Then Again - Diane Keaton [21]
At the Neighborhood Playhouse, it was Sandy Meisner. He wore a camel’s hair coat. He smoked and everyone said he was homosexual, even though he’d been married. I’d never heard of a married man who was gay but looked straight. He was mesmerizing and mean and the first grown man I ever thought of as sexy. I loved the ashes that were as long as the cigarette that dangled from his mouth. I loved how they fell onto his camel’s hair coat. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was the most exotic man I’d ever seen.
In Mr. Meisner’s acting class, there were no accolades. Things didn’t go like that. To Sandy, acting was about reproducing honest emotional reactions. He felt that the actor’s job was to prepare for an “experiment that would take place onstage.” His approach was designed “to eliminate all intellectuality from the actor’s instrument and to make him a spontaneous responder,” which could be learned by practicing the Repetition Game. It went like this. A partner—let’s say Cricket Cohen—would make an observation about me. “Diane, you have brown hair.” I listened and repeated the sentence she spoke. “I have brown hair.” Observing some aspect of my hair, Cricket might say, “Your brown hair is also straight and thin.” I would respond with something like, “Yes, my hair is straight and thin.” She would embellish, adding, “Very thin.” I would reply, “You’re right, it is thin, very thin, but not curly like yours.” The implication being, “You got a problem, asshole?” She would respond, “At least my hair is not too thin.” Meaning something to the effect of, “Lay off, bitch. Go back to Santa Ana where you belong.” And on and on, until we both ended up expressing a variety of emotions based on our reactions to each other’s behavior. I took to the Repetition Game like a fish to water.
Sandy Meisner also introduced us to the world of playing with our feelings, especially the embarrassing ones. I learned to use my suppressed anger to good effect. I could cry on a dime, explode, forgive, fall in love, fall out, all in a matter of moments. My weakness? I was “too general.” At the end of the second year, he cast me as Barbara Allen in Dark of the Moon. Rehearsals were fraught with anxiety. One day I entered stage right, singing, “A witch boy from the mountain came, a-pinin’ to be human, for he had seen the fairest gal, a gal named Barbara Allen.” Meisner yelled as only he could, “Why are you traipsing around like you’re Doris fucking Day?”
Sandy taught us to respond to our partner’s behavior. End of discussion. He forced us to hang in with the truth of the moment. No questions. He made observing and listening a prelude to expression. Point-blank. He was simple and direct. Without embellishing, he gave us the freedom to chart the complex terrain of human behavior within the safety of his guidance. It made playing with fire fun. I loved exploring the shared moment, as long as Sandy was watching. There was one cardinal rule: “Respond to your partner first, and think later.” If you broke that rule, he would start laying on the one-liners. “There’s no such thing as nothing.” “In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.” “May I say as the world’s oldest living teacher, ‘Fuck polite!’ ” More than anything, Sandy Meisner helped me learn to appreciate the darker side of human behavior.