“Imagine you are preparing for the role of a lifetime. Based on the techniques we’ve studied, describe your process from beginning to end. Use what is helpful to you. Your personal acting method should be exactly as it sounds: personal.”

The above writing assignment was given to my advanced high school theatre students after introducing them to several members of the “Big League” of famous Western acting teachers: Constantin Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Michael Chekhov, and Stella Adler. As with anything else in a busy school year, we had barely enough time to scratch the surface of each teacher’s method. But these quick explorations helped students appreciate varied approaches and begin developing their own personal methods. And by looking at these teachers back to back, we identified ways in which they interconnected. In fact, while their approaches can seem disparate, these teachers were all one another’s students, teachers, or fellow members of The Group Theater from the early to mid 1900s. When one visually maps out how these key players related to one another, it starts to look something like a baseball diamond.

So who is the Big League? What are their core philosophies and exercises, and how did the students respond? Like a stack of baseball trading cards, the article below can only promise a snapshot of each player rather than a comprehensive exploration. But with so many great acting techniques available, the young actor would be well served in a base understanding of each, which would allow her to determine which she would like to further explore.

Check out the line up, which includes a brief description of each player and some of their well known exercises:

The Pitcher: Constantin Stanislavski

Stance: The father of modern Western acting, most young actors are trained in Stanislavski’s method whether they know it or not. Despite his centrality as pitcher of the team, he still learned a thing or two from his teammates. In fact, Stanislavski originally promoted the use of emotional memory, or using one’s own memories to connect with a character’s experience, but later moved away from this notion – largely due to his student Michael Chekhov’s influence.

Stats: This is the man responsible for the core of script analysis: objectives, superobjectives, and units. He also coined the term magic “if,” which encourages an actor to, rather than relying on her own memories, invest imaginatively in the lives of her character, exploring what she would do “if” she were in that situation herself.

Catcher: Lee Strasberg

Stance: Strasberg caught Stanislavski’s idea of emotional memory and ran with it (renaming it affective memory), long after Stanislavski dismissed it in his own practice. Though it began with Stanislavski, what we now call Method Acting was further honed by Strasberg, who believed in substitution, or an actor replacing a play or character’s circumstances with those from his own life.

Stats: Strasberg used deep relaxation and sensory exercises to achieve affective memory – such as the coffee cup exercise, which involves transitioning from drinking a real cup of coffee to pantomiming it as authentically as possible. Method Acting also aims to break down an actor’s inhibitions – actors might embody animals, sing, dance, or speak in gibberish.

Hitter: Sanford Meisner

Stance: “The pinch and the ouch,” Meisner said when describing how acting is reacting. A hitter is dependent on a pitch, and for Meisner an actor is dependent on his scene partner. Rooted in improvisation and impulse, Meisner encouraged actors to “live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.”

Stats: Meisner’s token repetition exercise may be familiar to many, but his technique extends well beyond that. Meisner used the repetition exercise to build up to improvised scenes, and ultimately to apply to a text.

Short Stop: Stella Adler

Stats: Adler’s approach to acting covered the most bases, focusing equally on body, voice, and mind. She, like Meisner and eventually Stanislavski, opposed affective memory, opting instead for exercises that activate the imagination.

Signature Moves: Adler’s imagination exercises begin with describing simple items like a toothbrush in full detail. Eventually, actors can allow their minds to “travel”; the color of a toothbrush might remind an actor of a necklace, given to her by Great Aunt Martha, who made the best snickerdoodle cookies, and so on, to allow the actor to fully explore the world and mind of a character.

Left Field: Michael Chekhov

Stats: Chekhov’s approach and exercises put him out in left field; in an era where most artists moved toward realism, Chekhov tended toward physical theatre, believing an expressive body influences an actor’s emotions and imagination (this also shifted Stanislavski’s own thinking – in his later years, he developed a “Method of Physical Acting” largely motivated by Chekhov’s work).

Signature Moves: Chekhov’s exercises are physical and improvisational; actors might pantomime moving through an imaginary palace with one room of water, one room of fire, and so on. Chekhov also coined the term psychological gesture, where an actor explores a physical gesture that embodies his characters’ psychological state, which can then be internalized to impact his presence, physicality, and voice.

So how did my high school students respond? Well, their responses were as varied and polarized as the players we studied, though it should be noted that Strasberg’s Method was the most conflicting, and Adler’s technique was the “fan favorite.” As seen from the variety of techniques, exercises, and the students’ often contradictory responses, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to acting, just like not every baseball player is meant to be a pitcher. Educators should strive to expose students to multiple MVPs, allowing each student to develop her own personal acting method, so that when the time comes, she’s ready to play ball.

Elizabeth Brendel Horn is an assistant professor in Theatre for Young Audiences at the University of Central Florida.