n Interview with William Esper

William Esper has had an acting studio in New York since 1965. For the past
eight years he has also headed the MFA and BFA professional actor training
programs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. A
graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he studied with Sanford
Meisner and Martha Graham, Mr. Esper underwent teacher training with
Sanford Meisner and subsequently worked with him for many years, becoming
a leading exponent of Mr. Meisners technique. He is also a former director of
the Company Lab at Circle Repertory Company in New York, and has been a
guest artist and directed productions at Canadas Banff Festival, the St.
Nicholas Theatre Company in Chicago, and WPA Theatre and Circle Rep in New
York.

Mr. Esper believes that the real contact between actors comes when they
listen to what they are saying to each other, and then respond truthfully from
themselves, from their own point of view. He subscribes to Sanford Meisners
principle that what an actor does doesnt depend on him, but on what the other
actor does to him. He believes that this is the foundation from which all acting
training should begin.

How did you get started teaching acting?

My own background is with Sanford Meisner. I went to the Neighborhood

Playhouse and studied with him, and I finished just before he went out to
California to become head of talent for Twentieth Century-Fox. He got very
disenchanted and came back to New York to found the American Musical and
Dramatic Academy, which still exists today, but in a very different form. While
Meisner was there it had a fantastic faculty. That was about twenty-three years
ago. Things got shaky at AMDA and Sandy went back to the Neighborhood
Playhouse. I went with him and stayed until 1977.

What I teach is based on what I learned from Sandy Meisner during the
seventeen years I worked with him. He was a brilliant teacher, a brilliant
theater man. He had three important attributes: a tremendous sense of truth,
an inventive way of working with actors, and a great feeling and love for
theatricality. In that way his temperament was different from Strasbergs. He
was closer to Stella Adler, but I think much more technically precise than she.
He was wonderful at process. It was really from him that I learned how

important it is for actors to be taken through a specific series of steps, one at a

time, and how each step is the basis for the next so that what an actor did
yesterday becomes the foundation for what he does today. In this way the actor
has a process for constantly developing and evolving his work. Its not
scattered. Its a very particular method based on improvisation that is
tremendously helpful.

I dont think of myself as an acting teacher in that I dont really give acting
classes. I undertake the training of professional actors and Im a specialist in
actor training, not just somebody who conducts a class to give actors some
helpful hints on how to improve their next performance. Im not focused on
that. I think that the only things that are teachable are fundamental principles,
because every time an actor has a problem in a performance it always comes
back to one of those principles: either hes not listening or he doesnt know
why hes there or he doesnt understand the relationship between himself and
the other person or hes acting his emotions and not really leaving himself
alone.

The moment an actor starts to work he has the problem of what to do about
the text because the text can easily corrupt him. If someone can memorize
lines and talk, you might think that he is acting when, in fact, he may be doing
nothing more than saying lines. So in order to get clear about what happens in
acting, its a good idea to get rid of the text temporarily. That means
improvising. But improvising brings its own difficulties. The moment you take
the text away from an actor hell start writing dialogue himself. So often a lot of
improvisation work is not very helpful to the actor because he starts making up
dialogue or ad libbing his way through a situation. Instead of being in the
situation, hes thinking of what to say. Thats not helpful because when you
play a part you dont have to think of what to say. You know your lines.
Someone has written them for you, you have memorized them, and they are
right there. You dont have to make up your own dialogue.

I base my first years work on Meisners form of improvisation. We start with

this Repetition Exercise. Two actors stand on stage facing each other. One says
something makes an observation about the other. It may be about what the
other actor is wearing or something else that catches his interest. Then his
partner repeats everything he hears the other say. For example, one student
may say to another, Thats a very nice green shirt. If that makes the actor
wearing the green shirt feel good, he might say, Thats a very nice green
shirt back, but it will be colored by his good feelings. Repeating everything

creates a dialogue substitute because the other person is always giving you
your line. You hear what the other person says and thats your line. You repeat
it from your point of view, keep repeating the same word or sentence, and only
change what you say how you say it when you feel the impulse to do so.

