Foregone Television Viewing
February 21, 2014
Schizophrenic Time in The Rockies
March 21, 2014
I’m totally slammed right now with all sorts of activities and still trying to figure out ways to survive and stay healthy on a diet of 5-6 hours of sleep/night. I’ve adapted to the standard 8 so that doesn’t happen. Instead I’ve reduced the blog essay. The size of this one is less than 600 words. Enjoy!!
Word Count: 598
Innovative Ways to
Fool the General Public
Recently I was asked to take the role of a bit player in a theatrical production being staged in my hometown. Besides the fact that it’s a lot of fun participating in endeavors such as this (acting is a golden opportunity to relive parts of one’s youth), I wanted to see just how much my abilities at memorizing dialogue have changed. I’ve done a bit of acting in the past and curiosity had gotten the better of me. With age had learning lines gotten easier, or as a buddy of mine once put it, “A bust-ass situation gotten even tougher?”
First off those of you that don’t act need to know this, there’s an unwritten rule that if a person is going to perform on the stage in front of an audience they need to know their lines like the back of their hand. Besides saving face by not looking like an Eskimo stuck in the tropics, I like to think you can’t really delve into the personality of the character until after you’ve fully jumped into their skin. Learn your lines so you can get into the mind of the playwright as well.
Now for the hard part. It seems that as you get older picking up dialogue (or going “off book” as they say in the theatre world) isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. In fact, with age I’ve noticed the barrier for mastering lots of things has definitely gotten a little bit harder. Is the dialogue difficulty because of certain dyes in the costumes playing tricks with my mind and forcing me to flounder? You’d like to think it is. Unfortunately that’s probably not the case.
So what methods have I used to nail my lines? Well for one there’s the old tried and true method of reading and then repeating the same section of dialogue again and again. Attempting to cover your lines with a blank piece of paper, followed by reciting them to yourself over and over. Since this practice is as intellectually stimulating as working on the assembly line in a North Korean bomb-building factory, at first I didn’t want to do it that way.
A minor case of arrogance told me I should try some alternate methods of dialogue mastery. These included; casually reading the entire play, then moving on to another section of the script to somehow mind-meld with the character’s lines.
Reading the character’s dialogue-followed by going out and doing something totally different like skiing through knee=deep powder snow in an attempt to also intellectually bond with the character’s psyche.
Finally reading the dialogue and using my powers of photographic memorization to come back later and pleasantly discover that I’ve totally mastered the passage. Since my pictorial recollection abilities are about +20 on a scale of 1 to 100, +1 being total mental retardation, this didn’t work for me either.
After a week of stumbling through play practice it finally hit me that the only way to truly master one’s dialogue is to just keep reading your lines to yourself over and over. Then show up to practice, look at the book once or twice before you go on stage, chuck the script out the window and wing it. Try to get as close to what the character says when you recite your lines and hope for the best. Thank God we’ve got another week to master our lines before I’m placed smack dab in the middle of the actual performance fire with my gasoline suit on.
