Meisner Shmeisner

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Sanford Meisner.

Sanford Meisner who?

Sanford Meisner who?!

Yeah, Sanford Meisner who?

Well, f*k you!

Yeah? Well, f*k you too!

(slam the door)

Sanford Meisner was the greatest teacher of acting that this country has produced. Tragically, Sandy died in 1997. If you go to an acting school with his name on the door he will not be there to watch your work, tell you what needs fixing, or how to fix it. Sandy wanted to be "an influence" and that he has become. Mr. Meisner has influenced every hack acting teacher in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, to use his name to sell their bogus acting classes. In their defense I will quote Mr. Meisner in saying, "Even when it's taught badly, it's still pretty good."

My G-d, what a lot of lame crap floats around L.A. under the guise of "The Authentic Meisner Technique." The Sanford Meisner technique is a technique for teaching and learning, not a technique for acting! That damned exercise he invented has no practical application in the real world of professional acting. The exercise exists as an exploratory tool for problem solving and to introduce the actor to himself and his acting partner, then to allow the personal discovery of one's own values, character, imagination, and creativity.

The problems all actors face in the beginning are that they will not listen or stop thinking about themselves. Mr. Meisner's invention eliminates these problems by replacing them with positive work habits: listening to, observing, and being affected emotionally by your acting partner; then permitting your instinctual, emotional responses. All great actors do those things irrespective of their training. The result of his approach is that every moment is inspired when you act.

Mr. Meisner was a classically trained pianist and understood, therefore, the need for the actor to have a repeatable exercise which cultivated imagination and emotional depth along with the fundamentals that all great actors shared. The fundamentals of acting are these: listening, observing, taking personally what you see and hear, and responding instinctually to that which is right in front of you. Call it, "Scales for the actor," that's the Sanford Meisner exercise.

Imagination, sensitivity, instincts, and emotional depth and range are the actors' stock in trade. That means that the actor who is most sensitive to his acting partner's emotional state, who permits what he sees and hears to affect him emotionally, and who instinctually permits the full measure of his emotional responses, all while being completely immersed in a purely imaginary situation, can bring the greatest depth of the human experience of a scene to life.

Acting is all about imagination, emotion and the human experience. Mr. Meisner understood those things and worked with students to get them to embrace and permit those characteristics habitually when they worked. He would use any tactic available to him to direct his students to the ideal of , "Living truthfully, under imaginary circumstances."

The hack or proficient actor (Stanislavski's terms, not mine) and those who are college trained, suffer a huge disadvantage in the professional arena because their training demands that they analyze and predetermine all their 'character's' feelings and responses, then execute them on cue. "Execute," is a good word for what they do because they immediately kill any honest response they may have by delivering stylized oratory and faked, forced or indicated responses. The human experience does not work that way.

Anyone who has ever broken off a relationship will tell you that no matter how many times they have rehearsed the break-up in their minds, it never went that way in the reality of the moment. Meisner, Stanislavski, and yours truly, are in agreement that the human drama and the staged drama must not be diverse from one another. It is the human experience that galvanizes the audience, actor, script, and screen. The actor is the catalyst for that vicarious experience.

Your truthful responses can be seen (and experts debate the actual time) in anywhere from 1/40th to 1/25th of a second. Film captures your responses in 24 frames per second and video in 29.9 frames per second, so the actor who permits his truthful, instinctual response looks absolutely real while the fake actor looks absolutely fake. That's where the college trained actor falls apart. He cannot, by definition of his training, permit an honest response. Furthermore, life's training does not permit an honest response. From the earliest possible moment you are trained to stuff your honest response in favor of the one that is polite, unaffected, and rationalized. Mr. Meisner saw this and spent his life training people to permit that which is organic and genuine (but only when you act). Acting, in other words, demands new training.

Sandy knew that the training took five years to integrate completely with the actor, though he never worked for more than two years (two, nine month periods) with a given class. If a student had the wherewithal to do so he might attend summer classes with Sandy in Bequis but for the most part, by his own confession, Sandy's ego could not tolerate students for more than two years.

Via the acting exercise of Mr. Meisner's invention the student could learn his most valuable assets: his values and his character. Identifying your personal values, those things for which you wish and want, reveals areas around which you can invent meaningfully via your imagination. It is your ability to invent meaningfully around imaginary circumstances that allows you to bring personal meaning to a scene. For the purposes of your training I will define character as those things you stand for and those things you will not stand for. Defining your character reveals your instinctual responses when you act.