What do you mean by point of view?

How you feel at that moment. Thats a very important issue in the development
of an acting artist. Its vital, and that is a major area of work in the first year of
training. A lot of people who come to study acting are very disconnected from
themselves even though they may have acted a lot. They tend to be
depersonalized and they dont know how to respond subjectively, from
themselves. Thats not good for an artist because the raw material an artist
works with is how he feels about everything. Ultimately, every moment in a
performance is made up of how the actor feels about that moment. But before
an actor can get to that he has to get closely attuned to his own personal
feelings about everything under the sun.

How would you summarize the purpose and goal of the Repetition Exercise?

The first thing this exercise does is help actors learn how to listen. Thats the
bottom line in acting. You have to start by listening, and through listening
comes the beginning of contact. The beginning of real contact between actors
comes when they really listen to what they are saying to each other, and then
really respond truthfully from themselves, from their own point of view.
Because they have to repeat everything, theyve got to listen or they cant do
the exercise. So it forces them into contact immediately and into really
listening to each other.

The Repetition Exercise is not a complete exercise in itself. It is the beginning of

the work. It lays the groundwork for what is eventually a very sophisticated
kind of improvisational exercise that ultimately trains the actor to do and live
truthfully under imaginary circumstances. It does several things immediately: it
forces the actor to listen, forces him to put his attention on the other actor and
off himself; and teaches him to work impulsively and spontaneously and to be
able to respond emotionally and not intellectually.

Without spontaneity acting is like soup without salt: its stale, flat, and
completely unprofitable. Plus an actor will never develop an attractive
personality because spontaneity has an awful lot to do with stage charm if
you have some charm to begin with. Just as in life, people who are not
spontaneous are very boring. Those who are spontaneous are very charming.
Its a delightful trait. And only when youre spontaneous does the real person
begin to emerge, not the person you think you are, but the one you really are.
You have to do a lot of work tricking the actor into being spontaneous so you
can see who he really is and give him a chance to find himself. The truth of
someone is in his spontaneous responses, not his edited ones.

How does the Repetition Exercise progress?

The next step in the Repetition Exercise can only be described as a kind of
Ping-Pong game of impulses in which actors are bouncing spontaneous
impulses off each other. Again, there are two actors on stage facing each other
and one starts with a personal observation about the other; for instance, You
have a pretty sweater on. The two actors may initially repeat that sentence
thirty times to each other. Then something will happen inside of them an
impulse to change will occur from the sheer repetitiveness of this sentence
and it will produce an impulse in one actor to change. He may say, All right, so
Ive got a pretty sweater on. So what? Okay, okay! Meaning, thats enough of
that sentence. Through this exercise actors begin to learn how to sense an
impulse and act on it. The actors repetition of the sentence always adjusts to
the truthfulness of his impulse. If it means that he has to change the words in
the repetition in order to keep his answer an honest one, he does that.

The next step in this exercise has to do with behavior. The actor starts
responding not just to the words being said but also the behavior of the other
person. Now it is no longer a question of what the person is saying, but what he
means. One actor may say to his partner, Gee, thats a nice sweater. His
partner may answer, Well, Im sorry you dont like it, because the first actors
intonation made him feel that he didnt really like the sweater. As students
become more sensitized and hear more of what is really being said, they
change the sentence being repeated more frequently and become more aware
of what is happening in the other persons behavior. As they become more
responsive, the repetition gradually becomes more flexible. Then you may have

two students repeating sentences to each other that will change after every
three or four repetitions.

So now you have the actor working off his partners behavior and things begin
to pop up in the repetition that are a response to behavior, like, What are you
laughing about? or Why are you getting so serious? Now they are in very
close contact, and they work harder to hear not just what they are saying, but
what they mean. When they begin the Repetition Exercise their exchanges may
go back and forth twenty times before something happens to make a change in
the words. As they keep working it gets more and more flexible so that a
change in the sentence they are repeating will occur with more frequency.
Eventually the repetition falls away altogether and the actors work directly off
each others subtext in each moment. At this point its important that all excess
verbalizations come out of the exercise.

