatre practice today. Like Esper, we hope this will support you in developing your own practice for working with Shakespeare.

How to use this book

The approaches and exercises in this book are aimed at helping an actor find themselves in Shakespeare’s text, using the principles of Meisner’s technique. We encourage you to find confidence and freedom with the words and worlds of Shakespeare’s plays to find the joy of responding truthfully, moment by moment within the given circumstances of Shakespeare’s extraordinary texts.

We offer a short biography of Meisner in Chapter 2, describing the context of his work, with discussion about how his legacy and his approaches have been taken forward and developed by other practitioners. Chapter 3 explores Meisner’s concept of ‘the reality of doing’ with some preliminary exercises for establishing the awareness and connection needed for a successful ensemble company working with Meisner techniques. Chapter 4 looks in more detail at Meisner’s famous exercise of Repetition and how it can be used as a gateway to a more personal connection to Shakespeare’s text. In Chapter 5, we review Meisner’s other two key exercises of the Independent Activity and Knock on the Door, and how they support an actor in finding the reality of doing by developing the stakes that allow something to matter. Chapter 6 moves on to explore how Meisner looked at the given and imaginary circumstances of a text with exercises on creating knowledge lists from the text to develop a personal interpretation of character. Chapter 7 explores Meisner’s concepts of the Preparation an actor needs so that they do not come into a scene empty, and the value of finding personal ‘As Ifs’ to better connect with the relationships and situations of a character.

In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, we begin to explore a reconciliation of Meisner techniques with attention to the sounds and structures of...