eisner outrages many with his instruction to “cross out all the stage directions” when an actor first receives a play. Aren’t the stage directions part of the play?  Meisner disagrees. He felt that the dialogue of the play spoke itself in the hands of an actor who was truthfully creating the human reality that the play depicted.    Obviously there are some words in a text that describe action so directly that it is obvious the actor must do it.  If a line says: “Why did you slap me?” it would be ridiculous for the actor not to execute the slap before that line. But how the slap is executed and why is still up to the actor and director.  Detailed stage directions that describe the exact attitude and action of the actor were seen to deprive the actor of his creative contribution and destroy the possibility of him doing his work. Here’s a fictitious example for our “slap” example: 

“With vicious satisfaction he raises his hand, smiles as if to disarm her, and then with sudden ferocity, slaps her upon the left cheek, thence leaning back in his chair with the cold repose of a satiated lizard”

It is at least a fair point of view to think that an actor who believed it was his job to follow these instructions would be doing a kind of imitation or cook-book performance that would not really be ‘acting’.  What is acting? According to Meisner, it is the ability to live truthfully within imaginary circumstances.  Yes, the words themselves imply a certain pathway that the actor must go down, but to restrict his movement to the blow-by-blow management of the playwright is to so limit his contribution as to annihilate it.  That is certainly true if you adhere in any way to the definition above.  The actor has to be able to ‘live’ within the part, not just act it out or copy it from another source.

So how does the actor create the details of the playwright’s vision, and what is the relationship between the playwright’s text and the actor’s process in doing so?  It is complex and indirect if it is to be done instinctively and artfully.

Sanford Meisner, for all of his statements to the contrary, ultimately wanted to illuminate the text of the play.  The question is:  what does a play represent, and how does that which it represents get best illuminated. I think the theatrical acting of Meisner’s time probably sickened him.  He had a great eye for human action and truthful work, and facile impersonation did not interest him.  He also noted that people hardly ever said what they meant. Usually something else was going on that gave the words other layers of meaning, and it was the behavior of the moment, coming out of intention and relationship, that gave the words this more textured meaning.

Sometimes the contradiction of verbal meaning was more obvious, as when someone says “I love you” and is obviously lying to placate the other person.  But even when the words seemed to be sincere, the element of sincerity was not the meaning of the words, but the way in which the accompanying action “validated” those words.

If someone says: “I apologize, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”, while reading a book and waving their hand dismissively at the other person, the apology doesn’t carry any weight. Apology is not in the words.  if someone says:  “You know, I had a lot of things to do that day, I really didn’t have time to do what you asked me, and I didn’t even really remember” with a tear in their eye, head bowed and with a pleading tone of voice, the apology is obvious even thought the words don’t say “I’m sorry”. Apology or any other human activity is in the behavior, not in the words.  Meisner understood that this principle could free the actor to do a much broader range of interpretations of the role. The words did not have to imprison him . He could find out through improvisation, experimentation and personal homework, how far the possibilities of the text were capable of going and then follow a truthful but creative path to enact those possibilities.  This would be giving true credit and true realization to what the playwright had to offer. Those who merely stood ready to carry out the playwright’s orders and communicate the initial meanings of the words on the page were offering so much less.

When an actor stewed and experimented with both the text and subtext of what the playwright had written and implied, had thrashed out the mechanics of the situation with director and other actors, and had found the instinct and impulses to live out the underlying reality that the words suggested and then build specific and telling behavior out of each moment of the text in this fashion, he could be said to have created a level of “theatrical detail”, a true rendition of a studied and inspired version of what the playwright was capable of creating, not through the literal and literary content of his words, but through the inspiration and the implications they had for living.

What playwright ultimately would object to being taken this seriously, to being told that their words were not just vehicles of poetry or the dictionary, but were a roadmap for the progress of souls in a human conflict? Obviously that is what great playwrights were trying to do and hoping for.  Only from time to time they forgot that the play itself contained the full potential of that possibility and insecurely tried to limit the interpretation of their plays to stage directions that make the actors’ work more superficial rather than deeper. It is often the sign of a playwright’s maturity when his “parentheticals” stop being verbose and become spare and lean.  When he does this, he is opening the door to actors to discover the meaning of his work.

Robert Epstein is the Program Director
and Instructor of The Complete
Meisner-Based Actor's Training in
Washington, D.C

© 2000 Robert Epstein ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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