You see, the tendency that actors have is to make conversation, and that will
interfere with their emotionality because they cant think and feel at the same
time. An actor has to be rooted in his feelings. The least important aspect of an
actors instrument is his mind. Its much more important that he have an
understanding heart, an ability to empathize with other human beings, an
ability to respond with his feelings, not with his head. Thats what makes an
actor.

A lot of great actors cant articulate or communicate how they do it, and they
would make terrible teachers. I understand that Alfred Lunt was like that. He
was a great actor, but when he directed he couldnt communicate. He would
only know how to show you how he would do it himself. Teaching is a special
gift. Not only do you need an insight into what is going on in a talented person,
but you need the ability to articulate it so that someone else can understand it.

After about four or five classes of using the Repetition Exercise I introduce a
task called an Independent Activity. This is an addition to the Repetition
Exercise. A good Independent Activity has to have three elements: it has to be
difficult to execute; there has to be a concrete, specific, and ultimately personal
reason the actor is doing it; and it has to have reasonable immediacy-which
means that the actor says to himself, What is the least amount of time in
which I would reasonably be able to complete this task? All of this is, of
course, imaginary, but must be taken as a reality.

Students do this kind of concrete task with concrete objects while they are
doing the Repetition Exercise. One student may be mending a broken plate,
fixing a clock, copying a drawing, making something out of clay some task
that is very difficult and complicated to do so that it forces the actor to use
every drop of his concentration in order to complete it. The actor is forced to
deepen his concentration on the object, which ties up his conscious mind so
that he cant think about anything else except the activity in which he is
engaged. At the same time, he has to keep responding repetitively to each
moment that comes from his partner.

You now have one actor struggling with a mound of clay or trying to mend a
broken clock while he is responding to his partners sentence, both the way its
said and what is being said. And how a sentence is repeated is influenced by
the persons behavior as he works on his Independent Activity, and his partner
is responding moment by moment to the behavior created in the other actor by
his task.

Then I introduce a time limit. I tell the student who is working on the
Independent Activity that he has to complete the task while he is engaged in
the Repetition Exercise within a certain amount of time; i.e., to fix the clock in
an hour. This adds urgency.

One of the most important things that the Independent Activity brings to the
actors attention is the whole question of justification. Why is it important that I
fix this clock within an hour? This is a major area in the training of the actor
and one that I think is not fully understood in a lot of the training that goes on.
It isnt until the actor asks himself why he is doing this that his creativity begins
to operate. Here you begin to tap into the real use of the actors imagination.
This is another important part of the training because all of the training is
based on the use of the dramatic imagination.

A good Independent Activity has an element of struggle in it. Now you have an
actor trying to get this damn thing done, whatever it is, and, without the actor
even knowing it, hes upset. The emotion that comes out of that has a
wonderful quality because its not just a question of getting the actor to come
alive. Everybody wants an emotionally alive actor. The emotion has a wonderful
quality because the actor has not become emotion conscious. One of the

worst things that can happen to an actor is for him to become an emotionally
self-conscious actor who concentrates on what he is feeling and tries to
manufacture the feeling. Thats no good. He must be involved in what he is
doing. And if he knows why hes doing it and the reason has meaning for him,
he will come to a full emotional life.

This brings us back to the important notion of justification. This is where wish
fulfillment or fantasies come into the training because now the actor who is
engaged in the Independent Activity has to endow the object with something
important to him. Perhaps he decides that if he repairs this clock he can sell it
for a lot of money and then go on a vacation to the Bahamas. He brings that
desire into the work. It must be a total fantasy, but at the same time have real
meaning for him as a person.

Now we begin to get into the actors wants and desires. The actor has to make
his need to complete the Independent Activity stronger and stronger. Lets say
an actress wants to finish making a clay pot because she wants to sell it in
order to buy a terrific cocktail dress that she knows is going to make her look
like a million bucks. Or an actor may want the money to go see his dying father.
Students have to come up with justifications for completing the Independent
Activity that are more and more personal and urgent.

