Tag: Meisner

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Meisner for the Immersive Audience

Last week, I examined the Meisner technique for the immersive actor. I am particularly excited by the genre’s promise of a scene partner who has no script. Who is, by the way, you. You’re my scene partner.

In immersive theatre, the audience becomes actors. Think of them that way. When sold out, The Man From Beyond has a cast of 10. It’s precisely this radical reconception of the audience that energizes immersive theatre. Hell, I love it so much, I extended Meisner language to include the audience and enshrined it in the Strange Bird mission statement:

We’re in this together.

But if audiences are truly actors, then they are now facing the same pitfalls all actors do. The audience doesn’t need to worry about not listening—they are hearing the script for the first time—but they do need to overcome the bigger demon: feeling self-conscious.

Most folks associate interactive theatre with self-consciousness, and with good reason. Performances that pull an audience member on stage typically thrive off that person feeling awkward. The performer points up the audience member’s behavior, and the audience subsequently laughs at that person’s expense. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the OPPOSITE of immersive theatre. Let’s run as far away from that kind of “interaction” as possible.

Lest we forget, there’s this thing called stage fright. We must take this phobia seriously.

Training audiences to be in-the-moment like actors are trained isn’t possible, but what we can do is design environments that engender real interaction. Armed with an understanding of the Meisner technique, designers can help slay self-consciousness for audience-actors, so they, too, can live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.

Here are my Meisner-inspired design principles for killing self-consciousness and eliciting truthful behaviors from your audience…

  • Make your world rich
  • Start your world as soon as possible
  • Limit audience watching audience
  • Stakes
  • Dialogue that matters
  • Really doing stuff
  • The element of surprise
Make your world rich

Children have no trouble with imaginative play. The entire world still feels novel to them, so behind a bush is as rich a secret hangout as the fanciest speakeasy with trick-wall entrance. But adults must preserve their dignity and need much more help to get them to a point of make-believe. And make no mistake, make-believe is our ultimate goal.

The less your audience has to imagine, the easier it is for them to believe. Immersive actors can help tremendously—they belong to the world, so interacting with them requires adopting their world—but production design also plays a major part. The more you can WOW your audience with a sense that they have been transported, the more they actually have been transported and can act in that world with ease. If you do your job right, they won’t even realize they’re making believe.

Do you have to have a big-budget build-out? No, of course not. While I don’t know of any immersive productions that have done so, you can ask your participants to use their imaginations like black box productions do, but you risk losing a few people in that leap. It’s just easier for me to behave like I’m in a hospital if it looks like a hospital.

Start your world as soon as possible

No matter what you do, there will always be an awkward transition from real world to imaginary world. The earlier your participants can pass through that transition, the easier it will be for them to believe.

I think escape rooms in particular suffer from starting their worlds way too late. You spend a good 15-20 minutes checking in, signing waivers, chatting up the gamemaster, hearing the rules of the game, getting the lock tutorial (oh lord), and then, THEN you cross the threshold to your exciting Egyptian Tomb adventure. No one really expects me to start acting like a cursed archaeologist now, do they? After treating it as a game for so long, I’d feel silly, and making that transition to play-acting would make me feel self-conscious. So I just don’t do it.

(Note that this is where actors inside the game can really help. Escape rooms with actors are the only times I’ve felt motivated to play along. Peer pressure can move mountains!)

I like aggressive worlds, worlds that bleed into the street if possible, with hosts who contribute to the make-believe instead of tearing it down. Think of the pre-show experience in Sleep No More, Then She Fell—even Accomplice. You may be waiting to enter the main attraction, but as for the world, you’re already there. You’re already playing.

”How would you like to die?” he asked me. ”In media res,” I said. (The Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, NYC)
Limit audience watching audience

There’s nothing worse than feeling the eyes of strangers—or worse, your friends—on you during imaginative play. You feel a little judged, and just like that, you’re hyper-aware of yourself, and all doors to transformation slam shut.

When I speak of The Man From Beyond to people who haven’t played yet, I often have to assuage fears of embarrassment. They don’t want to be actors in the traditional sense: they don’t want to be watched. So we should take great care that they are watched as little as possible. Disperse the audience. I’ll examine in more detail later how audience distribution affects the experience, but for now, I’ll just say that it matters a great deal.

There’s a reason 1-on-1’s feel special—with no one else watching, you’re more open to connect with the performer. You can even keep the content a secret to your grave. Case in point, I am still deliciously creeped out by the fact that a Then She Fell interaction I had (solo with two cast members) was in fact observed by another audience member via a secret hiding place (I found this out later from a friend—such a great psychological twist!). Knowing I was watched at the time would have changed everything.

