Line Run

A memorization app for actors

Notes on learning lines

Why covering your lines with your hand keeps you reading

Kelly Wong · Updated

Getting off book usually happens in the living room. Script in one hand, the other hand covering the page. You read the line before yours, say your line, lift your hand to check it, and slide down to the next one.

That's how I learned lines for years. I've been acting for more than 25 years, and for a long stretch of that, it never came easily. As hard as I worked, getting off book took an enormous amount of effort. There was no single moment when I figured out why. It was just a constant frustration.

Looking back, the hand over the page was a big part of the problem.

What actually happens when you read your cues

Here's the most honest description I can give of what learning lines that way felt like.

When I'm reading, I'm not really engaged. My mind wanders. I'm thinking more about the sound of the words than about what I'm actually saying. My focus narrows to the line in front of me: not what came before it, not what comes after. It's rote. There isn't an ounce of acting in it. It's purely mechanical, and the words don't stick.

I'd read the other character's line, recite mine, and never really listen. It's hard to listen when the other person in the scene is just text you're reading to yourself.

Crossing my fingers

The clearest memory I have of the old way is understudying Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, in 2013.

The actor playing Nathan had to leave town because of a family emergency, and I had to go on at the third preview, before we'd even had an understudy rehearsal. The night before, I was pacing in a circle in a rehearsal hall, frantically memorizing. That was my whole process: cross my fingers and hope for the best, without really trusting that the words would be there.

Going on was a fever dream. I was flying by the seat of my pants, and it was terrifying, because I didn't feel prepared. I made it through. But I still remember drying mid-speech, and another actor having to save me.

In fairness to the hand

Covering your lines isn't a silly idea, and it's worth saying why it's everywhere.

It's a way of testing yourself, and memory research has good evidence that testing yourself beats reading something over and over. In a well-known 2006 study, the psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students either reread a short passage or try to recall it from memory. A week later, the students who had practised recalling it remembered more. The students who only reread it were the most confident they'd remember it, and they remembered the least.

So if the choice is rereading your script or covering your lines, cover your lines. The hand is doing something right: it makes you pull the words out of your own head.

But look at what you're practising. The cue arrives as text on a page, and your line goes back out as a recitation. Roediger and Karpicke connect their results to an idea called transfer-appropriate processing: memory tends to work better when what you practise while learning matches what you'll need to do later.

In a scene, nobody hands you a page. The cue arrives as another person's thought, out loud, and your line is your answer to it. Practise reading and reciting, and you get very good at reading and reciting.

That last part is my reading as an actor, not something their study tested. But it matches my experience exactly.

What actors are really doing when the lines stick

Helga and Tony Noice spent close to twenty years studying how actors learn lines. In a 2006 review of their work, they report that professional actors rarely learn their roles by rote. Actors work out what the character is after with every line. Then, in rehearsal, they try to keep their attention on the other actors, glancing down at the script only when they need to. Eventually, they find they're off book.

The part I find most interesting is what happened when they tried to teach this to students with no acting training.

First they taught the students to analyze a text the way actors do. That wasn't enough. Students who simply memorized however they liked did better (57% against 33%). Then the researchers tried the other half of what actors do. They had students go through the material imagining someone they knew who needed the information, and told them to concentrate on meaning the words rather than remembering them. The result flipped: 60% for meaning it, 50% for memorizing it. The Noices call this "active experiencing": using everything you've got to get the meaning across to another person, real or imagined.

Their article opens with Michael Caine, which says it better than I can:

You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor's face. Otherwise, for your next line, you're not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.

None of this research puts the hand over the page up against hearing your cues out loud, and I won't pretend the science settles it. But the actor it describes has their attention on the other person. The hand puts your attention on the page.

Thinking the thoughts

I say "thinking the thoughts" a lot, and it's hard to describe to someone who's never heard it.

It's about just responding to the other actor. You put your focus on them, you listen to what they're saying, and then you open your mouth and let your character's thoughts come out. The opposite is what I used to do: keep quiet, recite my line in my head while they talked, then deliver it. Disconnected like that.

Thinking the thoughts is a genuine connection, the way we do it in real life. I often call it connecting the dots, because I'm connecting the thoughts, and the arc of the scene, in a way that feels organic.

Almost ten years ago, I stopped learning lines the old way. I found an app called LineLearner: you record the scene, and it plays the other parts back with gaps for you to speak yours. I recorded every line myself. The first show I learned that way was an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows for a children's theatre company. It changed the game for me, and I've never gone back.

If I had to pick one role where I felt the difference, it would be Wyndham Brandon in Rope, at the Shaw Festival in 2019. I'm a long-time member of the Shaw ensemble, and until then I'd played a lot of supporting roles. Brandon was one of my first leads. There wasn't one lightning-bolt moment. I just remember feeling freer: able to speak the lines and listen at the same time. And I was definitely more confident with the words.

If you trained in Meisner

If you studied Meisner, you might be bristling right now. Meisner actors are often taught to learn their lines dry, "by rote," without inflection, so they don't memorize a line reading.

I agree with the reason. You shouldn't lock in a reading. But I don't think learning by listening fights that. If anything, it shakes up patterns. When you're really listening to your scene partner, the way you would in a Meisner exercise, you tend to respond differently every time. You unlock new things.

Reading is the one that works against it. You're forcing your brain to invent the intentions behind both sides of the dialogue, and then you're answering yourself.

Ways to hear the scene instead of reading it

You don't need any particular tool for this. You need the cue to reach you through your ears, and you need to answer it out loud.

A person. A friend, a partner, a fellow actor reading the other parts is still the best way there is. Ask them to give you the cue and let you find your answer.

Your own recording. Record the other characters' lines with gaps for yours, and answer out loud into the gaps. It's how I learned for nearly a decade. I'll go through how to do it properly in another post.

A line run with the company. It's listening in its purest form.

An app that listens. More on that below.

However you do it, say your lines out loud, and answer the thought, not the words on the page.

Is the hand ever still useful? Honestly, I can't think of much. I'm not a strong reader at the best of times, so maybe I started at a deficit. But for memory work, the only real reason I can see to choose it is when you need to be silent: backstage, or at the side of a rehearsal hall.

Why I built Line Run

LineLearner served me well for nearly a decade, and it's the reason Line Run exists. I wanted to take that same idea and build it for what our phones can do now. Line Run speaks the line before yours and listens while you answer, so you hear your cue and think your way into the reply. If you go blank, say "Line, please." I built it for myself first, then for my friends. One of its most devoted early testers is a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse, the home of the Meisner Technique, and says they're never going back to the old way.

Whatever you use, get the cue off the page and into your ears. Then answer it.

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