While the actor continues the exercise I give another actor one who doesnt
have an Independent Activity a simple objective to carry out with respect to
the actor in the exercise. For instance, he wants to borrow fifty dollars. And I
have him come to the door while his partner is engaged in his urgent
Independent Activity.

How is this carried out within the Repetition Exercise?

Lets say one actor has a simple objective, to come to the door, and he knocks
playfully dum di di dum dum, dum dum. The actor opening the door will use
that knock as a point of departure. He might say, What are you kidding around
for? or if he cant get a sentence from the knock, he might use some behavior
that he observes, like Gee, you look cold. There is never manufactured
dialogue. The dialogue in these improvisations (which incorporate the
Repetition Exercise) always has to come from an actors personal response to

what exists in the moment. And the exercise or improvisation can go in a lot of
different directions.

At this point in the training I hammer home an important principle of Sandy

Meisner, one that is at the core of his work: what you do doesnt depend on
you, but on what the other actor does to you. You cant do anything unless the
other actor does something to make you do it. This means that the objective
must be left alone, and all the actors concentration must be focused on the
other fellows behavior and how he feels about it moment by moment. It is
terribly important that the actor play off what exists in each moment and not
begin to manipulate himself because of the objective. Later the objective is
activated by emotional preparations.

How do you bring the Repetition Exercise into scene work?

The first scene a student works on is always a simple conflict scene. I assign
scenes to students that are usually from terrible plays like Tomorrow the World
or On Whitman Avenue. The scenes are based on a simple conflict with two
opposing points of view.

Then the actors memorize a scene by rote. In the first year of training we
memorize all the text we work on by rote. The purpose is to focus the actors
whole attention on what his acting partner is doing and not on remembering
his lines.

When students do a scene, they have not worked out any moments. The
interpretation of the scene is a result of two actors working off each others
behavior, out of their moment-to-moment behavior. I dont want them to do the
scene. I want them to let the scene do them. All a student may know about the
scene is where he is and why he is there. He will eventually learn about his
relationships. Then he works off his acting partner spontaneously. This ability to
improvise with a memorized text is crucial. You have to develop a strong feel
for this in the actor. There is a great deal of work in our theater today for which
an ability to improvise with the text is vital.

This ability is the basis for cold readings. And its also the key to television and
film work, where improvisation, not rehearsal, is important. Rehearsal is a
theater concept, and you cant train an actor to work only in the theater.

When a student is working on a scene, instead of answering what his acting

partner says or expressing what he feels is being said, he must answer using
the words of the text he has memorized so he doesnt have to think abut what
to say. He already has the lines. The point is that the student has to answer
before he adjusts himself or thinks about the line of dialogue, so that he is
responding from a spontaneous impulse. This is where the teacher has to have
a good eye to catch it and say, You see, in this moment you didnt pick up on
your impulse.

Thats what I mean by improvising in a scene with the text. The student is
working off his spontaneous impulses all the time and the text is coming to the
surface off his impulses. He is responding in the moment using the text but, at
this stage, he doesnt consider if its right for the character or if its right for the
play. For the time being, the student ignores these considerations because he is
trying to establish a way to work from himself and with himself. A good actor
adjusts his text to his subtext, whats really going on inside him. You have to
break the actors conventional response to text. Most actors tend to be
conventional about text and have to be broken of that habit. I try to rid them of
that conventionality. At this point I dont want the actor to try to solve the
interpretive problems of the scene. That comes later.

The next step in the training is learning Emotional Preparations.

Is that different from prior circumstances?

Yes, in a way. Its the way the actor relates himself emotionally to the prior
circumstances. Lets say the actor is doing a scene and ten lines into the scene
his stage wife says to him, What are you so happy about? His line is, Honey,
you are looking at the new vice president of the Crocketsville National Bank.
The audience then thinks, So, thats why the actor was so happy. Emotional
Preparation is what the actor does offstage to bring himself alive so that he is
emotionally related to his prior circumstances when he comes to the first
moment, the moment of his entrance.

