"Meisner's unusual techniques were considered both unorthodox and effective.
They were given a single line of dialogue, told to turn away, and instructed not to do or say anything until something happened to make them say the words (one of the fundamental principles of the Meisner technique). The first student’s line came when Meisner approached him from behind and gave him a strong pinch on the back, inspiring him to jump away and yelp his line in pain. The other student’s line came when Meisner reached around and slipped his hand into her blouse. Her line came out as a giggle as she moved away from his touch.[
He taught to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances."
In order 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. One of the best known exercises of the Meisner technique is called the Repetition exercise, where one person spontaneously makes a comment based on his or her partner, and the comment is repeated back and forth between the two actors in the same manner, until it changes on its own. The object is always to react truthfully, allowing the repetition to change naturally rather than by manipulation.
In 1983, Sanford Meisner and his life partner James Carville founded the Meisner/Carville School of Acting on the Caribbean island of Bequia. beginning in 1985, also in North Hollywood, California. Meisner split his time between the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and the two school locations.
Sandra Bullock, Dylan McDermott, James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Jack Lord, 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 served as Meisner's senior assistants. The technique is helpful not just for actors, but also for directors, writers, and teachers. A number of directors also studied with him, among them Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, and writers such as Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
STANISLAVSKI:
"Increasingly interested in "living the part," Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterization in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy; he extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning "in character"."
"Stanislavski's 'system' focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to "experience the part" during performance. Stanislavski hoped that the 'system' could be applied to all forms of drama, including melodrama, vaudeville, and opera. He organised a series of theatre studios in which young actors were trained in his 'system.' At the First Studio, actors were instructed to use their own memories in order to express emotion."
Stanislavski soon observed that some of the actors using or abusing this technique were given to hysteria. He began to search for more reliable means to access emotion, eventually emphasizing the actor's use of imagination and belief in the given circumstances of the text rather than her/his private and often painful memories.
"In the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means. While in its very earliest stages his 'system' focused on creating truthful emotions and embodying them, he later worked on the Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 1930s. Its focus was on physical actions as a means to access truthful emotion, and involved improvisation. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious."
| ▪ Joshua Logan |
STELLA ADLER:
Adler founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City (1949) and the The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles
"Stella Adler's technique, based on a balanced and pragmatic combination of imagination as well as memory, is hugely credited with introducing the subtle and insightful details and a deep physical embodiment of a character.[17] Elaine Stritch once said: "What an extraordinary combination was Stella Adler - a goddess of full of magic and mystery, a child full of innocence and vulnerability."[17] In the book Acting: Onstage and Off, Robert Barton wrote: "[Adler] established the value of the actor putting himself in the place of the character rather than vice versa ... More than anyone else, Stella Adler brought into public awareness all the close careful attention to text and analysis Stanislavski endorsed."
The Acting schools Adler founded still operate today in New York City and Los Angeles. Her method, based on use of the actor's imagination, has been studied by many renowned actors, such as Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, Martin Sheen, Roy Scheider, Vincent D'Onofrio, Mark Ruffalo, Warren Beatty, Michael Imperioli, Salma Hayek, Sean Astin, Barbara Stuart, Joyce Meadows, Stephen Bauer and Benicio del Toro, in addition to Marlon Brando, who served as the New York studio's Honorary Chairman until his death, and was replaced by another pupil, Warren Beatty.
Stella Adler's technique, based on a balanced and pragmatic combination of imagination as well as memory, is hugely credited with introducing the subtle and insightful details and a deep physical embodiment of a character.
Adler was the only American actor to study with Constantin Stanislavski. She was a prominent member of the Group Theatre, but differences with Lee Strasberg over the Stanislavski System (later developed by Strasberg into Method acting) made her leave the Group."
STRASSBURG
"He is considered the "father of method acting in America," according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 "he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies".[4] From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film's most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.[4]
Strasberg demanded great discipline of his actors as well as great depths of psychological truthfulness. He once explained his approach in this way:
The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.
In 1966, Strasberg established Actors Studio West in Los Angeles. In 1969, he founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles."
CHEKHOV:
"His acting technique has been used by actors such as Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, and Robert Stack. Constantin Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov.
Chekhov was considered by the Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski to be one of his brightest students. He studied under Stanislavski at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, where he acted, directed, and studied Stanislavski's 'system'. When Chekhov experimented with affective memory and had a nervous breakdown, this aided Stanislavski in seeing the limitations of his early concepts of emotional memory.[citation needed] He later led the company of the studio under the name the Second Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski came to regard Chekhov's work as a betrayal of his principles.
Between 1936 and 1939 Chekhov established The Chekhov Theatre School at Dartington Hall, in Devon, England. "
LEWIS:
"Lewis held that Strasberg's Method, while valid in its particulars, was a misrepresentation of Stanislavski because it emphasized only some parts of Stanislavski's theory.
While in London, Lewis studied with Michael Chekov, an actor whose work he admired and whom Stanislavski considered one of the foremost interpreters of his theories. At Chekov's studio in Devonshire at Dartington Hall, Lewis further shaped his understanding of Stanislavski's techniques, or "method", as it was informally known in America.
In 1947, Lewis co-founded The Actors Studio
In the first year alone, Robert Lewis' group, meeting three times a week, consisted of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Mildred Dunnock, Jerome Robbins, Herbert Berghof, Tom Ewell, John Forsythe, Kevin McCarthy, Karl Malden, E. G. Marshall, Patricia Neal, Beatrice Straight and David Wayne, to name a few.
one of Lewis' points revolved around the idea that there are many facets of an actor's preparation and Stanislavski intended that the actor prepare internallyand externally, rather than relying exclusively, or too heavily, upon internal techniques such as affective memory. Opponents of Method acting complained of a "generation of mumblers", whose acting conveyed the truth of the actor but not necessarily the truth of the character on the stage. Lewis felt that such performances were the result of an unfortunate misinterpretation of Stanislavski's ideas.
Mr. Lewis declared throughout his career, in fact, that Method actors, who simply spoke stage dialogue truthfully, exactly as they would in life, were discouraged from playing Shakespeare or other classical writers because these author's plays required a stylized method of speaking. In his lectures, Lewis maintained that an actor must learn to use his voice properly and master formal ways of speaking, such as blank verse, if he/she is to succeed in Shakespeare., "
You impress me Katz. The actors in my year are actually all reading Meisner now, it was one of the first textbooks they ordered. Glad to see you'll be pre-prepared for college!
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