The sandbox-style also does a good job of freeing folks from the gaze of others; if you don’t like the audience energy where you are, you can leave. Escape rooms and dark rides, however, involve audience groups with no hope of relief. Someone is almost always watching your interactions, and if that someone’s not playing along, your entire show is screwed. Third Rail Project shows always make me feel really uncomfortable with whatever it is I’m wearing—and that has nothing to do with my fashion choices.

Stakes

Not just your characters: the audience too needs stakes in the story they inhabit. Following the Meisner Independent Activity guidelines for drama, actors should be doing something “important, on a deadline, and difficult to do.” Importance is paramount here. If the audience thinks what’s happening around them matters, they’ll enter a true state of flow. Their awareness of themselves will slip away, as they laser-focus in pursuit of their goal. You’ll get some wonderful make-believe behaviors that way. But if the story lacks importance, you’ll wind up with a bunch of disengaged people reaching for their phones.

But that doesn’t mean the world should always be ending. Higher stakes do not translate to better results, as you can easily break the ceiling of believability. See: most escape rooms.

Threatening the explosion of the earth or even just my death if I fail is frankly beyond my imaginative pale (we all know the game master will just enter to console us), so you might as well have just skipped the stakes part entirely. Sometimes the best stakes aren’t the highest or even the most personal ones. We have stakes in other people all the time, so perhaps this is where your characters can step up.

Dialogue that matters

Meisner wants us to really listen. Your audience should be all ears in an immersive, and listening—or navigating to the right place to listen—should engross them. The script should reward those who listen, with every word providing insight into a part of the story. Avoid dialogue that is obtuse, or your audience will quickly learn that their efforts are for naught.

really Doing stuff

To reach a proper flow-state, where the knowledge of the self disappears, you need to be doing something. Like actors on stage, tasks and challenges—from holding up a mirror to deciphering the riddle inside a poem—offer a great path for audiences to forget themselves and engage in the story world.

Escape rooms are masterpieces of doing stuff, and fans get addicted to that sweet puzzle-flow-state. Third Rail Projects adores simple tasks as entry points to relationships, and even Sleep No More, often maligned for not giving the audience activity, packs a wallop of stuff happening in their one-on-ones to the point that you don’t have time to catch your breath.

So give your audience something to do other than “watch.” All the better if it’s important, on a deadline, and hard to do.

the element of surprise

Actors often perform from their heads instead of their guts; knowing what’s going to happen, they plot out their reactions ahead of time. The result is it feels fake—and we remain unmoved. Since rehearsal is unavoidable, Meisner offers tricks for actors to rely more on their gut, but immersive audiences don’t rehearse, and they have no lines to learn. If they go into the experience without any foreknowledge of the script, they are very likely to respond from their gut. And that’s a very good thing.

I don’t recommend reading too much about an immersive theatre production you plan to see. Read just enough for you to decide to buy a ticket, and then STOP. Don’t read the reviews, blogs, or facebook comments, or you could walk into a show like a cold, premeditated killer, acting cerebrally: “What’s a clever thing I could do or say in that situation to surprise them?” When the mind holds the reigns, we stay firmly on the ground. We can’t be transported.

Gut-response requires the element of surprise.

Creators get this. Immersive theatre productions typically say as little as possible about a show. The mystery entices you, and you go maybe not even knowing the themes of the piece until two-thirds of the way through, when it hits you like a hammer. That’s special indeed.

But creators can take surprise too far. Immersive theatre is uniquely visceral—you are there, participating in the world, and leave with a real memory—so we should appropriately warn audiences of potentially traumatic content within. We need to be responsible, to care for our audience, rather than to ambush them. After all…

Given what they’re doing, they’re actually very responsible about it.

But when are warnings needed? It’s hard for me to draw the line. I think The Man From Beyond capitalizes a great deal on thematic surprise, and taking away that surprise at the start would damage its power. Surprise has a huge payoff, but if it comes at too high a cost (trauma to a reasonable percentage of your guests—we’re not talking about that one guy who has a fear of taxidermied turkeys), the art is not worth the cost. We need to be responsible, first and foremost, and earn the trust of our audiences. The genre won’t get very far if our chief weapon is surprise.

Okay, so apparently hurricane stay-cations inspire a lot of meme generation in me. Apologies for that. (Luckily, Strange Bird is coming out just fine through Harvey.)

To wrap up…you know you’ve been self-conscious in an immersive before. It happens—and it’s awful. Think about why you got kicked out or perhaps why you never started the make-believe in the first place. Maybe I mentioned a reason above. If designers are in turn conscious of the scenarios that create it, they can reduce its likelihood and boost the chances of audiences acting truthfully and emerging transformed. Just as Meisner would have wanted it.

