How Do Actors Memorize So Much?

[Ann_Hedonia]

My comments as a former theatre professional.

While the lighting and sound systems are highly automated, the sequences (cues) are still initiated manually, usually by pushing a big backlit button. I was working a show once where an actress skipped over about 5 pages of script. While operating the computerized lighting system was usually pretty routine this presented some challenges, especially as there was a background sunset lighting change that was happening gradually over the course of about a dozen cues. IIRC, I had to pull out the sunset zones and put them on a manual slider before I “synced up” the rest of the lighting to the onstage action.

I didn’t do much acting, but I always found memorizing dialogue to be surprisingly easy, you say “this” after the other guy says “that”, it just sort of flows. Monologues are more difficult, and I’ve known actresses that just spend hours repeating the monologue out loud, no inflection or “acting” just straight up high speed repetition of the words.

Although it may be common in school and community theatre, paraphrasing isn’t considered acceptable in professional theatre. In broadcast medium if the players are on union contract there is another downside to paraphrasing, your contract and pay rate can be based on you having less than, say 50, words of dialogue. And the writers work within that restriction. I have an actor friend that had to reshoot a scene because he added a filler word ( I think he said “well, I have to leave soon instead of “I have to leave soon”.) This put him over the maximum amount of words he was allowed to speak during the episode.

[DesertDog]

@Spoons

Bingo. I’ve done a lot of community theatre, and while we try to get things word-for-word, it doesn’t always work that way. The idea is to know where the scene is going, and what needs to be said to get it there. If you need to improv or ad-lib to get things where they need to be, you do. As we so often say, “The audience hasn’t read the script, so they’ll never notice.”

Sort of like live vs. recorded music. If you’re at, say a live performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a trumpet player lets out an odd little blat in the middle of a crescendo it’s lost in the Now, but if you’re listening to your favorite recording you’re going to know that blat is coming up any moment now… and there it is. Recorded pieces are done and redone until they are perfect or edited to string the perfect bits together

@gkster

Not just at the end of his career–supposedly when he played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1953) he had a hard time memorizing the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech and did at least part of it with cue cards.

Gee, he’s lucky. I remember having to memorize that in Freshman English and getting a C because I fluffed two words.

[Dale_Sams]

@Ann_Hedonia

My comments as a former theatre professional.

While the lighting and sound systems are highly automated, the sequences (cues) are still initiated manually, usually by pushing a big backlit button. I was working a show once where an actress skipped over about 5 pages of script. While operating the computerized lighting system was usually pretty routine this presented some challenges, especially as there was a background sunset lighting change that was happening gradually over the course of about a dozen cues. IIRC, I had to pull out the sunset zones and put them on a manual slider before I “synced up” the rest of the lighting to the onstage action.

I didn’t do much acting, but I always found memorizing dialogue to be surprisingly easy, you say “this” after the other guy says “that”, it just sort of flows. Monologues are more difficult, and I’ve known actresses that just spend hours repeating the monologue out loud, no inflection or “acting” just straight up high speed repetition of the words.

Although it may be common in school and community theatre, paraphrasing isn’t considered acceptable in professional theatre. In broadcast medium if the players are on union contract there is another downside to paraphrasing, your contract and pay rate can be based on you having less than, say 50, words of dialogue. And the writers work within that restriction. I have an actor friend that had to reshoot a scene because he added a filler word ( I think he said “well, I have to leave soon instead of “I have to leave soon”.) This put him over the maximum amount of words he was allowed to speak during the episode.

Heh. Nothing funnier then looking up and seeing everyone in the booth flipping pages frantically cause someone on stage jumped ahead and then flipping back when you go back to pick up what was lost.

[Maus_Magill]

@Dale_Sams

Heh. Nothing funnier then looking up and seeing everyone in the booth flipping pages frantically cause someone on stage jumped ahead and then flipping back when you go back to pick up what was lost.

Speaking as a former stage manager. This is not funny. At all.