How do you teach students to do Emotional Preparations?

Through daydreaming. We daydream in life when something triggers it, and we

drift off spontaneously. It isnt a question of imagining something, but of
actually daydreaming about it, which means living out a scenario. The actor
has to go into that drifty condition because it is then that the conscious mind
relaxes and the unconscious starts to open up.

One of the things that the actor has to learn is the difference between
daydreaming about something and thinking about it. Theres a difference
between thinking about making love to someone and daydreaming that you are
doing it. Daydreaming is much more evocative.

How is daydreaming used in Emotional Preparation?

I tell a student to sit down quietly and give himself a topic and start to
daydream about it. For instance, I might say, Youre emperor of the world, or
Youre a star, or Youre going to die, or Daydream about the worst thing in
the world that could happen to you. Its very freeing for an actor to do this
because he is not locked into what has actually happened to him. I feel very
strongly about that. It isnt a question of what did happen, but what might
happen, what could be not the most frightening or wonderful thing that did
happen to you, but what could happen. Once an actor says what could be, he
can start to daydream.

What instruction do you give students to help them develop this facility?

I start by telling the actor to relax and I may give him a topic to start from, but
then he has to let it go if other associations come up. Lets say a daydream
starts about an agent who has rejected you. Then it goes to a policeman
beating up a bum and you find yourself getting into the middle of it, getting
into a fight with the policeman. This kind of daydream may come to the surface
in someone who is very sensitive to authority. The policeman may suddenly
change into your father, with you having an argument with him. And then you

come to and you are in a rage, and thats when you come on stage if thats
what you need to fulfill the circumstances of that particular scene. Of course it
takes a very long time for the actor to use it with confidence. It is one of the
most delicate areas in acting and one that demands great vigilance from the
teacher so that the actor does not end up acting emotion.

How is this different from an Affective Memory?

Affective memory means going back to a past experience, and I think it has a
lot of problems. First of all, you have to teach the actor to do an Affective
Memory. You dont have to teach anyone how to daydream. Next, you often run
into a lot of resistance with an Affective Memory because the actor may not
want to go back to it. It also makes acting a very dreary thing. You cant keep
going back to re-create your mothers funeral for thirty years. Thats not
healthy, its not good for the actor. And you dont need to do it either, because
when your mother died it created an area of sensitivity to loss in you and thats
what you need that area of sensitivity. Then any daydream that plays on loss,
losing something precious to you, is going to emotionalize you. And when you
get tired of one daydream, you can invent another. Your mothers funeral will
wear out as a source of emotionality after a while, but you can invent a million
daydreams.

You know there are just so many emotions that human beings are capable of:
fear, anger, pain, joy, humiliation. And joy is joy is joy, and pain is pain is pain.
It doesnt matter where it originates because once its alive in the actor its
easy to relate it to the circumstances of the scene.

Do you encourage students to reveal their daydreams as part of the process of

learning how to do it?

No. They never divulge their daydreams. They never share them. Daydreams
are too personal. First of all, to talk about them is not going to be helpful to the
actor. One mans daydream is another mans bore. Second, daydreams come
out of the unconscious, so they are often very crude and ugly. People will often
daydream things that they would never do in real life, things they would never
act out. If the actor reveals those things, he starts to worry about what people
will think about him. As long as the daydream brings the actor to life, it doesnt

matter where he got it from. As long as he is alive when he walks out on stage,
nobody cares where it came from. Then, of course, he must leave his emotion
alone and respond fully and openly to whatever his partners behavior means
to him. The danger is that the actor will try to hold on to his emotion.

What is the next stage of the training?

Next we work on improvisations and scenes that have prior given

circumstances and require Emotional Preparations. Now we are at another
level. Students are working off each other in a very intense emotional way and
we bring in emotional relationships. For example, we will do an improvisation in
which a woman is home and opens the door to the man who walked off and left
her when she was pregnant two years ago.

