Three young actors are going through improvisation exercises devised by the influential American acting coach Sanford Meisner. Drawing on an excerpt from Clifford Odets 1937 play Golden Boy, the are producing “an accumulation of incremental non-responses or an absolutely, repetitively constructed and incrementally evacuated present for the sake of portraying an emotional truth, or Truth itself” (Ian White).

Meisner, whose formative years in the Group Theatre coincided with the Great Depression, defined acting as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances." His method left a distinct mark on American cinema (students included Sydney Pollack, Steve Mc Queen, Michele Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock and Naomi Watts) and remains a testimony to the dogma of naturalism and the seduction of ‘authentic’ emotional performance.

Instructor: Jeff Peterson
Actors: Jenna Berk, Samantha Dakin, Michael Goldsmith
Script excerpt from Golden Boy (1937) by Clifford Odets