[Dale_Sams]

@Maus_Magill

Speaking as a former stage manager. This is not funny. At all.

Sowwwwy. I’m not the one who skipped ahead!!

[Cheesesteak]

@commasense

Of course, on Broadway, and in other similarly professional shows, most performances do proceed like clockwork, so perhaps they have moved to near total show automation. Is Snowboarder Bo or some other theater professional around to enlighten us?

Mrs. Cheesesteak was a stage manager on Broadway not too long ago, and it isn’t automated. It’s computerized, and setup in sequence, but initiated by crew members. The ‘calling’ stage manager is the central person in this setup, ensuring that the cues go out on time to match the action on the stage. This is going to change if there’s applause for a line, or the conductor is faster/slower than usual, if an actor takes longer to walk across the stage, or anything else that can happen in live theater.

One interesting time in her career was when a Soap Opera actor was brought into the show. He had some trouble because he was used to learning a small set of different lines every day, on Broadway, you’re learning one large set of lines to use over and over. Different skill, but he eventually got the hang of it.

[Voyager]

BTW, filmed TV shows are shot out of order, so memorizing the script in order (or ones parts in it) would be useless.
Especially if they bring in last minute script changes.

[commasense]

@Spoons

Bingo. I’ve done a lot of community theatre, and while we try to get things word-for-word, it doesn’t always work that way. The idea is to know where the scene is going, and what needs to be said to get it there. If you need to improv or ad-lib to get things where they need to be, you do. As we so often say, “The audience hasn’t read the script, so they’ll never notice.”

When you do Shakespeare (and other classics) you can be pretty sure that there will be *some *people in the audience who will notice *every *departure from the text. IOW, audience members who have memorized the script!

[Chronos]

Quoth LittleOtt:

6 - There are apps that help. “Line learner” is a good one. Some of us love to drill lines. Actors that like to drill find each other and run lines whenever they can. Other actors can help an actor in stage who has, “dried up.” They can feed us a line or jump over our line to theirs in a clever way and keep the play moving.
…
11 - We do NOT PARAPHRASE. I was hired 7 different times to work with a playwright who had won 3 Pulitzer Prizes. I assure you he knew every comma he’d ever put on paper. An actor would change his words at his peril.

These two statements seem in conflict with each other. How can you feed a line or jump over a line without changing the wording?

And yeah, commasense, in a Shakespeare production, there are going to be a few in the audience who know your lines better than you do. But only a few. And heck, there was one time I was watching The Tempest and keeping an ear out for dropped lines, and heard the actor put in a few lines that were unfamiliar to me. Turns out I had dropped a few, too.

[kenobi_65]

@Chronos

These two statements seem in conflict with each other. How can you feed a line or jump over a line without changing the wording?

I suspect that it’s a matter of “don’t change the wording unless it’s an emergency, and then only to get back onto script.”

[Bryan_Ekers]

“I don’t read the script, the script reads me.”

-Kirk Lazarus

[iamthewalrus_3]

In addition to the fact that memorizing can be learned and practiced like everyone said, there’s also a selection process. If you can’t memorize lines, you don’t get very far as an actor.

It’s like asking how professional baseball players can throw the ball so quickly and accurately. Sure, some of it is practice. They practice a ton. And anyone can become better at throwing a baseball by practicing. But also, there’s some innate skill. If you’re not good at it, you don’t become a ballplayer.

[LittleOtt]

@Chronos

These two statements seem in conflict with each other. How can you feed a line or jump over a line without changing the wording?

And yeah, commasense, in a Shakespeare production, there are going to be a few in the audience who know your lines better than you do. But only a few. And heck, there was one time I was watching The Tempest and keeping an ear out for dropped lines, and heard the actor put in a few lines that were unfamiliar to me. Turns out I had dropped a few, too.

