In the middle of my acting career, I took two years out and committed to learning a new technique (for me) named after its founder, Sanford Meisner. He, along with Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler, studied with the Russian genius Stanislavski, the father of modern acting, and returned to train 2 generations of American actors that changed the art form forever. During my 2-year stint, I was not allowed to pursue any work in the industry: no films, plays, commercials, voice overs, nothing. It was harsh but they demanded the commitment from you. Robert Duvall called his time learning the technique “worse than my time in the Korean War” because it is emotionally brutal. It is brutal in that it does not allow the bullshit tricks and shortcuts that actors fall into during their career, things that got them work in the past; things they’re known for in the industry; little bits of business they use over and over again: the eyebrow raise, the cocked smile, the walk or strut. It had one goal, emotional truth, played truthfully in the moment from your own imagination. You learn to listen actively, be in the moment and serve the script and your fellow players.

 

In the first year you never work with a script; for an actor, this is madness. It’s nothing but exercises designed to strip you of your ego, to strip you of your pride and strip you of any falsity you may harbor: all the enemy of truth. These are exercises based on repetition: 2 students facing each other, and one repeating what the other one says. Its madness and that was the point. The repetitions were designed to evoke a true response from you: not one you think might work, not one that seemed funny or dramatic (indeed, there was no “acting” going on at all here), but what was true based on your response to your partner. It was always 2 things: frustration and anger. One quarter of the class dropped out in the first year and in the commission of the exercises, you could tell who would be next: the ones who actively resisted, the ones who put up the walls, that clung tight to a reverie of themselves in the past, that tried to pull out their safety net of tricks. One by one, we all got called on it and it infuriated us, it made no sense why we were being castigated and harangued by our teacher. It was humiliating because each one of us was being stripped down to our emotional core in front of the entire class, we were being called on our bullshit, our insincerity, our falseness, our ruses that we all use in our everyday life to shield us from the harshness of it. There’s no place for that in the theatre, in the service of a character you may play. There is only truth. We would have rather shown up disrobed and naked (which happened a few times) than to be robbed of the persona mask we wore as protection and have the real us shown glaring in a spotlight. And yet that was what the work demanded. Our fragility was being exposed, each one different than the other. We, the class as a whole and guided by our teacher, came face to face with each other’s weaknesses, neuroses and secrets.

 

And here’s the secret you learn, the one you take with you your whole life after its revealed: that when you get stripped of the layers of sophistication that you adopt to hide your insecurities, you get angry, very, very angry, sometimes a rage. Its the first line of defense, the first impulse, its very primal, the engagement of fight/flight at a higher level. I’ve seen nuclear bursts of rage coming from the tiniest of people that made me frightened in that moment: it was real, it was enormous and it was locked inside them their entire lives before this exercise released it. Its why there is a mattress hanging on the wall of every Meisner studio in the country, because in the course of the exercises when that anger got so big and had to be exorcised, the teacher would yell, “go to the mattress” and you would leap at it flailing, crying, screaming, pounding and kicking until the anger was purged like a toxin from your blood. Then you would return to your partner and continue the exercise. And what happened in that moment, over and over, with each person in their own unique way, was why I was committed to being an actor, to pursuing art in this form for what I thought would be the rest of my life. You saw an almost transcendent human transformation happen in front of your eyes. With the anger purged, the emotional truth of that person was revealed, and I’m not kidding, as if it came down from heaven. You saw into that person’s soul, in the context of this repetitive dialogue, and you could not believe it transpired in front of you. It was scary, sexy and huge, it attracted us like flies to sugar in that we all wanted it, we all wanted what we saw to happen to us. So we came back day after day, week after week, filled with the homework assigned to us, ready to go to the mattress for our art. I did not go to war like Duvall did, but I have a sense of what he was talking about. At the end of 2 years, I was forever changed as an artist. And not surprisingly, its when I began to actually make a living at it.

 

I teach sales techniques to spirits industry salespeople and brand narratives to small brands. I’m bringing a lifetime of content mastery and methodologies I learned through 3 different businesses: acting, technology and liquor. But what I’m really doing is a modified Meisner technique. Sales is difficult, its one of the most demanding careers anyone can pursue, and as a result, its easy to fall into a host of tiny traps that prevent you from growth that end up as a barrier to sales. What I’m hoping to do is challenge each person to purge those habits from themselves, to re-educate themselves as to what the customer and the brand may need, and in turn, what they may need. With the narrative work, I’m hoping to strip away the ego from the entrepreneur to get to that transcendent light inside their brand, the unique glow that separates it from other similar ones on the shelf. They have to commit to some time with me to do it, but I think it pays off for them.

Let me know if you have any leads: robin@robinrobinsonllc.com