Hey, I was just wondering how everyone on the boards works on a script? Anyone have any tips or tricks? I know that Stella Adler focused on Script Analysis a lot... who else did?

Thanks!

Well...I read it. and then read it...and then read it again. Honestly, I also read the whole script/play and then get together with someone and analyze it to death....


And then hope were doin' it right...what I want to know...how do y'all memorize? I have to memorize a new monologue in two weeks. And it takes me forever.

Anyone have any hints?
czarina....

After reading through a script, my daughter reads scenes aloud a couple of times. She finds "aloud" works much better than reading to herself. I'll run the scenes with her, flat, and she feeds off that. She'll work her way through a script this way. She'll also work with a coach on certain scenes, and all of that reinforces it. It actually doesn't take too much for her to have it memorized.

Hope this helps.

Oh Monty, what a great question! I wonder if Jason Bennet will answer! Oh joy, oh joy!

For me working on a script is like surgery, I literally sit at a desk or something and go over each scene and it's beginning, middle and end, and dissect it. it's not the most fun, but I get to know the overall arch of each scene.

and yeah Stella Adlers approach was very much ingrained in Script analysis, theres the actual "acting" of the script, and theres also "knowing" the script and story. I've always viewed a script as the blue print for a building.

once I do all the research, I learn the lines back and front, so well that I can say them as fast as I can. and will echo what another poster wrote, I read and read it...and read it again.

as for memorization, I'm not sure it'll work for everyone, but I take a monologue, and say the first three lines 3-4 times, then do that with the next four lines, and so on, then start putting them together, that has worked pretty well for me.

I tend to read the script and find the "beats". This helps what is emphasised, paused, etc...whatever you find works best. The director will tweak it and you build from there.

I pretty much memorize the same way Shay does, except I useually take a trip out in my car while I am doing it. Keeps me away from distractions like my computer or movies or something. Park outside a place that stays open 24/7 in case you need to grab a drink or use the bathroom or something, and just act away. A few hours of this and I know most scenes...

--John

I usually read the script/sides over and analyze it with a friend. I try to find similarities in my character with people I know or situations I've been in, it helps a lot and I can always incorperate their characteristics in my character.

For memorizing, I do better if I memorize it the night before or the day of. I work well under pressure. And it also helps to have someone to run the scenes with!

i think scrip analysis is essensial whatever technique you use
i read the scrip, first for fun, second time - i'm trying to determine every place mentioned, then i'm trying to figure out backstory of the character and his/her previous or not mentioned (before the script started) relationships with other character, then i read again to find out more about place (office, appartment), then i read and trying to figure out why is I/he/she saying every line
so i read it like 10 or more times
then to memorize i record other person(s) line on a cassette and going though my lines home or in the car, or while doing make up

does anyone do verbing on their words?

For memorizing a mon. I usually break it down into sections. 4 ines at a time or depending on the length of the peice I might break it down by beats and memorize those sections 1 at a time. I find that trying to say a peice in my head in a loud public area really helps me see how well I know it. Also I say it in my head when I'm doing various activites through out the day like brushing my teeth. Its that whole doing an action while saying the peice and distracting yourself, hence seeing how well you know it. Thats what works for me.

When working on a script, I read it multiple times -- I'm talking at least 10 times minimum. I let my unconscious do most of the work, while I absorb the story. While reading over and over, I get all kinds of images of the place, the other characters, what I look like, how I dress, etc. Then I think about the archetypes involved in the scene, about what I'm fighting for, what I want, what I need to convince the other person of.

I also spend a great deal of time creating my life, including huge events in my life that effect who I am in this script. I create vivid memories, and I go over them multiples times to make them more and more real. The more real they are, the more they're going to drive me in the scene.

I find all of this work to be much more helpful than just finding beats and basic analysis. That's not to say those techniques aren't useful, but when you think of real life, your past influences how you fight with your lover, friend, or parent.

Excellent post, Katie. Thanks everyone for your contribution to this discussion.

It is difficult to choose what to say here about this, because obviously I could write books about this subject. But this is just a message board.

So let me make some general and vital points about Script Work.

Personally, I dislike the term "Script Analysis" because "analysis" implies the process is intellectual and controlled by one’s conscious “will.”

But great acting comes from the Imagination and from your unconscious. Your imagination and unconscious are the deepest parts of who you are. And primarily they have a life of their own. Every night when you dream, your imagination is at play – creating new solutions to life’s dilemmas, reassembling previously held beliefs into new realizations, and more.

The intellectual, analytical part of your brain is a tiny part of who you are. It basically does not guide your “acting” in life much, and thus shouldn’t primarily guide your “acting” on stage.

So all this means that when working on a script, you should probably honor the way your brain is structured and honor the processes that guide your “actions” or “acting” in “real” life.