There is not a conflict in what I said. The goal of every job in the theater is “TO TELL THE STORY.” When actors are good, they LIVE the story. The actors job is to tell the story that the playwright wrote as seen by the director. Those two people tell us “The What” and “The How” of each production. We want to say the playwrights words, but we are human and when humans get together, things often go wrong. Lines got dropped. Words get changed. Actors “dry up.” Sometimes cues are missed.

Since the primary objective is “TO TELL THE STORY”

[LittleOtt]

Since the primary objective is “TO TELL THE STORY,” we default to that. We give a new cue. We feed a line. We reshape a moment so that the story can get back on track. Then we go home, look at our words again and try to be better tomorrow than we were today.

[BlankSlate]

A friend was on General Hospital for seven years back in the 70s. I remember him saying that the scripts were so convoluted and inane that he eventually just gave up memorizing his lines and began taping them up anywhere out of sight. On furniture, on the backs of other actors, on the floor etc…

You know who must be really good at memorization? David Costabile.

[D_Odds]

@Chronos

From my experience in plays (six of them, from various years of school, including two as the lead): Forget about memorizing words. Memorize lines. It doesn’t matter if you get the words wrong, as long as the lines are correct, and a line is nearly as easy to memorize as a word, anyway.

As an example, if I say “He’s the man that shot my pa!” instead of “That’s the man who shot my pa!”, I’ve got the words wrong, but the line is still right. It doesn’t matter.

And yes, sometimes actors get the lines wrong, too. If it’s in the middle of a speech, almost nobody will notice (I do notice, occasionally, when watching Shakespeare, because I’ve memorized a few Shakespeare speeches, but I have to assume it happens just as often with speeches I don’t know as with the ones I do, and I’ve never noticed anything for them). And if it’s in dialog, well, that’s why movies take multiple takes, and that’s when live stage actors get to find out how good their improv skills are.

@LittleOtt

Since the primary objective is “TO TELL THE STORY,” we default to that. We give a new cue. We feed a line. We reshape a moment so that the story can get back on track. Then we go home, look at our words again and try to be better tomorrow than we were today.

Many moons ago, I was part of a community theatre group, and I concur. Lines get flubbed, actors draw a blank and sometimes need cues, but one has to tell a story. Had one where I was lead, and my co-lead skipped a whole scene. I was scrambling and improvising the rest of the play to fill in the lost plot points. What was most surprising to my cast was how bad I had flubbed our final full dress rehearsal. Everyone was worried about me being the screw-up.

[dorvann]

@commasense

When you do Shakespeare (and other classics) you can be pretty sure that there will be *some *people in the audience who will notice *every *departure from the text. IOW, audience members who have memorized the script!

I know they aren’t Shakespeare but I remember when Monty Python performed certain sketches from their show live, audience members would often yell out lines to them on stage.

[Dale_Sams]

@LittleOtt

There is not a conflict in what I said. The goal of every job in the theater is “TO TELL THE STORY.” When actors are good,** they LIVE the story**. The actors job is to tell the story that the playwright wrote as seen by the director. Those two people tell us “The What” and “The How” of each production. We want to say the playwrights words, but we are human and when humans get together, things often go wrong. Lines got dropped. Words get changed. Actors “dry up.” Sometimes cues are missed.

Since the primary objective is “TO TELL THE STORY”

Unless you’re Mamet…who just wants the actors to ‘say the fucking lines and don’t try and live in the moment’

Fuck you Mamet!! Huh??? Fuck me??? NO fuck you you fucking fuck!

[choie]

Also fun (and not yet mentioned, I think) are those who memorize and perform classical songs in multiple languages (often in the same recital), not to mention entire operas. All of which are set to challenging music (the notes of which we also must memorize), in an art that requires simultaneous unique physical requirements to produce the correct sound… oh and acting them as well.

Back in high school we performed full operas in English. (This was back in the ‘80s; now they do the operas in the original language, because this rich-ass town has frickin’ supertitles. For their high school stage!!!) Of course the parts were incredibly difficult to learn, but you just… do. In my senior year I was lucky enough to have the lead role in an opera that was originally in English, which helped, because honestly some of the “official” translations in some of the scores (“Cosi fan tutte” for example) were… not great. But the American opera was intensely challenging, musically, and it took us all some time to manage to sing the right words with the right notes. The libretto was very natural, however, and that helped.