Next I set up circumstances in an improvisation that are common to both

students. In the above example, the man might be coming back because he
realizes that he was a fool, that the woman he went off with was a real bitch,
and that he truly loved the one he left. This is a whole other level from those
earlier simple improvisations when an actors objective might be simply to
borrow a car to go on a date. In this way the actor is learning how to live
truthfully under imaginary circumstances, and he is ready to work on more
demanding scenes.

During the whole first year of Meisners work students are developing a truthful
instrument and it all has to do with straight acting, the actor being himself in
the imaginary world, working with his real responses to what is happening. The
actor is the character. Students are substituting themselves for the character.
There is no character work at all during the first year. That comes later.

At the end of the first year you have an actor who is very good at being himself
and has a strong sense of who he is, a strong sense of truth, and a good ability
to live truthfully in the imaginary world. He is able to promote real spontaneity
in himself and will act off his real impulses all the time. He cant help working
off other peoples behavior because he is so sensitized and has done it so much
and he is always working with his real feelings. You have an actor who has a
developed imagination and can invent very personal justifications to make
himself do almost anything under the sun. He knows how to make himself do

almost anything under the sun. He knows how to work with objectives and
leave them alone and how to focus on the other person and work off him or
her, always adjusting the text to whats happening at the moment between him
and the other person, and not the other way around. You have an actor who is
able to take a text and improvise it, identify the prior circumstances very
quickly, ask himself, How do I or the character feel about them? or How do I
think the character feels about them? What does the text tell me about what
the character feels about them? then he can create, push the button and find
the emotional life in himself, connect himself with it emotionally, and then walk
into contact, absolutely relaxed, leave himself alone and live it out off the other
person from unanticipated moment to unanticipated moment. If you looked at
the scene being played you would swear it was real life. Thats what you have
at the end of the first year.

How do you help students develop a character?

We begin the second years training by using the improvisational technique and
asking the student to play himself but to pick one addition to his behavior, such
as a limp, a speech impediment, a dialect one element that is different from
himself. At this point he is not using a text, just improvising situations. Now its
the actor still being himself but with the addition of a lisp or a sprained ankle,
etc. That allows us to begin to work on the physical or sensory adjustments of a
character. And we begin to do sensory work on heat and cold. Ive also begun
to experiment with exercises where the actor will take a point of view that is
not his own.

Could you describe that?

For instance, I set up an improvisational situation in which one person owes

another a lot of money and hasnt paid it back. The one who owes money may
take the point of view that its only money, how can this other guy possibly get
upset over something as insignificant as $1,000? And anyway, if I had it, I
would lend it but I dont have it. I cant pay it back. Id have to get a job to do
that, and he couldnt possibly want me to do that. That situation gets the actor
to take on a point of view that isnt his. Thats a very important ingredient in
acting and in character work. A person who has that kind of point of view about
owing money is a specific kind of character.

The criterion for choosing a point of view is that it has to be something that is
humanly true, that is life as it is lived by most people (not eccentric or crazy
people). You may have a character who believes that stealing is not wrong, or
one who gets upset over losing a small amount of money. They can both be
characters.

Character work is very complicated. There are a number of ways to create a

character. One way is out of the emotional life: a happy woman is a character;
a depressed man is a character. An interesting question to ask about a
character is what his or her point of view about life is. Some characters view
life as an endless party; others have a very tragic sense of life that will color his
responses. I am teaching the actor to play the emotional line of a character
so that everything is adjusted to the dominant thing that is going on inside the
person. We will do that through the exercise work and take it into scenes like
the scene in Two for the Seesaw in which Gittel has the ulcer attack. The
character of Gittel has a physical adjustment. She has ulcers and is in pain. Its
also a very good teaching tool for an actor to adjust all dialogue to the physical
and emotional pain of the character. And if you throw in a dialect, you have a
complete character.

Do you use animal exercises for character work?

Sometimes, but its important for the student to understand that he is not
doing a literal animal, but a human being who has the characteristics of that
animal. He is not a bear, but bearlike. Its dangerous to have students work on
animals literally.

