Sanford Meisner’s approach transformed acting training, providing aspiring actors with a craft and process for consistently creating fully realized human behavior. Known for its focus on the actor’s imagination, and the power of concentrated listening, the Meisner Technique teaches actors how to do truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
For those wondering how to get better at Meisner, the answer lies in two parts.
First, get yourself enrolled into a reputable, legitimate two-year Meisner program, and second, attend class and rehearse regularly with your partners. You cannot get better as an actor by reading books about it. Meisner training requires a full commitment to class, and to the preparation that is required as the technique unfolds.
This blog covers essential steps to help you sharpen these Meisner skills and discover a deeper sense of truth in your work. With commitment and expert guidance, you can develop an artistic process that can support a long professional acting career.
Key Takeaways
Emotional preparation is a key fundamental skill in an actor’s process, connecting the actor emotionally to the previous circumstance of a scene.
Meisner’s first year repetition and improvisation exercise gets the actor out of their head, onto their spontaneous impulses, while also remaining fully present, in the moment with vulnerability and empathy.
Meisner’s independent activity teaches the actor how to do truthfully under an imaginary circumstance, while also developing the ability to harness the power of their imagination. Students learn how to craft in a simple, specific, and personal way.
Emotional Preparation: Connecting to the previous circumstance
In the Meisner Technique, learning emotional preparation is key to connecting the actor emotionally to the previous circumstance of a scene. Meisner teaches you how to harness the ability to daydream and fantasize to your craft.
Students are taught a process for connecting deeply to the previous circumstance, boiling that down to its emotional essence, and then triggering a daydream that brings the emotional life needed to the surface. It is essentially self-induced emotion. If you are working with an emotionally intense circumstance, when you hear action, or you walk onto the stage, you want to be internally alive. An audience will not believe you otherwise.
For example, if you are shooting a scene that starts after finding out your husband has been having an affair, your job as an actor is to be emotionally alive when action is called. So if you need to start the scene completely devastated and heartbroken, Meisner’s emotional preparation training will give you a process for making that happen.
Here are some ways to strengthen the skill of emotional preparation:
Learn how to craft the fundamental questions
Crafting is essential for the actor. When breaking down a script, there are fundamental questions that need to be answered. Knowing how to pin these down in a simple, specific, and personal way, can help make emotional preparation easier to identify and more accessible to you.
These questions must be answered whenever you get a script: What is the previous circumstance that causes this scene to happen for me? How do I feel about it? What is the acting relationship? And what is my objective?
Second year training then focuses on the fifth question; what am I doing to achieve my objective?
Use your imagination, not personal trauma
Unlike Method acting, Meisner’s approach avoids asking actors to draw on their own literal, painful experiences and trauma in order to manipulate themselves emotionally.
Meisner believed this was an unnecessary and unhealthy way to work. Instead, he emphasized the power of imagination as a safer, more sustainable tool for achieving emotional depth, enabling actors to approach character without the need to use their real life trauma.
Daydream for authentic emotional responses
As humans, we already have the innate ability to daydream and fantasize. Meisner training teaches you how to harness this ability to your acting process.
The first year of the Meisner Technique provides the actor a way triggering daydreams, to live them out with vividness and a graphic sensibility. A vivid daydream can alter your emotional life, and it's an effective tool for the actor.
Daydreaming needs to be a prominent part of an actor’s process, and it is rooted in your life experiences, your imagination, and those issues and relationships that have deep personal meaning for you. An actor who can access their imagination in this way, and filter that into their work can create incredibly vivid, and organic human behavior.
The Repetition Exercise: Building Real Connections
The first year repetition exercise is the seed of the Meisner Technique, and it evolves over nine months into an incredibly deep, profound, and sophisticated improvisational exercise. There are some people who also refer to this as a “Word Repetition Game.”
Sanford Meisner created this exercise to begin the process of instilling the fundamentals of acting into his students. The bedrock of acting is listening. Most actors don’t listen, they wait for their cues.
The beginning repetition grounds the actor in the present moment, gets the attention off of themselves and onto the other person, out of their heads, and onto their spontaneous impulses. This is the way a well-trained actor should be able to work.
Begin with simple observations
Point of view is everything for an artist. It is born out of your authenticity and uniqueness. The Meisner Technique begins by encouraging two actors to respond from moment to moment from their point of view. The subjective response is the artistic response.
The repetition exercise begins with an opinion you have about what you see in the other person. If you want to get better at the Meisner Technique, begin by becoming conscious of how you feel about everything. Your opinions and judgements are born out of the essence of who you are.
When in doubt, repeat
The brilliance of Meisner’s repetition exercise is that it completely removes the need to think about what to say. When engaging in the repetition exercise, act before you think, and get onto your spontaneous impulse.
