Meisner and Madonna

I feel like I've grown within the past couple of weeks with the Meisner work, mainly because I've been able to be myself. I really enjoyed learning about letting go and letting the natural emotion rise to the surface and just be myself. I felt that as we progressed, I gradually broke out of my shell, and I saw that everyone else did as well, and it was nice to finally see the true, raw emotion and personality come out of everyone.

In regards to the scene work, I'm very interested in how we will take what we've learned of the Meisner technique and apply it to characters. Yes as we've developed our repetition exercise, it seemed to gradually become a natural scene and the repetition was a buffer, letting life portray itself genuinely in the studio. But I'm curious as to how to prepare for a character with this work. Yes, there is the mental preparation, but I feel like there may be something more. I kind of enjoy how we need to memorize, not with feeling, but just the basic gist of the words for our scenes. After reading my play (Stop Kiss by Diana Son), I realized though that there may be difficulties among actors with mental preparation because of the structure of the plot. I guess I'll learn eventually how to fully adapt and utilize the Meisner work for works like this, as well as others in mildly abstract styles [i.e. how would one prepare mentally for something as abstract as The Bald Soprano?]

Overall, I find Meisner very much like Madonna: it's all about being true to yourself and not inhibiting your natural being. In the end, it's important to express yourself...