In animal work its the behavior that counts. Camels are wonderful when you
want to play a snobbish character because they really seem to be looking down
at he world. Squirrels are good when you need to play someone who is very
anxious. Certain kinds of dogs are good. In fact, when you get into style, you
might say that style comes out of the theatricality of your ideas. I once directed
the letter writing scene from The Country Wife with the two actors playing a
bulldog and a poodle. It worked very well because the actors qualities were
right for the choices. I had another actor do the same scene and he used the
image of an old Model T Ford for the male character and that worked well also.
The more upset he became, the more he huffed and puffed like an old car. Now
thats very theatrical.

But Im getting ahead of myself. When an actor works on a character he has to

work on making specific choices. Thats the heart of the character work:
making choices. There is a scene from a play called Timelimit in which a fellow
comes in to be interrogated who has had a terrible experience the day before,
one that was very painful for him. An actor might choose to enter the room as if
it could be booby-trapped. He would then enter in a certain way and, using that
choice, capture all the wariness and suspiciousness of that character.

In the first year of training students never really pick actions because they
follow the principle, I dont do anything except what the other actor makes me
do; therefore they do everything. But once the actor starts to work with
interpretation he has to be more conscious of what he is doing; he has to be
able to translate text into choices things to do, actions.

What do you mean by actions?

To tell a joke is an action, to teach somebody, to flirt, to introduce oneself, to

give somebody an order. A great deal of the second year of training is spent
developing the students understanding of actions, intentions and objectives.
The other part is learning that although most human beings do the same
things, what distinguishes one from another is how he or she does it. For
instance, a priest and a gangster may both give warnings to a person. The
difference is in how they give that warning.

Whats really interesting is when a priest gives a warning the way a gangster
would and vice versa.

Exactly. Then you get unexpected behavior and it becomes interesting for an
actor to play a priest like a gangster and a gangster like a priest. Whenever an
actor can find a way to go against the text he or she can make a big
impression.

Do you recommend that students do that?

Sure. Good actors will always find things to act that are not in the text. You
never really want to play the text. Thats the point, to my mind. Thats the
point of Strasbergs sensory work: you never play the text. You play the heat
and the cold or the ice cream you were eating.

And I dont believe you can go into period work until youve created a very
sound, solid, truthful actor. If you do it before that, youll have a disaster. Its
like juggling. Its okay to juggle three balls, but then you have to juggle, four,
five, six. You have to work your way up to that.

Its difficult to do period work in New York studios because Im not in the
position to impose voice, speech and movement on the actor. Even though I
have colleagues Ive worked with for a long time and I implore students to work
with them, they are not all going to do it. At Rutgers I can.

Do you follow the same course of training at Rutgers?

For the first two years at Rutgers the training is the same process as my private
classes. But on the MFA level, the whole third year is devoted to style. I start
with Victorian-Edwardian plays Shaw and Wilde because they are more
accessible. Then I move on to Restoration and Moliere and Shakespeare.

You encourage your students to use the circumstances of the character. Do you
ever encourage them to substitute events from their personal lives?

I dont believe in substitutions. Im against them because they divide an actor.

Substitutions are what gave Method acting a bad name. You get two actors on
stage and they are not relating to each other; they are trying to see someone
else in each others faces because they are working on substitutions. You get
very absentminded behavior that way, as if someone isnt quite there. When an
actor uses substitutions, he must always find his own personal justifications for
what he is doing and he will very seldom find that they agree with the text.

But you said justification involves using something from your own experience
that is similar to that of the character you are playing.

I do teach actors to personalize, and most legitimate teachers will.

Personalizations are those personal examples that an actor will use to
illuminate some aspect of his performance. In the example I gave of an actor
using a booby trap, thats an as if. The actor is making a comparison between
something in the scene that is not very well understood and something he does
understand.

Do you give students these as if situations, or do you ask them to find them
for themselves?

I ask them to ask themselves, What is my personalization for this moment?

What is this like?