Later on in my very short music career, learning German, Spanish, Italian, French lieder/art songs/arias was extremely difficult. Part of the ritual that helped, I found, was first writing my own translations of each song (rather than whatever the official translator had come up with), so that the meaning of each word stopped feeling foreign and came alive. With singing there’s also muscle memory, to some extent. All the many muscles in your body that produce these sounds start to feel familiar.

Songs are unique, though. It’s astounding how ingrained music is. I can start singing pieces I haven’t looked at for decades word for word. And that American opera? Haven’t sung it for 35 years, but if I still had the vocal talent I could sing it all from memory. Plus everyone else’s lines, too.

Actually it’s funny this comes up, because to keep my mind occupied and active, I’ve lately taken up learning super-hard songs. “Guns and Ships” from Hamilton, or my new favorite, Amy’s crazed parts from “Getting Married Today” from *Company. That last one is brutal–even harder than Hamilton, because at least Hamilton’s music has some rhymes that you can hang on to. Sondheim just said “fuck it, this is stream of consciousness and there’s gonna be hundreds of words spitting out of your mouth, all on one breath at a breakneck pace.”

But by God, I’ve memorized it. Great mental training!

[commasense]

@commasense

A lot depends on the nature of the show, and the professionalism of the cast and crew, and in the case of shows with a recorded music track, yes, obviously, everything in that sequence happens exactly the same every time.

However – and it’s been a long time since I was involved in anything close to professional theater, so I could be wrong – I believe that, in most shows, most lighting and set cues are still manually initiated by technicians. They just don’t push a button that raises the curtain and starts an unbreakable chain of events that lasts for the whole act or the whole show. There may be sequences that run for many minutes without a break, but most of the time, if an actor’s timing gets seriously off, the lights and set changes aren’t just going to proceed as if nothing happened.

Of course, on Broadway, and in other similarly professional shows, most performances do proceed like clockwork, so perhaps they have moved to near total show automation. Is Snowboarder Bo or some other theater professional around to enlighten us?

@hajario

I’d be really surprised if this is true if for no other reason than the unions wouldn’t allow it.

I wasn’t suggesting that there were no running technicians any more, just that it might be possible to have sequenced and timed everything, or almost everything, to run without needing to use many manually initiated cues during the performance. But obviously there would have to be someone there on the lighting and sound boards to initiate the cues or take over manually if necessary. (As we see from these subsequent posts.)

@Ann_Hedonia

My comments as a former theatre professional.

While the lighting and sound systems are highly automated, the sequences (cues) are still initiated manually, usually by pushing a big backlit button. I was working a show once where an actress skipped over about 5 pages of script. While operating the computerized lighting system was usually pretty routine this presented some challenges, especially as there was a background sunset lighting change that was happening gradually over the course of about a dozen cues. IIRC, I had to pull out the sunset zones and put them on a manual slider before I “synced up” the rest of the lighting to the onstage action.

@Cheesesteak

Mrs. Cheesesteak was a stage manager on Broadway not too long ago, and it isn’t automated. It’s computerized, and setup in sequence, but initiated by crew members. The ‘calling’ stage manager is the central person in this setup, ensuring that the cues go out on time to match the action on the stage. This is going to change if there’s applause for a line, or the conductor is faster/slower than usual, if an actor takes longer to walk across the stage, or anything else that can happen in live theater.

I was reasonably sure that this was still how it was done; so it would appear from these two comments that total automation is not quite a thing yet. Even as we approach it, shows will probably always need the ability to hit pause or jump over cues.

I have always wished I could be in the booth or on headset while watching a complex stage production, like one of the permanent Cirque du Soleil shows in Las Vegas. It must be amazing.