This means, as Katie said, your main task when beginning work on a script is to do no “work.” You simply read the script over and over, slowly, without any intellectual (useless) analysis. Your intellect can easily block your imagination in the early phases of your work on a script. I see this in actors all the time. And it what is what many acting teachers refer to when they say the actor must “get out of their own way” or get “out of their head” when they work.

You need to give your unconscious, non-rational dream world plenty of time to fantasize about and create the imaginary world of the script. A lot of this will happen automatically if you give it time and don’t interfere with this deep, imaginative process.

So read the script over and over and let yourself react – instinctively and intuitively. Make notes of images that come to you, memories that come to you, feelings that come to you, music that comes to you. Make sounds and physicalize your responses to the script as you read it. This helps connect you more to your emotional and imaginative world. Responding from the gut is the key…

Daydream about the characters. Daydream about the world. Write down your night dreams. Learn about the awesome intelligence of your night dreams. If you are working on a script, you are dreaming about it at night, perhaps in highly symbolic ways. These images and the archetypes they connect you to are the raw material of your creativity. They are the clay being assembled before it is shaped, by rehearsal, into a sculpture.

All the analytical stuff is fine…but way, way AFTER you have given your imagination plenty of TIME to create an IMAGINARY (not analytical) world.

And research, research, research, research, research! You should become an expert on every issue and circumstance in that script. If a character is epileptic (like in “Night Mother,” by Marsha Norman), you need to become an expert on Epilepsy. You need to know what it is like to be an Epileptic in every regard. You need to know what it would be like to grow up in that specific place, in that specific time, with the religious, political, sexual, psychological, social…and on and on….rules of the time. You need to know every meaning of every word in that script. I could write pages just about RESEARCH and how to do it. It must be highly specific and exhaustive.

All this research feeds your imagination.

You cannot do any meaningful “analysis” until your research is specific and extensive and until your imagination and unconscious has been allowed to do its thing. If you “analyze” beats and objectives and actions early on, you destroy your creative process before it even begins. This is probably the most common mistake aspiring actors make – too much shallow intellectual work at the beginning of their “process.”

The Supreme God of Acting is the Imagination – the Unconscious. The Gods of the Intellect come in way, way later. If you cut yourself off from the Imagination right at the beginning, you’re in big trouble.

As Katie said, after the raw Imagination work and Research, then you move into “creating” the world and characters specifically and imaginatively. Again, not analytically…

This means you need an Imaginative process for creating a character’s life – memories, hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, vulnerabilities. Many aspiring actors have no idea how to do any of this and skip right to meaningless intellectual analysis. They mistakenly focus on a performing result, instead of imaginative process.

But in life, your actions are caused not by analysis, but by your memories, hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, vulnerabilities and archetypes…

Thus, you need to create these kinds of gut, imaginative realities when you act.

After you’ve learned to do this kind of work, only then will your “analysis” be deep and meaningful. Then, your “analysis” of beats, actions, objectives will come from your imagination work, research and character work. All this imaginative work swirls around in your creative unconscious and gives rise to new possibilities, and possibly specific, unpredictable “acting.”

Now…

In order to do meaningful script work, you must have a well developed imagination in the first place. Many aspiring actors don’t and are trained in acting methods that do not develop the imagination. Without a well developed imagination, in general, your work on a script always remains shallow.

And the same thing goes for emotional and psychological freedom, If some of your feelings are blocked, your script work will be shallow and/or intellectual. So again, a major goal of the best actor training is imaginative and emotional development.

Without you being free as an actor in the first place, your auditions will mostly fail and you’ll never have the opportunity to do script work.

These are just my rapid, stream-of-consciousness thoughts. I reserve the right to clarify and revise what I’ve written later. I’ve learned people can easily misinterpret these message board posts.

- Jason Bennett

This is actually good info., Jason. It reminds me of a couple of excellent teachers I have had here in Los Angeles. I also hate the term "analysis", but it is just a word. As actors, we all must work w. a script and character. Although I am not in New York, I am glad that Los Angeles has great acting teachers (IN MY OPINION) who use all the "tactics" (can I use that word) that you wrote about in your post, as far as character and script, and acting in general. I imagine you might take this as slander or an insult, but I actually mean it as a compliment. You have hit on some great points as a teacher, and so have many others.

Thanks for responding, everyone!

Seems I only get on here every once in a while... I intend to get in here a bit more often.

Sounds like most people read the play over and over and over... I've heard that many a time before, and I do that when I'm working on a script as well. I've heard that Anthony Hopkins reads a script 100 times.

I've found that, after a certain point, I have trouble getting myself to read it again. It usually happens at around 7 or so readings of the script. I tend to push through it, and I usually get engrossed in the story again. Sometimes I don't.

