For those of you just tuning in, I’m in the middle of a multi-part blog series calledProject: Introspection. Previously, I discussed the importance of taking the initiative. Read on for the next part in the series.

Theatre students, whether memorizing lines or learning the technical aspects of production, must have the ability to memorize and absorb vast amounts of material quickly and accurately.  When you work on a production, memorizing steps, blocking, lines, cues and timing are essential to keeping a production moving smoothly.

Incidentally, the flip side of this is that you also need the ability to listen.  Not just listen, but comprehend and adapt your memorized material to the new information.  How often have you had a whole page cut out of a play, stuff that you’d already memorized?  How often have you had blocking changed at the last minute?  Memorization and listening comprehension are critical to the success of a production.

Several years ago I worked in North Carolina for a living history museum.  There were six of us actors, and we were going to play parts for the duration of the summer.  This wasn’t a play, but a living history museum.  That meant that we were in character for eight hours a day going about our daily business while visitors came in and observed and asked questions.  We had a few staged things like a musket drill and a pike drill, but otherwise it was completely improv.

Before we could get started, however, we had to learn about the lives of these characters.  What kind of food did they eat?  Where were they from?  What was the weather like?  How did my character wind up being rich while the others were poor?  What were the different types of weapons we used?

Our trainers essentially locked the six of us up into a library for twelve hours over the course of three days and then we spent the rest of each day observing the full-time workers.  After our training week was over, we were on the job full-time.

Learning that information took a vast amount of concentration, but we had to be accurate, consistent and correct.  Every single day and often nearly every hour we had visitors try to catch us in a lie.  They asked us where we were from and when I responded “Yorkshire”, they wanted to know where I REALLY lived.  Of course, we had explanations for how we’d lived so long and such and they aren’t relevant.

We had a few visitors come in that were actually from England, and they left impressed at our knowledge of our “hometowns”.  Granted, our “knowledge” was based on 16th century England, but they were well aware of many of the things we mentioned in our narratives.  We also had some visitors who were history professors or teachers that tried to catch us in mistakes about the history of the area that we were reenacting, but again, our memorization and understanding of the time period helped to prevent any major disasters in that area.

Every once in awhile we’d slip up and the visitor would correct us (or more likely go, “AH HAH! Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t born in Yorkshire!” or some such).  At that point we’d shrug, make an excuse, and look up the answer that night so that next time we wouldn’t make that mistake.  By the end of the summer, my co-workers and I were veritable experts on the history of the location.

Bottom line:  Memorization.  Quickly.  Accurately.  Necessary for theatrical projects.