I MMEDIATE E XPERIENCE

An actor uses the resource of immediate experience by being alert and awake to what’s happening in the here and now, to the stimuli he’s getting from the other actors and from the environment. This is “moment-by-moment” work. Some people call this an attention to “outer reality,” to distinguish it from “inner reality,” the imaginative subworld of image, need, and adjustment.

Sanford Meisner invented the “repetition exercise,” a teaching technique that promotes moment by moment aliveness and engagement with a scene partner. It is described in his book, Sanford Meisner On Acting. Two actors sit across from each other, giving each other relaxed attention. When one of them has an impulse, he may say something—either an observation of the other actor or a statement of his own feelings— such as “Your eyes are brown,” or “My stomach is tense.” The other actor repeats exactly what the first actor has said, and the two of them keep repeating the same phrase until one of them has an impulse to say something else, which then gets repeated in the same way.

The exercise must be carefully supervised, to make sure the participants are speaking out of true impulse, not because they think it is time for them to come up with something, or because they feel a need to entertain those who are watching the exercise. But the beauty of it is exactly that: you can participate in the exercise even if you have no impulse or idea for something to say, because you can repeat what is already being said. The exercise, when properly supervised, gets the actors out of their heads and away from watching themselves, and into the moment.

The repetition makes the “lines” of the exercise a kind of nonsense, so there can be no pressure to say them “right.” The exercise allows the actors to be engaged without any responsibility to a text or even a situation. Typically in a Meisner oriented class, the students are only allowed to improvise situations after several months of repetition exercises.

In my own classes I use a variation on the classic Meisner technique which I learned from David Proval. The two participants sit across from each other, looking at each other, relaxed. After a while one of them is asked to say something about the other person, but specifically using the form, “You have…” and refraining from any descriptive adjectives. For example, if the participant has the urge to say, “You have beautiful eyes,” he instead must say, “You have eyes.” The other participant then repeats back, but changing the pronoun to “I.” After a while the participants are invited to say how they feel, only using the form, “You make me feel…” which is repeated, “I make you feel…,” etc. The important rule is that the “you make me feel…” is a form. The participants are to say how they actually feel, regardless of where the feelings come from. In fact, no analysis will be made of where the feelings come from.

It’s quite a remarkable exercise. Without manipulation or bullying, students “go places” emotionally, with full, instantaneous transitions and a simple, deep “solitude in

public.” The purpose is to build their confidence so that even when they have memorized lines to say, they will be able to give the lines the moment-by-moment life of an improvised emotional subtext. They will generate energy from their honest, real feelings and a concentration on their scene partner. Their transitions will be full and unforced.

When actors have confidence that they can trust their feelings and the other actor, they receive all stimuli as energy. If the actor is irritated with the direction or doesn’t like the other actor or is shooting on a hot sound stage a scene set in the Antarctic, the actor can still be alive to the “here and now,” using everything as energy, instead of shutting it off, screening it out, pretending it’s not there. If the actor has a headache, he lets the character have a headache. If the actor is nervous, he imagines what the character might conceivably be nervous about.

Some actors use direct experience as preparation; that is, rather than imagining the experiences of the character, or finding parallels from their own experience, they put themselves through some part of the character’s experience themselves. Eric Stoltz spent two months in a wheelchair to prepare for his role in “Waterdance.” Oliver Stone led the actors through a kind of boot camp to prepare for “Platoon.” Holly Hunter has described her preparation for a scene in “Copycat” in which she was supposed to enter a room distraught; she asked a group of extras on the set to do an improv with her, in which they pushed her around physically, just before the scene was shot. Dustin Hoffman is known for insisting on experiencing the reality of the character. On the set of “Marathon Man,” the story goes, he arrived one morning to play a scene in which his character had been up all night. “I stayed up all night to prepare for this scene,” he declared to his costar, who happened to be Laurence Olivier. Olivier’s legendary reply: “But my dear boy, why don’t you just act it?”