With theater making its return to the spotlight, actors experienced and new are faced with the recurring challenge of memorization. When given a part, it may be intimidating to memorize pages and pages of lines, but celebrities and actors from NHHS Spring play Our Town have developed tricks to get them down. 

     Junior Julia Eakes has been in a plethora of productions in her time as an actress, in and out of school. In Our Town she got the part of Mrs. Julia Gibbs, the mother of the male lead. Eakes had several monologues, interactions, and a latin opera song to memorize for her challenging part. “I end up practicing my lines a lot, and run them over and over in my brain and with people at rehearsal,” she says, “I slowly get myself more and more not looking at my script, and it just comes to me as time goes on.”

     Being an experienced actress, she also notes the importance of stage awareness and knowing the context and contents of each scene. “I try my best to memorize the whole scene and know what’s coming,” Eakes says, “that way, if a line is dropped, I’m able to save the other lines.”  

     Actor Robert Downey Jr., memorizes thousand word lines at a time, according to theactorsplace.org. He takes the first letter of each word, like an acronym and puts it on a piece of poster board. He stands just far enough away to where he can see it, and runs the lines repeatedly. He claims that this way is speedy and effective, so he has time to do other activities in his life. It also helps with accents, he claims. 

    Junior Brea Smothers has a different tactic for her memorizations. “I’m a writer, so when I need to remember something, I’ll write the whole thing down on my skin,” she says. Smothers played one of the stage managers who narrated Our Town, giving her page long monologues to memorize at a time. “Gradually I’ll pair down the writing so I just need one word, one cue to fully recite my entire script,” she concludes. 

     Actor Matthew McConaughey does not stress as much about the memorization of lines, but on the emotion behind them. He’ll read or recite his lines repeatedly, but always in a different location, with different emotions. He’ll read them when he’s “mad, sad, glad, happy, excited— many different places personally, I’ll read a script.” Not only does it help in memorization, which is only one part acting, it helps with exploring the emotions and meaning behind the lines.