Line Run

A memorization app for actors

Notes on learning lines

How long does it really take to learn lines? A working actor's honest answer

Kelly Wong · Updated

If you've just been handed a script and you want a number, I'm sorry. The honest answer is that it depends, and I don't mean that as an excuse.

I've been acting for more than 25 years, and memorizing is still a challenge for me. I can't predict how long a part will take. It depends on the script, how much there is to learn, and how easily the language comes to me. You can't say that so many pages equals so many hours. It just doesn't work that way.

What I can give you is some real numbers, and what I've learned from them.

Some real numbers

The app I use shows how many hours I've logged on each script, so I went back and looked. Here's a small sample. These are hours I logged by myself: in my bedroom, in my living room, in my basement. None of the time in the rehearsal hall is in here.

  • More than 127 hours: Amadeus. A very large role, with a huge volume of text.
  • 78 hours: my own role in The Tale of the Gifted Prince, a new musical.
  • 83 hours: the role I understudied in The Tale of the Gifted Prince.
  • Just over 9 hours: my role in One for the Pot, a farce, about 160 lines.
  • About 10 hours: the role I understudied in One for the Pot.
  • Just over 6 hours: an audition for South Pacific. Twenty-eight lines of dialogue and two songs.

They're all over the place. Some parts look straightforward on paper and take longer to run. Some look complicated and seem to come more easily. One for the Pot is the least representative number on the list, because so much of that work happened in the rehearsal hall, where nothing was counting. It's not a perfect science.

But look at the musical. I spent more time on the part I was understudying than on my own. There's a reason for that, and I'll get to it.

What makes a part slow

This is a broad generalization, but in my career I've done more classical text than contemporary, and I find classical text considerably harder to learn.

The thoughts in a play by George Bernard Shaw, for example, are long and continuous. They follow a line of argument that goes all the way from point A to point B, with a lot of stops along the way. That takes a different approach from a contemporary script, which is usually closer to the way we speak and think now. The thoughts are shorter, and the lines come more easily, I think simply because we still talk that way. Nobody talks like Shaw or Wilde anymore.

Songs, for me, are easier than text. There's something about the musicality, having to attach a melody to a lyric, that helps the words go in. That's not to say it's never a struggle. If a lyric doesn't sit easily, it can still be hard to learn. But on the whole, I find songs a little easier than speeches.

The research on this is honestly mixed. In one study, adults learning short phrases in Hungarian, a language they didn't know, were better at recalling and saying them after learning them by singing than after learning them by speaking. In another, university students learning an unfamiliar song recalled fewer words when they sang than when they spoke. Those researchers concluded that the words and the melody of a song are stored separately in memory, which makes singing a kind of double task, at least in the early stages of learning. So I can only tell you what works for me.

Even so, it's hard to say why some lines go in easily and others don't.

Too much time can be its own problem

That audition on the list, 28 lines and two songs? I spent more than six hours on it. That wasn't because it was hard. It was because I had too much time.

Theatre auditions usually give you at least a week, sometimes more. And I find that too much time can hurt as much as too little. You start to obsess over it. You overwork it. You put so much pressure on yourself, because you've had all that time to prepare, that your own expectations go up, and you assume the people auditioning you expect more too.

Too little time isn't great either. I wrote about the other extreme in learning sides overnight for a self-tape.

How a rehearsal period actually works

For the shows I do, a rehearsal period is usually about a hundred hours, give or take, depending on how much money and how many resources the company has. On a standard six-day week with Mondays off, that's about two and a half weeks before tech.

These days, I find there's less of a culture of directors announcing an off-book date. The directors I've worked with trust that we're professionals and that we'll do our jobs. Everyone's process is different, so nobody is policing when you're off book. We're all working toward it as early as we can.

My goal is to walk into the room on day one already off book. That way I'm ready to play, to listen, and to respond to the actors in the room. If I'm worried about whether the lines are coming out, I'm not really acting at all. The day becomes an exercise in line recall instead of an exercise in listening and acting.

The reality is that it isn't always possible. Life is busy, and sometimes the volume of text is too much to have down before the first day.

Why understudies front-load

That's why my understudy hours were higher than my own.

When you're playing the part, you learn a lot of it through rehearsal. As an understudy, you don't have that luxury. You have to front-load the work, so you're ready if and when you need to step in.

And understudies go on, often. The old mentality was that the show must go on, whatever it took: you showed up sick with a horrible cough and a runny nose, threw up in a bucket offstage, went on and did the scene, and came off and threw up again. That's rightly shifting to something more sustainable. Every theatre I've worked at since COVID has had the same attitude: if you're sick, stay home. We love you, but we don't want the whole cast to catch it and have to cancel shows. So I think understudies need to be even more solid now than they used to be.

In The Tale of the Gifted Prince, the actor playing my understudy role got sick, and I went on four times. I felt very prepared and very confident, because of the work I'd done on my own in the apartment I was staying in during the run. And I had a ton of fun.

What changed when I stopped reading my cues

For years I learned lines with my hand over the page. Then I switched to learning by listening, which I wrote about in why covering your lines keeps you reading. Did it make me faster?

Honestly, I can't say. It probably did, but I genuinely don't know.

What I do know is what changed. I became confident that the lines would be there in rehearsal. I'd built up the muscle memory of hearing the words with my ears and responding to them, instead of hearing a voice I'd made up in my head while reading. So when I got into rehearsal and heard the other actor, my ears were already tuned to it. It wasn't the first time I was listening.

I could also connect the dots at home. I could figure out the subtext, and my journey through the scene, including what my character wasn't saying. I think what a character doesn't say can be as important as what they do say, or more: why they hold something back at a certain moment, or what thought prompts them to say the next line. Those were discoveries I used to make only in the rehearsal room. Once I changed the way I memorized, I could make them at home.

How do you know you know it?

There's no light bulb moment. You just get more and more comfortable.

Early on, you call for line all the time, and the stage manager or ASM is on book and ready with your cue. As rehearsals go on, you call for line less and less. Then at some point, usually without even noticing, you stop looking at the page. It might be in your back pocket, but you don't need it in your hand anymore.

And before you know it, you're off book. The words aren't you, the actor, saying lines anymore. They're the character's words, driven by the given circumstances of the play.

The part nobody talks about

Actors complain about memorizing, and we all acknowledge it's hard. But we rarely talk about how we actually do it. We talk about finding the character's intentions, about dialects and accents, about being present with a scene partner, about projecting to the back of the house. I don't think I'd ever really had a conversation about how I get the words into my head.

Building Line Run changed that for me. It's made me look hard at my own process, and it's been fascinating to hear how other actors learn. All the hours above were logged in it. It speaks the line before yours and listens for your answer, so the time you spend alone is spent hearing the scene instead of reading it. The free version holds one script of up to three scenes, and Pro takes as many scripts and scenes as you need.

So if you're staring at a new script and wondering how long it'll take, the only honest answer is that it depends. Start early, hear the scene, and don't measure yourself against anyone else's hours. Everyone's process is different.

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