Treat the exercise as a reality, answer responsively, and hold onto the repetition.There are a number of organic ways that the repetition changes, and those get introduced during the first few weeks of class.
Listening is the bedrock of acting
The ability to listen is the most important fundamental skill in acting. The Meisner Technique begins honing this ability on day one. The moment must be all consuming. We miss moments in life all the time, but if you do that on stage or in front of a camera, you could derail the entire scene.
If you want the ability to do 20 takes, or eight shows a week, if you want every one to be fresh and spontaneous, it begins with listening, and the ability to respond personally in every moment.
Improvisation in Meisner: Acting before you think
Improvisation is central to the Meisner Acting Technique, as it encourages actors to remove hesitation from their work. As an actor, if you hesitate, you cannot be impulsive, and if you are not impulsive, you cannot be spontaneous. If you lack spontaneity, you have nothing.
Good writers create inevitable cause and effect. Just like life, a script is a flow of moments. It’s like setting up a long row of domino’s, and then tipping over the first one. All of the others will fall inevitably.
The improvisational nature of Meisner’s first year exercise teaches the actor how to catch cause & effect, responding personally in every single moment. Over the course of the first year, students apply this exercise work to three rounds of scenes.
A scene, just like a good Meisner exercise, should feel like a spontaneous improvisation. This is what an audience wants, to feel like they are watching something happen for the first time.
Through this structured improvisation , students become very skilled at spontaneous, moment to moment acting.
Breaking the bad habits actors have with scripts
Whether you have acted before or not, you have ideas about acting, most of which are misconceptions about the art form. If you have acted before, or cobbled together crappy training, you will be riddled with bad habits.
Meisner’s first year training addresses these with three rounds of scenes. Most actors do not listen, they wait for their cues, they manipulate themselves emotionally to fit a line, they adjust to the text, and succumb to cliched line readings.
The Meisner Technique teaches you how to respond continually from unanticipated moment to unanticipated moment. Good actors let the text rest on the truth of the moment as opposed to adjusting to how they think a line should be said.
If the line is “I’m so angry I could kill!”, most actors will just assume this must mean I am very angry. They will yell that line no matter what is going on at the moment. Good actors never subvert their inner life to fit a line, but instead subvert the line to whatever is truthfully going on inside of them. Really good actors work this way.
Embrace unanticipated moments
Childlike curiosity, and a sense of adventure is the place every actor should work from. This is challenging because of the walls and defense mechanisms that are acquired through parenting, education, and socialization.
Meisner training helps strip away the defenses, so that the actor can function with this openness. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes months of training.
Get comfortable with conflict and intimacy
You can essentially boil all of acting down to two things, conflict and intimacy. Obviously there is sexual intimacy, but the intimacy I’m talking about is the open-hearted vulnerability that comes from allowing yourself to be truly seen by someone else.
Acting also involves the conflict between people who want and need different things. Usually the stakes are life and death.
In the Meisner training, the first year exercise helps get you comfortable standing up for yourself, functioning from your anger, while also giving you the skills to be able to handle other people's anger.
You must be able to hang in the contact during a scene. You cannot run off-set because it's too overwhelming. So getting better at Meisner will require you to unpack your relationship to anger and vulnerability.
Independent Activities: Crafting is everything
The independent activity is a core part of the Meisner Technique, and teaches the actor how to craft in a simple, specific, and personal way. Acting is the ability to do truthfully under an imaginary circumstance, and the independent activity makes this second nature for the student.
Sanford Meisner uses the independent activity to teach actors how to craft a previous circumstance, relate to a time element, pin down the acting relationship, and use the power of daydreaming and fantasizing in order to create vivid, truthful, human behavior.
To improve your independent activity skills, consider these approaches:
Start with a difficult object
The first requirement of Meisner’s activity is securing a difficult object. The goal is to nail down 100% of your concentration onto what you’re doing.
This is an acting fundamental, and it is the first step in freeing your instrument, so that it can become spontaneous and responsive. Avoid activities that are tedious, such as puzzles, games, memorization, or sewing.
Work with deeply personal reasons, relationships, and life issues
Independent activities are meant to help the actor illuminate the human condition. The job of the actor is one thing, to create behavior. Really good actors do this organically and experientially, while bad actors indicate and perform.
The actor must find their personal hook into the character, their issues, and the relationships that define their journey. If you want to be an actor that can do this, you need to know yourself really well. You cannot bring more to your art than what resides inside you.
Meisner’s first year training helps you discover what you are truly all about, and then teaches you how to bring that to your acting process.
Emotional Preparation: The imagination and self-induced emotion
Emotional preparation is another key fundamental of acting. This is the actor’s ability to relate emotionally to the previous circumstance of a scene.
