Okay, we’re almost open with this show.
It’s been a busy, busy process. Not much updating of LJ, not much family time, sleep, housework, or anything else!

Prompted by an entry from my friend kateherself, I was thinking about some of the fun things that happen in rehearsal. One of them is when actors are getting their lines memorized. The process is called “getting off-book”. The phrase “off-book” is just what you’d expect: no longer needing to hold the script, you’ve got the lines and your cues memorized and aren’t relying on “the book”.

When this happens there is usually a short period of transition, where the actors are calling “Line”, and a Stage Manager or their assistant (who is following along in the script) will call the line out to the actor. Sometimes this process goes very well, other times it can be trying for actors and directors – until the lines start to come smoothly, the play lurches forward with not much listening to each other, or rhythms or actions because the actors are truly working to remember the next thing they say. This process is usually a couple days of rehearsal, in the first 1/3 of the process. Then the words start to come instinctively, and the real scene-work begins to shape up.

So, as you can imagine, this lurching-forward-stop-start motion can be frustrating to actors, on occasion, as they try to find the truth in a scene while still trying to remember what their next words are.

This following exchange, from the middle of a scene we were working on, was one I heard fairly recently from an actor getting more and more frustrated with himself, and made me laugh. I thought I’d repost it as close to verbatim as I could remember it.

Actor: Uhmm…Line?
Assistant Stage Manager: What?
Actor: Line!!
Assistant Stage Manager: The line is ‘what?’
Actor: I say ‘WHAT?’
A.S.M.: Correct.
Actor: I just ask him ‘WHAT?!’
A.S.M.: Correct.
Actor: Jesus Christ. Somebody shoot me.

Sometimes what we do can be ridiculously funny!