Mr. Meisner's exercise also permits the student to cultivate his emotional depth and range by demanding that you find and repeatedly go to your personal and absolute limits in emotion. This is new training from what life permits. In life you stay off of the emotional roller coaster, staying in control and never letting them see you sweat. Acting demands the blood, sweat and tears, 15 takes in an hour, all day long.

The two biggest problems with learning to act via the Meisner Technique are the actors and the teachers.

The actor, especially the young actor who is new to the business, is impatient to get the recognition and rewards he believes he so richly deserves. The "Meisner Teacher" is impatient to get the money from the young actor. The student wants a 'quickie' course so he can start working and make millions of dollars and the teacher wants as many students as possible so he can satisfy his ego and buy a multi-million dollar home. The student does not take the time necessary to learn the whole of his craft and the teacher doesn't study teaching long enough or offer the student a long enough period of study for genuine learning to take place.

Sandy complained repeatedly that the teachers at the Neighborhood Playhouse only studied with him for the briefest of periods and never reviewed his classes to see what had evolved. He rebuked anyone who used his name to sell their classes. Mr. Meisner said that in order to see every answer to every acting question one would have to spend eight years in his classes. Very few "Meisner Teachers" ever did that and a great many of them in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, never studied with or even met the man.

What Mr. Meisner was conscious of was his role as one instance in a chain of the pursuit of truth. That is Socratic Teaching by definition. It was that pursuit of truth that earned him his legendary status. Though he was pedantic in that pursuit and autocratic in its execution, he was also clear that it was the propositions that he represented and not him as a person or a teacher that made them true. He did not teach great acting but pointed his students in its direction then guided them through every agonizing step while they learned it for themselves, by their own definitions, and turned themselves into great actors.

Let me be clear that I knew Mr. Meisner only slightly. He recognized me and knew my name only because of my association with Robert Carnegie with whom Sandy had the closest professional relationship. Mr. Carnegie sat by Mr. Meisner's side for over eight years studying the approach. I sat by Mr. Carnegie's side for nine years doing the exact same thing. On occaision I would sneak into Sandy's classes and watch but I never studied with him personally. I promised both Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Meisner that I would never use their names to promote my classes as, from the start, my intention was to become the best acting teacher I could become.

To say that I make uncorrupted use of Mr. Meisner's inventions should go without saying, but I said it just the same. My name is Joseph Dean Coburn and I teach acting in Los Angeles. It will take some work on your part to find the name of my school but not much. You will not find either Mr. Carnegie's or Mr. Meisner's names associated with your search results. I only put all our names in the same paragraph here as a matter of historical fact.

The point of difference between my training and any others you may see comes from maintaining the connection with your working partner and maintaining the discipline in your approach between your classes and your auditions. Mr. Meisner taught acting, as do I, but my professional experience in commercial broadcasting and the legitimate stage forces me to prepare people to work with (not to put too fine a point on it) me. If you can work with me, you can work.

In our classes we work toward working. Every class is a class in auditioning since that is what you will do every day for the rest of your life as a professional actor; audition. Scenes in my classes are no more than two or three minutes long because scenes are no longer than two or three minutes in film. Your job is to punch as much meaning as necessary to further the story into those two minutes. Instead of having weeks to work on a scene as you do in acting school you may have a few minutes merely. I train actors to work in such a professional environment.

You would work for two years with me just to establish a foundation. After those first two years you can start auditioning without fear of ever embarrassing yourself or damaging your reputation. Continue studying for another four years and every time you are seen you will be improved from the last time. At the end of six years of study with me you will have a rock solid reputation and be able to act any part for which you are right, no matter what the demands of that part. Since it takes eight to ten years to get your career established as an actor those first six years will be well spent.

I know that Mr. Meisner would have been supportive of my efforts as he aspired toward the same things toward which I assent. Part of the assent to truth is to prove the tenability of your approach and part of that assent is to prove the untenability of any other. Therefore, my critique of other schools and teachers is necessary.

Congratulations on having completed this article. Good luck on your career. The mission of my school is, "To Act and Inspire." Hopefully, having read this article, you are inspired to act. Just watch out for the Meisner promoters. It may say Tuna Fish on the can but because of the way they cast their net you might end up with a shark.

Thank you,

Mr. Coburn