The Bookless Club: Line please!

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I sat in the bleachers under the big red and white tent that has been a part of Vancouver’s summer landscape since 1990. More than two and a half hours of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream unfolded before me. It was everything I expected from Bard On The Beach. The costumes were inventive, the staging was excellent, and the acting was first class. Heck, even the merchandise in the gift shop was lovely.

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But that’s not what I was thinking. He was amazed at how anyone manages to memorize so much dialogue. How do you fit all those words into your head and then say them, engagingly, entertainingly, and, I suspect, flawlessly? How do you do that?!

I don’t remember anyone’s phone number anymore.

That’s not true at all. I can, to this day, recite all the phone numbers of my high school friends. If I met you sometime after the introduction of the cell phone, I probably don’t know your phone number. If I lose my cell phone contact list, our relationship will be trashed. The things I had racked and prepared in my brain are now completely outsourced.

I’m pretty sure my memory has suffered as a result.

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I’m pretty sure, at this point in life, I could probably plan my own surprise party.

So how do they do it?

How do those Bard On The Beach actors stand up and deliver loads of text?

The night I attended A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Joey Lespérance played the part of Bottom, and he was doing great. He owned the material and never wavered. What’s more, he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. So I asked Joey how he managed to memorize that whole script.

It turns out that the more you do it, the easier it gets. Damn, contact list, but memory is a muscle and my memory is now a couch potato.

So here’s how Joey does it:

Before rehearsals begin, Joey reads the entire play 10 or 15 times. He makes no attempt to memorize the script, just to get the general outline of all the characters and the plot. He then breaks down the script in relation to his part. From there, he divides the scenes into paragraphs. Only after finishing this job does he begin to memorize his lines. In order for the information to be maintained, she physicalizes the lines, adding the appropriate expressions.

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It’s at this point, especially if you feel like it’s a well-written script, that the role begins to settle in your brain. What Joey calls “character art” provides clearer prompts that make memorization easier.

And this is not a rehearsal, it is a preparation for the rehearsal. Formal rehearsals begin about a month before opening night. The goal is to rehearse “out of the book”, that is, to have the script set in stone in your head. At this point, the actors move around the stage, picking up the rhythm of the mise-en-scène, matching their role with that of another actor. It is a delicate construction. The block, where everyone is supposed to stand, is critical to memory. According to Joey, “If a fellow actor isn’t in the right place, that can really shake you up.”

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So can Joey Lespérance recite Shakespeare in the blink of an eye? Surprisingly not!

The easier it is to memorize things, the more he does it, and he has been doing it for 30 years, once production is over, “the memory of the script fades. I’m not attached to that, and I make room for new material.”

It’s exactly like that with me and phone numbers.

Once they’re in my contact list, poof! — fade from my memory.

Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former columnist for the National Post who lives in Vancouver. She will write in The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. To learn more about what Jane is up to, visit her website, janemacdougall.com

This week’s question for readers:

Do you have tricks to remember things? How is your memory these days??

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Email your answers, not as an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at [email protected]. We will print some next week in this space.

Answers to last week’s question for readers:

Has someone taken advantage of you or scammed you? How did you find out about the deception??

• My grandfather owned a gas station in a small town. The family lived in a house next door. One night during the Depression, my grandfather was awakened by the sound of someone breaking something on the railroad tracks behind the house. He confronted the man, who was trying to open the garage box. He asked the man why he had stolen it and the man replied that he had lost his job and could not feed his family. Instead of calling the police, my grandfather gave him a job at the gas station.

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glen taylor

• We bought a new car a few years ago, and from the beginning there was a problem that kept coming up. I would mention this to the service department when I had the car checked, but they stated that they couldn’t find anything wrong. This went on for a couple of years, and I insisted they fix the problem when I brought the car in for service. Finally, when the car was in the shop, the service department came to the waiting area and said my car was ready. He also informed me that they had found the problem, but unfortunately my warranty had just expired! After a good laugh, we started negotiating who would pay for what.

lance groner

• I had a financial planner/broker who, when I said I was moving my account, “shuffled” it, thus generating a windfall of fees for him at my expense and to no benefit to me. There should be more accountability and transparency in that industry.

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name withheld

• Many years ago, I read about this incident that took place in the exclusive Shaughnessy neighborhood of Vancouver. Men with a large unmarked truck openly began removing precious rugs from an old, luxurious home. Next-door neighbors questioned the rug removers, who explained that the landlord had hired them to remove, dry clean, and replace the rugs before the landlord returned from vacation. The neighbors asked the military if they would also take away and clean their carpets. “Certainly,” they replied. The rugs and removers were never seen again.

Jeremy Greenfield

• Many years ago, my wife and I worked evening shifts. We had purchased a large order of meat. We had a young woman looking after our little girl. We noticed the meat slowly disappearing, but we hadn’t been eating it. We got a call from the babysitter asking if we could drop off our daughter that particular night because they were having a barbecue. When we got there, we realized that it was our meat that was being grilled. We started looking around and noticed that our daughter’s piggy bank had been broken into. That’s when we found a new babysitter.

Kelvin Lowry