Most of the acting classes NYC has to offer do not teach actors how to do this. Meisner teaches you how to confront the previous circumstance emotionally, and then use your ability to daydream and fantasize in order to come to life emotionally.
Meisner did not believe that you had to use your literal past in order to manipulate yourself emotionally. Daydreams and fantasies are incredibly effective, and also a healthy way to work with yourself.
You can practice triggering vivid, personal daydreams. Live them through, in your mind's eye, and you will discover how this very human ability can alter your emotional life, and improve your acting.
Respond to subtext
What a person says and what a person means are two totally different things. An actor who can respond in every moment to the meaning of what’s being said, one who can respond to how they are being treated can keep every performance fresh take after take, and night after night in the theater.
To get better at Meisner, tune up your hearing, and be more malleable to the nuance of another person's behavior. This will help prevent you from doing line readings, regardless of how you are being treated.
Train yourself to notice subtle shifts in your partner’s behavior, like a change in tone or expression. This approach keeps your acting fresh and instinctive. It also helps actors avoid rehearsed responses and predetermined line readings.
Your acting needs simplicity, ease, stillness, and clarity
Any serious artist masters their instrument. If you want to get better at your Meisner training, start developing your voice and body. Major parts and lead roles can demand a great deal of vivid behavior.
Most actors are riddled with tension, have horrible speech and diction, and have a great deal of unconscious, pedestrian, physical clutter. Work for stillness, get rid of your day to day “isms”, so that your acting is not brought down to your limited personality.
If you want to be a transformative actor with range and dimension, develop command over the behavior you create.
MFS: A Leader in Meisner Training
Learning the Meisner Technique requires a teacher and studio that are masters of the training. Most NYC Meisner studios do not teach the technique as Meisner intended. And many teachers do not mentor under master teachers. They are typically actors who are pulling out notes from classes they took ten years ago, and are trying to cobble together what they can remember.
When you are looking for acting classes in NYC, make sure you talk to the artistic director and head of the acting program. Talk to current students, and speak to other actors you trust in order to get their feedback.
MFS is led by me, Artistic Director & Master Teacher Charlie Sandlan. I have spent the last 34 years dedicated to the Meisner Technique. I have an MFA from Rutgers, trained under William Esper and Maggie Flanigan, and spent 11 years mastering the teaching of the technique as Maggie’s protege.
The heart and soul of our two-year conservatory program is the full progression of Meisner’s acting technique. With essential classes in acting techniques, voice, movement, breathwork, clown, mask & character, theater history, script analysis and more, our curriculum is designed to develop a complete actor who can sustain a career at the highest level of the industry.
For actors serious about advancing their careers on stage or screen, the Maggie Flanigan Studio provides the foundation and guidance they need. Call us today to learn more about taking your Meisner training to the next level.
Summary
The Meisner Technique takes dedication, patience, and an openness to growth.
Developing authentic emotional responses and staying present in each moment requires actors to invest in craft and process. From repetition and improvisation, to emotional preparation and scene work, each exercise builds toward a natural, organic acting style that separates the artist from the hack.
When actors fully embrace the Meisner approach, they develop a craft and process that provides them consistency in their acting regardless of medium.
A well-trained Meisner actor can do film, television, and theater. They can bring characters to life with depth and honesty. Staying committed to Meisner’s principles empowers actors to create real, vivid, unforgettable performances.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to practice the Meisner Technique?
To practice the Meisner Technique with any real success, you will need to enroll in a serious Meisner Technique studio. You will want to study under a master of the technique, who has a reputation for training successful actors.
A professional NYC acting studio should require weekly rehearsals with your scene partner. If you attend class and rehearse regularly, you can become a well-trained actor.
Is Meisner a good acting technique?
Yes, I believe that the Meisner Technique is one of the best ways to train an actor, to instill in them a way of working consistently.
Developed by Sanford Meisner at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse, this acting method helps actors create vivid, human behavior without the need to go into your literal past in order to manipulate yourself emotionally.
This is the biggest difference between Meisner and the Method, created by Lee Strasberg. By developing the ability to do truthfully under imaginary circumstances, the Meisner approach gives actors a powerful tool for creating authentic performances.
What is the best way to get better at acting?
No one will take you seriously if you do not take yourself seriously first. If you want to become a professional actor, it will require a commitment to training.
It takes a dedication to artistry, consistent practice, and a willingness to learn. Techniques like Meisner build essential skills in creating emotional honesty and dynamic presence, providing a strong foundation for a long career.
Training with a reputable Meisner teacher, developing your voice and body, and becoming dedicated to artistry, can lead you down the path of a serious actor who can sustain a long and productive career.
