Meisner Technique: Sanford Meisner’s Approach to Acting

The Meisner Technique is an approach to acting that theater actor and acting teacher Sanford Meisner developed. The Meisner approach to acting emphasizes three elements: emotional preparation, repetition exercises, and improvisation. The Meisner Technique aims to connect actors with their scene partners and instinctively respond to stimuli. Many legendary Broadway and Hollywood actors trained with the Meisner acting technique, including Gregory Peck, Grace Kelly, Robert Duvall, Alec Baldwin, and Diane Keaton.

Sanford Meisner developed the Meisner Technique in the 1930s. Consider its evolution:

• The Group Theatre: Meisner joined The Group Theatre in 1931, a New York theatre collective founded by actor and teacher Lee Strasberg, a leading proponent of the Method Acting approach and director of the Actors Studio; director and Actors Studio cofounder Cheryl Crawford; and director and critic Harold Clurman. The Group Theatre based their approach to acting, known as The Method, off theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski’s system. The Method emphasizes “affective memory,” a technique also known as emotional recall.
• Neighborhood Playhouse: Meisner and Stella Adler, a fellow Group Theatre member, opposed affective memory, which they considered manipulative. Disagreements about the Method approach led to the theater collective’s disbandment in 1941. Meisner served as the head of the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. There, he crafted a training program based partly on Stanislavski’s system and Strasberg’s Method Acting techniques. The founding principle of Meisner’s training is “to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”
• Meisner/Carville School of Acting: In 1983, Meisner launched the Meisner/Carville School of Acting with long-time partner James Carville on the island of Bequia in the West Indies. A second Meisner/Carville School of Acting, later renamed the Sanford Meisner Center for the Arts, opened in Los Angeles in 1995, two years before Meisner’s death in 1997.
• Legacy: Sanford Meisner on Acting (1987), written by Meisner and actor Dennis Longwell, outlines Mesiner’s philosophy on actor training. Actors worldwide continue to train with the Meisner Technique.

The Meisner Technique has three critical components:

1. 1. Emotional preparation: Meisner training requires an actor to enter a scene emotionally by drawing on imagination or a real experience to access a character’s emotional state. Actors should then focus on their scene partners and instinctual human behavior to drive the scene's actions.
2. 2. Improvisation: The Meisner Technique posits that actors should only react when provoked by naturally occurring stimuli within the scene. When actors fully connect to a scene and the other performers, improvisation becomes organic, and reactions reflect the truth.
3. 3. Repetition: The repetition exercise is a crucial component of a Meisner class. The exercise, known as the “Word Repetition Game,” puts two actors across from each other. One actor makes an observation about their scene partner, who then repeats the statement. Repetition eventually gives way to different perspectives (“I’m standing next to you” becomes “You’re standing next to me”) and builds both natural, improvised dialogue and focused connection between scene partners.

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