But if you had, you would.
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Meisner for the Immersive Actor

Back in my graduate school days, when I had ivory-tower wishes and PhD dreams, an advisor told me to think of theory as a toolkit. You go out in the field, you encounter something puzzling, and you then select the theory that can best chisel away at the problem. A nice, utilitarian approach—and I’m definitely a utilitarian.

When it comes to immersive acting, the Meisner technique is the freaking Sonic Screwdriver in my toolkit. I would be at cosmic sea without it, and with it, well, I’m pretty much The Doctor.

Audience control is cool. (Matt Smith in BBC’s Dr. Who)

Disclaimer: I am no Meisner expert. I am a beginner at best, imposter at worst. I’ve taken some 28 class periods, hardly enough to qualify as an authority who knows what I’m talking about. But whatever. It still changed everything for me, so I’ll write about it, and you can decide.

Meisner 101

Meisner wanted what we all want: recognizable human behavior on stage. But that ain’t easy.

The Meisner technique is an inside-out approach: by fixing your inner workings, specifically where you focus your attention when acting, your outer body will follow the lead and behave naturally.

Sanford Meisner told his students, “The text is your greatest enemy.” Why? Because you know what’s going to happen. You’ve memorized it. Your scene partner’s lines come as no surprise to your ears. You tune him out. And the director says you need to move here on this line every time. You anticipate it. How on earth are you supposed to retain a shred of humanity when, after a few rehearsals, you are more like an automaton?

Clinging to spontaneity is the key. We live our lives improvisationally—that’s what it is to be human. We figure it out as we go, we speak at the edge of our thoughts, and we’re rarely self-conscious. Meisner must have a huge thing for improv theatre (it’s electric, after all). His technique is all about bottling that quintessentially human electricity and unleashing it on scripted performance.

The actor has two fundamental problems…

PROBLEM #1: You aren’t listening

SOLUTION: Pay attention to your scene partner with your ears and eyes.

Life hack: we don’t just listen with our ears. We also listen with our eyes. We are extremely fluent in reading human behavior without really being consciously aware of it. Think of how many times you’ve had a gut instinct against someone. Probably nothing in the words spoken tipped you off, but something in the behavior didn’t sit right with you. Think also of how many times you’ve noticed a friend was feeling low before he even spoke. There’s a lot that we’re saying to each other that goes unsaid, but you can hear it loud and clear when you listen with your eyes.

The Meisner repetition exercise forces what is usually subtext into text. It trains you to name the behaviors you see in your scene partner and respond to those behaviors with your gut.

PROBLEM #2: you’re self-conscious

SOLUTION: Stop feeling. Start doing. Focus either on the person you’re talking to or the task you are doing (and really do it), but never focus on yourself.

Once I heard this precept, I realized that my memories of acting were of this sort of “outside viewer” viewing myself (a lot of women project a viewer of themselves in their everyday lives, by the way, but that’s a rant for a different sort of blog). I acted disembodied, focusing on how the audience must see me and making sure it all looked correct. I was horrified when I realized I never saw my Lysander—a damn fine actor. My memory should have been a memory of him. I had missed the opportunity to SEE him, truly to see him, and to work with him. Poor bloke didn’t have a scene partner at all.

When you’re really doing something, from sewing a dress to seeing your partner, you have no spare bandwidth to spend on yourself. You disappear. That’s good. That’s how humans live: un-self-consciously. You never hear someone in the real world complain that he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

And you’re not allowed to plot your emotions, nor to find your own feelings fascinating when they burst forth, like sparkling diamonds you never knew your soul could conjure. Your attention must stay outside yourself if you want to stay honest. You need to act from your gut, not your head.

Instead of “being mad” on this line, try “convincing” the person instead. Use tactics, not feelings—verbs, not adjectives—to figure out your character, because that’s how human beings live.

The repetition exercise

In his beginner’s exercise (and his most famous), Meisner slays both of these actor demons. How it works…

  • Stand opposite a partner. You play no characters, and you have no scene. Your only goal is to be truthful.
  • You state an observation about your partner, anything from “you’re wearing a blue shirt” to “You’re twitching your fingers” to “You look angry.” Your partner then repeats exactly what you said, changing the pronoun appropriately. You repeat this phrase some 4+ times until one of you has the impulse to change it.
  • Sometimes the repetition will pile-up, and you’ll start forming opinions about your partner, based on their behavior. Listen to your gut—not your head. “I don’t trust you.”
  • Sometimes these opinions will give you a gut instinct to do something. See how she responds. “I want to take a step forward.”
  • Don’t try to control what happens or hold on to what was true a minute ago. Sometimes your partner’s behavior will change, and someone you just hated, you’ll now want to comfort. (A particularly useful point in immersive theatre, as that audience member who was a smartass five minutes ago may have opened up now).

