Sanford Meisner - The Group Theater

The Group Theater

Despite his parents' misgivings, Meisner continued to pursue a career in acting, receiving a scholarship to study at the Theatre Guild of Acting. Here he encountered once again Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. Strasberg was to become another of the century’s most influential acting theorists and the father of Method acting, an acting technique derived, like Meisner's own, from the 'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski. The three became friends. In 1931, Clurman, Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford (another Theatre Guild member) selected 28 actors (one of whom was Meisner) to form the Group Theatre. This company exerted an influence on the entire art of acting in the United States. Meisner summered with the Group Theater at their rehearsal headquarters at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut. Meisner, along with a number of other actors in the company, eventually resisted Strasberg's preoccupation with Affective memory exercises. In 1934, fellow company member Stella Adler returned from private study with Stanislavski in Paris and announced that Stanislavski had come to believe that, as part of a rehearsal process, delving into one's past memories as a source of emotion was only a last resort and that the actor should seek rather to develop the character's thoughts and feelings through physical action, a concentrated use of the imagination, and a belief in the "given circumstances" of the text. As a result, Meisner began to focus on a new approach to the art of acting.

When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1940, Meisner continued as head of the acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, at which he had taught since 1935. In teaching he found a level of fulfillment similar to that which he had found in playing the piano as a child. At the Playhouse he developed his own form of Method acting that was based on Stanislavski's 'system,' Meisner's training with Lee Strasberg, and on Stella Adler's revelations about the uses of the imagination. Today that approach is called the Meisner technique.

The Actors Studio was founded in 1947 by two ex-Group Theatre actors – the then successful directors, Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. Meisner was one of the first teachers to teach at the studio. Ironically, at first Strasberg was not asked, but by 1951 he had become its artistic director. Many students of the Actors Studio became well known in the film industry. Strasberg's later insistence that he had trained them distressed Meisner enormously, creating an animosity with his ex-mentor that continued until Strasberg's death.