Meisner Acting 2

Meisner Acting 2 acceptance is by invitation, based on each student’s first-year work, and the commitment they have demonstrated to themselves as artists.

If the first year of Meisner training is about laying the foundation, the second year of the Meisner technique is building the house. Now that the fundamentals are in place, we begin to look at the character and script interpretation. First-year teaches, among other things, how an actor finds their own spontaneous, personal, and emotional line of a scene. But what does an actor do when their straight response does not fit the character? The second year is about learning the tools to organically shift an actor’s impulses to fit the character and the script.

Students begin the year by learning how to craft a point of view that is not their own. This is the beginning of character work. We also spend time on impediments. Actors need to be able to craft drugs and pain. Learning how to do a flawless drunk along with various pain impediments is very important. It will come up many times in an actor’s career.

The heart of second-year, however, is scene work. Students tackle major playwrights (Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, to name a few) and complicated, lead parts. How do you read a play for the first time? What is the preparation for the first rehearsal? How does an actor begin to take themselves through a rehearsal process? Building upon the fundamentals learned in the first year, students are taught how to break down a script. Acting is doing, and an actor must ultimately figure out what they are doing in every moment. Students will learn how to use actions, line intentions, particularizations and as-ifs to create the behavior that is necessary for the character. Additionally, our students will be challenged to use their imagination, creativity, insight and life experience to begin to understand the psychology of the character they are inhabiting.

Meisner also created an incredibly ingenious and essential set of exercises in the second year to teach the actor: how to master the ability to create impulses, justify text, and use language in a deep and powerful way in order to illuminate character. Working with Mother Goose nursery rhymes, and Edgar Lee Masters’ beautifully profound Spoon River Anthology, actors truly discover how to become transformational. This hard work prepares the actor to return back to scenes where we will spend the remaining four months dedicated to script, character, and process.