Meisner in Practice

Once you have started to ‘include’ everything that happens within your observational scope, you become a more honest actor, because you stop trying to deal with two different realities simultaneously.

Meisner Technique is based on the concept of ‘the reality of doing’. You do not pretend to do something – you real

Working in pairs, sitting on the chairs exactly as before, you comment on your partner exactly as in Simple Repetition. The difference, in this version, is that each of you is now free to change the comment if and when you see your partner doing something significant. For example:
A1 You have dark hair.
A2 I have dark hair.
A1 You have dark hair.
A2 I have dark hair.
A1 You touched your hair.
A2 I touched my hair.
A1 You touched your hair.
A2 You sat forward.
A1 I sat forward.
Each comment is repeated continuously, as in Simple Repetition, until something happens to change it. You will also notice that all comments relating to physical actions are made in the past tense, so that they never stop being true. At this stage, the comments all have to be physical, factual and irrefutable.
You must repeat every comment made about you at least once and preferably more than once. You should not look for things to comment on in your partner just in order to escape repeating. The comment should only change when one of you notices the other doing something very definite.
However, you should also make sure that you notice and comment on significant things

The basic set-up is the same as before – you and your partner sit on two chairs facing each other. Once again you look at each other from head to toe. Once again a comment emerges from one of you, but this time it is personalised: ‘You have red socks,’ or ‘You’ve got a black jumper.’ This time, the second actor repeats the phrase back in a reversed form. ‘I have red socks,’ or ‘I’ve got a black jumper,’ so that the comment continues to be about the same thing and, as importantly, continues to be true.
In this exercise, however, you should make no attempt to reproduce the intonation of what you hear. You repeat the words, and you try to do so in a way which is open, responsive and organic to the situation. In other words, you do not impose anything on your response, but you allow the other person to affect the way in which your response comes out.
It should also be emphasised here that, whatever phrase is chosen, the actors should not attach too much literal significance to the socks, the jumper, or whatever. The significance must therefore lie in the subtext, which is often not about the black jumper itself but about the actual interaction taking place, whatever that may be.

In the first exercise, you and another actor sit on chairs facing each other, at a distance from one another that allows you to see not just the face of your partner, but their whole body. After a while, one of you makes a simple statement about something you notice about the other actor. This will be a physical, irrefutable fact, such as ‘red socks’. The other actor repeats the phrase back to you exactly as you have said it, copying your intonation, volume and pronunciation exactly. You then do the same, repeating not what you think you said the first time, but what you hear from the other actor, and so it goes on until the teacher stops the exercise.

I understand this need, but, should you feel this frustration in Meisner work, remind yourself that a momentary glance between two strangers at the bus stop can potentially be more compelling than the closing scenes of Hamlet, if you are genuinely engaged with each other in one but not the other. Drama can exist in the tiniest of moments, not just in monumental conflicts.

Most of you are already adept at reading others, but you often switch off your heightened sensors in everyday life, simply because they are not necessary, and would lead to your being overstimulated with huge amounts of surplus information about everyone you meet, from the person serving coffee to the person sitting opposite you on the train.
So you reserve the super-responsive mode for important or heightened situations, such as an audition, a date, or a street conflict. Within such contexts, you are utterly engaged.

it doesn’t matter who is watching you, provided you are not watching yourself, or even watching someone watching you. In other words, if you can train yourself to keep the focus elsewhere, and stay relaxed, you can avoid the tension which so often creeps into your body and stops you being responsive, released and real.