Sanford Meisner, the longtime director of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan, was an influential and revered teacher for generations of actors until his death on Feb. 2 [1997] at the age of 91. In this article, Marian Seldes, the actress, author and teacher, remembers her experiences as one of his students.
I met the magical Sanford Meisner in 1945 when the Neighborhood Playhouse was located on two floors of an office building on West 46th Street. Only one room was furnished and decorated, and in it sat Rita Wallach Morgenthau, the elegant elderly headmistress, and the dignified man she introduced as Sandy. The intensity of his stare unnerved me. I was being judged before I had a chance to prove to him that I had a talent for acting.
But the sound of his voice began to soothe me. He used tone and articulation like a brilliant actor, which of course he was. He had acted in five plays for the Theater Guild, appearing with Pauline Lord and Alfred Lunt. He was a founding member of the Group Theater in the 1930's and appeared in 13 of their productions. In later years his fine eyes were dimmed by cataracts, his seductive voice killed by cancer. But he continued to teach, ''Theater,'' he said, ''is my life.''
I wanted it to be my life too.
I remember asking, ''Shall I do a scene for you?''
''Why?'' he demanded. ''You know nothing about acting. We will have to begin at the beginning. You can forget everything you think you know.''
Confused and terrified, I joined the incoming class of 1946 with Richard Boone, Anne Meacham, Barbara Baxley and more than 20 others. We knew that however we succeeded in our speech and voice exercises, however hard we drove our minds and hearts and bodies for the extraordinary Martha Graham in our dance classes, it was Meisner's opinion of our work that mattered. By December, a third of our class had disappeared. When we graduated in May 1947 we would join a group of countless other actors, playwrights, directors and teachers who were already in the process of influencing the American theater because of Meisner's influence on them. He was their mentor, guide and colleague. He was then, and always, content for his students to receive the recognition and praise he never sought.
He sat at the far side of a badly lighted, unheated room, sometimes wearing his overcoat over his immaculate suits. He smoked constantly. He rarely moved, but when he did it was with quick grace, one shoulder hunched slightly higher than the other. He had no use for theatrical gossip or small talk. He adored Chekhov, Cezanne and Mozart. He detested hypocrisy, cliche acting tricks and bigotry. He knew we both feared and adored him. He rarely played favorites or bestowed praise. He cared about the process of our work more than the results. He did not teach us acting; he prepared us to act.
The exercises that Meisner conceived seemed simple. So does learning to walk or talk or swim or read or write -- after we learn how. The work was often painstaking, humiliating and embarrassing. We were, after all, young adults. We had all acted before. There were a few basic tasks, such as coming into a room, searching for an important document, finding it, hiding it from another person and leaving with it in your sleeve or shoe. Once, desperate to escape a life-and-death situation, I folded a make-believe passport and put it in my mouth.
One morning, instead of working with several pairs of actors, Meisner focused on a single student. Her task was to come into a place where someone important was waiting for her. Sandy lit a cigarette, and we all waited for the door to open. When it did, we glimpsed her face. ''Go back,'' he said. She did, waited a moment, then appeared again. ''Go back,'' again. The class was restless. Whispering and giggles were silenced by Sandy's silent glare. Three, four, five times the young woman attempted to come into the room. She grew confused and hostile. Tears came. I thought she was going to give up. Finally, he allowed her to come through the doorway, contact her partner, who had been waiting for her for what seemed like an hour, and together they worked through the problem of the scene with utter truth and reality.
She had been chastened by Sandy's treatment, but that day, I think, we all learned never to come onto a stage without knowing exactly why, nor leave it without having accomplished what the playwright asked for. For a Meisner student there were no exits, entrances, crosses, or moves right and left. Those were stage directions. We had to find our instructions in the play itself.
Occasionally, Meisner interrupted a scene. We were never sure if it was because it was successful or dismal. We sat spellbound as he used what he had witnessed as a taking-off place for his flights of imagination and explanation. Smoking, coughing, joking, he liberated us from that prison of a classroom, and we began to see a theater life existing in a moment of time where nothing else mattered but the reality of doing a task with truth.
The relationship between teacher and student in a theater school is intimate and complicated. Moments of discovery are impossible to predict, and each student progresses at a different rate. Meisner searched for what was distinctive in a personality. The actor's instrument is himself, he said, and his task was to find ways to use that self eventually in characterizations that were far from his own personality.
In 1947 when ''Crime and Punishment'' was produced by Robert Whitehead on Broadway, I had the chance to observe Meisner creating a part. I was in a cast that included John Gielgud, Lillian Gish, Dolly Haas, Alexis Minotis and a large group of students of the director, Theodore Komisargevsky. Before we opened, Minotis, Komisargevsky and all his students were dismissed. Vladimir Sokoloff joined the cast, and Gielgud took over the direction. Sandy was impervious to the emotional chaos around him. He worked with selfless concentration on his part and created a truly Dostoyevskian character. We were in awe of his discipline and his skill.
He lived a great life in the theater.
From The New York Times, February 16, 1997