Here is the best video of repetition that I can find. I’m not super happy with it, but it’ll give you a basic idea of the flow.

It’s weird, but it works. It trains your ability to observe your partner’s behavior (you have to give the behaviors words, after all) and to react truthfully to that behavior. It moves you from acting from your head to acting from your gut. You don’t think. In the end, it helps you create truthful subtext every moment on stage.

meisner inside an immersive

Now imagine if you will, please, an imaginary landscape where one half of this partnership has no idea what’s going on, has to listen to you closely because they’re hungry to understand better, and is so deeply invested in what’s happening that they betray the most honest human behavior you’ve ever seen.

I don’t want to get too metaphysically sentimental, but dear audience, sometimes you are too bright and beautiful to look at.

That’s immersive theatre. That’s a Meisner actor’s dream. Even when a show has strict scripted rails, there is almost infinite room for spontaneity when your scene partner is literally improvising. You don’t know what they are about to do, and neither do they know what you’re about to do. It’s the perfect imaginary-circumstances storm.

It would be so easy for immersive audiences to overpower an actor untrained in Meisner. They will quickly detect an automaton actor (the kind I used to be) and will promptly check-out of the show, or worse, screw around with the actors as much as possible like they’re Buckingham Palace Guards. Either way, that’s a disastrous experience for everyone. You cannot get by with ignoring your scene partner in this kind of work.

But with Meisner training, you already know to keep your knees bent in performance. Every show should be spontaneous, and immersives just more so. You’re already trained to listen to whatever your partner says, and respond to them honestly, building a relationship on very little every time. And remember how good you are at reading behaviors? That skill becomes especially important in immersives when there’s little to no opportunity for the audience to speak. You can tell who trusts you, who is bored with you, and who is falling in love with you all without them uttering a single word.

Reading behaviors fast is essential to proper one-on-one selection. Immersive actors often have a chance to vet their audience before choosing someone for a more intimate, closed-door encounter. This vetting is often based on behavior alone, and sometimes they don’t have more than a minute to gather the information they need. Only the actor with the well-trained gut-instinct will flourish.

Our gut also helps us know where the boundaries are for our participants, if we have a scene that can push the envelope for some people. I know there are one-on-ones in Sleep No More where characters can opt to mouth-kiss their participant (which is to say NOTHING about Blackout), and they make that choice based on the participant’s behavior in the moment and the gut instincts they have in response. If your actor makes the wrong gut call…you could get sued.

Seriously, though, does anyone know the litigation history of immersive theatre? PM me, please!

No joke, though. We’re playing with fire here, so we need professionally trained fire-eaters. Which I think in this case means Meisner actors.

Of course Meisner does not hold exclusive claim as the only theory useful in immersives. I am certain outside-in approaches like Viewpoints are also brilliant for immersive performance, especially in shows that emphasize movement over speech. Actors should populate our toolkit as much as possible. But I clearly have a favorite.

Meisner for Life!

Not only as an actor, but as a person, the Meisner technique has leveled me up. Consciously listening with your eyes and reading other people’s behaviors will get you in proper tune with a person much faster. You can care for friends better, identify the cause of conflicts faster (i.e. “You raised your voice, and now I’m tense!”), and avoid true creeps with greater alacrity. A single strong gut is worth a hundred rational brains.

And if you’re ever feeling self-conscious, get off Facebook and start doing something. Really doing something.

Where to start

So you don’t have the time/money/insanity to move to New York City for a two-year intensive in Meisner technique? Neither do I. But you can still make a radical change in your acting style with even a small taste. Here’s some reading to get you jump-started in the Meisner direction…

William Esper and Damon DiMarco, The Actor’s Art and Craft: William Esper Teaches the Meisner Technique (2008)
This book simulates an Esper class, and I liked it better than the official Meisner book for its clarity throughout.

Sanford Meisner and Dennis Longwell, On Acting (1987)
The official book, also simulates what a Meisner class is like.

And of course if you can find someone not fraudulent, someone that you can trust to teach you Meisner, go take some classes the next time you hit a performance lull. If you’re in Houston, I highly recommend taking classes with Kim Tobin.

Tune in next time for “Meisner and the Immersive Audience,” a look at how designers can use Meisner principles to craft powerful audience experiences.