Personalizations can be drawn from the actors own life. If an actress is playing
a scene in which her husband leaves her, it might occur to her that its just like
the time when she was eight years old and her father left and she watched him
go out the door. Its the same thing. But the important thing to understand is
that once the actor gets the personalization he or she must take the behavior
from it and throw the personalization away. She cant stand there thinking
about her father leaving. Once shes found that for herself its like a nut. The
meat of the nut is the behavior and she extracts it and throws the shell away. In
a substitution the actor goes onstage with it and tries to hang on to it.

One of the big keys is the question of meaning. I never train the actor to think
literally, but essentially. Its never the facts; its what they mean to him. Its not
a question of what is true, but of the association of the meaning. For example,
lets say Im working on a scene in which I get a big promotion at work. Perhaps
I cant personally relate to the kind of work that the character does, but I can
relate to achievement, and that promotion is achievement. Then I can make my
own associations with that because achievement is achievement is
achievement. Once I make my personal associations they give living meaning
to the text.

Another aspect of interpretive work in the second year is the problem of

homework. How does the actor do it? He sits down with the script and
daydreams through it. If he wants to take an hour to daydream around one
moment, he takes that hour to explore it fully, find its meaning for him in terms
of his own associations. It is very private and subjective work and if done
correctly results in a kind of conditioning.

I remember when Paul Sorvino was in That Championship Season. That play
has a problem in it. The first act ends right after Sorvino breaks the news to his
friend that hes had an affair with his wife. The other fellow grabs a gun, points
it at him, and says Im going to kill you. Then the curtain comes down for
intermission, and when it comes up again it picks up where it left off. Thats a
real acting problem because the actor has to stay in the moment during the
ten-minute intermission so that he can walk back on stage and still feel the
same fear of dying. When I talked to Paul about it he said that at the beginning
of the run of the play he used to spend the entire intermission preparing to
keep himself emotionally alive. After a while he became so conditioned that all
hed have to do was walk out in the dark and the emotion came up. He was
conditioned. It was just there. Thats what homework does. Its like doing a
preparation over and over again until the emotion becomes so connected with
the moment that it comes up by itself.

Stanislavsky said that the actor rehearses to make habits. First he decides what
habits he wants to have, then he rehearses to acquire them, which means
conditioning himself by doing it repeatedly until its a habit. Then the whole
performance becomes a habit. In the last phase of rehearsal you make all the
habits beautiful. Ultimately, acting is also an aesthetic consideration. It has to
look aesthetically pleasing. Thats why someone pushing to summon up an
emotion is not agreeable to watch on the stage. Its not aesthetic and its not
moving. It has to look as if it has just happened without any work showing.

Are there any areas in which you differ from Meisner in your teaching?

I owe a tremendous debt to him. I find that by and large everything I learned
from him enables me to do everything I want to do with the actor. I differ from
him not so much in methodology as in classroom atmosphere. I think I am very
good at creating an atmosphere of freedom. I agree that there has to be
discipline and a great sense of purpose, but you also have to keep a climate of

freedom so that actors can feel free to make mistakes and be willing to take
risks.

At the same time you have to maintain a standard so that the best student can
say, I have contended with it and met it and I feel as I have really done
something because I measured up to that standard. I know that his is the top
so I can be confident that if I please Bill Esper or any other reputable teacher,
Ive got some genuine level of competence.

I also differ from Meisner in my serious concern with period and style. He was
very interested in them and wonderfully good at period and style, but he didnt
devote himself to them in the way I have. Ive spent eight years working
constantly in that area. My feeling has been that they are the most important
frontier for American actors.

Putting together the real American-based Stanislavsky work to make a truthful

actor and the ability to find a vivid theatrical way to express that inner reality
thats the whole ball of wax. You cant say that you are really serious about the
art of acting unless you can test yourself against the classics.

You have to have a point of view about the art of acting and the theater. Im a
humanist and I go to the theater to learn something about human nature, some
part of the world we live in. If the theater cant illuminate some aspect of life
for me, I dont want to be there.