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The Sanford Meisner Approach Vol 3: The Preface

"One of the biggest thrills and stimulants for me as an actor has been the opportunity to collaborate with playwrights. Amazingly, this process can occur whether the writer is alive or dead, present or absent. I have been fortunate enough to have brought my craft to the genius of playwrights from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams - from Henrik Ibsen to David Mamet - from August Stringberg to Athol Fugard.

From the beginning of my career I have been in awe of playwrights who can mine their life experiences and then through whatever magical or alchemical process, refine that rough ore into a play. I learned early that such a transformation is not simply an intellectual process. Experience must be distilled and then subjected to the intense heat generated by the writer's passion to fashion a world. A world which serves as a metaphor for his personal experience.

I have come to believe that if we as actors want to enter and participate and contribute to that world, we must dare to feed the fire of the author's vision with our most personal inner heat. If that requires courage, trust, even recklessness, so be it. In Tackling the Text, Larry Silverberg opens the door to such a process and invites us to step inside.

I recently had the good fortune to direct Larry Silverberg, Laurason Driscoll and Shayn Bjornholm in the Belltown Theatre Center's production of American Buffalo, written by a former Sanford Meisner student, David Mamet. As you probably know, the play is set in a junk shop, Don's Resale. The first day of rehearsal we sat around the usual bare table on the usual bare stage and did our first reading of the text. In my experience, the first reading can be a disastrous (at best, wasteful) exercise in showing-off our acting "brilliance" when it is our turn to speak and evaluating the other actor's lack of same when they spoke. Or it can be the beginning of an exploration and understanding of our colleagues in relation to the text. We chose to explore. Day after day, we searched for ways to surrender to the immediacy of each others presence and to the incredible richness and density of Mr. Mamet's verbalized journey. Our bare stage wasn't bare for long. Objects of all sizes and sometimes inscrutable purpose were brought like offerings by actors, stage management and technical staff. Then tables had to be found to display these "treasures." And soon, the actor's were creating a world for themselves with the swiftly accumulating "stuff." One day Larry brought in a deck of cards and taught himself how to play solitaire with the fierceness and desperation of a gambler on a never ending losing streak. Laurason discovered an old broom and a handleless dustpan. In no time he was finding Don's satisfaction in maintaining some sense of order and control over the developing sense of "place." I suppose it was inevitable that Larry, as Teach, trying to ingratiate himself with Donny, would snatch the dust pan and stoop to receive the dusty deposits of Donny's broom. Suddenly activities were not illustrations or gestures - but actions. The actors were not merely coming from offstage to onstage, but were entering work. A refuge from the rain, the dark, the uncaring, the violent. A world that could evoke in a quick succession a sense of belonging, of isolation, of fantasy, or abject failure. We spent a lot of time working on emotional preparation. Through improvisation, through trial and error we worked to be ever more specific about the life of each character prior to the encounter of each scene. I found myself working more and more one-on-one with the actors. I would give them their notes and discuss their work problems privately. This is not my usual way of working, but I found it helped create surprises and spontaneity during rehearsals. It worked as a challenge, even a kind of game for the actors to recognize and accept the new things their partners would try out. A strong sense of "play" became an organic part of our work. To quote Sanford Meisner, "Now, play, play! It's a play."

I encourage you to read, explore and enjoy Tackling the Text. Before going to Seattle to direct American Buffalo, I read Larry's first two Meisner textbooks. They made me feel I knew him and that we would become friends. When Larry writes, it is as if he is talking directly to you. You feel in personal touch with his enthusiasm, his positiveness, his passion and his insight. Take it from me, it's a good feeling.

Sanford Meisner once said, "It takes years to be an actor." Where ever you are on that journey, I'm sure this book will be a helpful companion for you. In Tennessee Williams' Camino Real, the character of Byron announces before he heads alone across a seemingly endless desert, "Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else." Bon voyage."

-- April Shawhan