Craft · Auditions
How to learn audition sides overnight: six steps, in the order that works.
The email comes in at 8:40. Three pages, two scenes, callback at ten tomorrow morning. You've got tonight and whatever's left of the morning, and the first thing most of us do is read the pages over and over until they stop meaning anything.
There's a better order to do this in. None of it is new. It's the same few things memory researchers keep finding, put in the order that works when you only have one night.
1. Get it off the paper right away
Paper invites re-reading, and re-reading is the slowest way to learn anything (more on that in step 4). So the first job is to turn the pages into something you can run against: cue, your line, next cue. Type it, paste it, or take a photo of it. Give this five minutes, then don't look at the paper again tonight.
In OffBookly: point the camera at the pages and they come in as a scene, with every other part read to you.
2. Figure out what each line is doing
Helga and Tony Noice spent about twenty years studying how professional actors learn text. What they found is that actors mostly don't memorize. They work out what the character is trying to do with each line, and the words come along with that. In one of their studies, people who were told to learn a script by working out what the character wanted remembered more of the exact wording than people who were told to memorize it.[1][2] (We went deeper on this in how to memorize lines fast.)
So before you say anything out loud, go through the scene once and answer one question per line: what am I doing to the other person here? Pushing them, testing them, apologizing, stalling. Write a verb in the margin if that helps. This takes ten minutes and it's the best ten minutes you'll spend tonight.
In OffBookly: mark the beats and write the intention under each one. That's Read & Mark.
3. Say it out loud, every time
Reading a line silently and saying it out loud are different things as far as your memory is concerned. Colin MacLeod's lab calls this the production effect. Words you speak are remembered better than words you read, and it holds up across a lot of experiments.[3] You're also practicing the exact thing you'll have to do tomorrow, which is say the words with your mouth.
So don't run the scene in your head. Have the cue come at you, say your line, and let yourself get it wrong. Getting it wrong out loud tells you which lines aren't in yet. Getting it roughly right in your head tells you nothing.
In OffBookly: the app reads the other role, listens, and waits for you. If you blank, say "hint line."
4. Test yourself instead of reading it again
This is the study to think about when you want to read the pages one more time. Roediger and Karpicke had people learn a passage, then either study it again or take a test on it. A week later the people who'd been tested remembered a lot more, even though the ones who re-read had felt more sure of themselves at the time.[4] Re-reading makes you feel like you know it. Testing is what actually makes you know it.
Cover your lines and try to produce them from the cue alone. When one won't come, don't look at the whole line. Get the first two or three words and finish it yourself. That bit of struggle is what makes it stay.
In OffBookly: "hint line" gives you three words, not the sentence.
5. One run before bed, one run when you wake up
This is the step people skip because it feels like doing nothing. A lot of the work of making a memory permanent happens while you sleep.[5][6] If you run the scene at eleven and again at seven, that's two runs with the best spacing you can get, and the second one will feel noticeably easier than you expect.
Cepeda and colleagues looked at spacing across a large number of studies and found the gap between sessions matters more than how many sessions you do.[7] Two runs eight hours apart do more than six runs in a row. So do one clean run out loud, put the phone down, and go to sleep. Then do one more with your coffee.
In OffBookly: set the goal to one clean run. Do it twice.
6. Run it once on the way in
Lines learned in your kitchen are partly tied to your kitchen. Running them somewhere else loosens that, so they show up more reliably in a room you've never been in.[8] The drive or the walk over is your last chance to do that.
Run it once more out loud on the way. You're not cramming. You're checking that you have it somewhere other than home.
In OffBookly: on CarPlay the scene plays through the car speakers and replays by itself. Walking, lock the phone and keep going.
The whole night
Get it off the paper. Decide what each line is doing. Say it out loud. Test instead of re-reading. Sleep, then run it once at breakfast. Run it once on the way in.
You probably won't have it word-perfect by ten, and you don't need to. Nobody in that room is checking your recitation. They're watching whether you're listening to the person across from you, and you can't listen while you're reading. The lines just need to be far enough in that you can stop thinking about them. Six steps gets you there.
Break a leg.