Does anyone else have this trouble? How do you deal with that?

Also, I sometimes have trouble getting a script word-perfect. I tend to move things around a little (always in a way that is consistent with the character), but I'll occasionally get in trouble if, for instance, the playwright is watching the rehearsal.

I've also heard that you should memorize a script "robotically" so that you don't get stuck in a line reading (certainly makes sense). This makes memorization harder for me, as it's much easier to memorize with feeling.

I tend to use many of the methods described in this thread for memorization, but I still struggle sometimes. Does anyone have suggestions for being word-perfect and robotic in your memorizations?

Thanks!

Hi Monty,

Same experience here. I'm not a word-perfect guy either. What the folks here wrote is already a good idea. Break the text down to small easily-digestible parts, for examp. memorize four lines at a time.
What I would do is to remember the "nuances/atmosphere/etc" of each small part of the text. That helps me a lot in retaining the words.

It would also help if you have a background in music. I dabble with the snare drum and when I try to memorize a musical piece I would try to do it four bars at a time. I guess that's comparable to what people here is saying about breaking the script down.

quote:

Also, I sometimes have trouble getting a script word-perfect. I tend to move things around a little (always in a way that is consistent with

Does anyone have suggestions for being word-perfect and robotic in your memorizations?

Thanks!

I read it a few times and picture the scene in my head and try to understand what the person really wants. I read it again and the best way for me to memorize the lines is first as i mentioned to understand what the scene is about and what the characters want. Than I put it aside and try to play each scene (ideally with a partner) without looking at the lines. I even improvise if i don't remember a line. Than I do it again this time when I forget a word I look and see what it was and do it again until I get it right. Once I get it right i do it a few times more to get comfortable with the script.

Although breaking the scene that you have to memorize into chunks of lines may be easy for most people and effective. The truth is, the just as easy way (and better in my opinion) is you HAVE to learn your subconscious thoughts that are traveling through your head during the scene as well. And don't say they're not there because they are. Why do you say the next line? Why now and not a few lines ago? If it's a completely different thought in the same monologue, what popped into your head just now to make you say this. It's sounds like it would be harder but it's not. Not only will you remember your lines, they will seem to spring out of you organically not just because you memorized them...the result.BETTER ACTING. And that is what we should strive for, better art not better "memorization"

I once read that Tom Hanks reads a script four times to prepare for a part. That's it.

For what that's worth.

Michael Bennett, at HB, was very big on extremely detailed script analysis, really understanding line by line what the author wrote (and probably rewrote several times, in many cases) and why it's there. He demonstrated to us that one of the characters in "Waiting for Godot" had a very specific urinary tract infection from, as I recall, one phrase in the play.

This is the kind of thing that, once you get the intellectual information, can lead to concrete choices. If, for instance, you believe your character lives with that kind of physical discomfort, it becomes part of his overall state.

Years ago, a playwright had his director call me in based on a moment he'd seen me do in "Merry Wives of Windsor". when Sir Hugh comes out to talk to a messenger, then says, "I will make an end of my dinner - there's pippins and cheese to come". I took this one line as evidence that Sir Hugh liked a free meal, and decided that he probably would grab a bit of food before leaving the table to talk to the messenger. I thought of bread, but that leaves crumbs. So I used a bunch of grapes, which Sir Hugh kept popping in his mouth while talking to the messenger. With all kinds of unpredictable results: once a particularly large grape squirt juice at the other actor, another time I half-choked on a grape trying to get my next line out. Etc.

All this business from one line in the play. That's one way to use script analysis - the same way a paleontologist determines from a single claw that the creature was an eight-foot scorpion, an actor can take a phrase and bring all the larger reality/dimension it suggests into the performance.

Of course all this has to be preparation and not the acting itself. I think of the intellectual work as building a house where the emotional reality can live. Once you've set up/understood your structure thoroughly, you take it as a given and let the performance loose inside it.

By the way, I also do a lot of historical research and a similar process applies in, say, reading trial transcripts. I've gotten very full, vivid ideas of incidental figures simply from a phrase or an action noted in (generally laconic) testimony. But, of course, it helps to have an active imagination and an interest in people to start with.

Oops - the HB teacher is Michael Beckett (as I realized too late to modify my original post.)

I hope everybody read the exchange on this week's BSW site between Larry Moss, William Esper and Mary McCann. Full of good stuff.

At one point, in a remarkably frank critique of Ashley Judd, Moss zeros in specifically on her failure to do script analysis.

I want to be clear: this IS intellectual work. It is analysis in the simplest sense of the word: "That's what they're talking about, about reading the play". But it's what you LIVE after you've done that analysis that makes the performance.

quote:

When Ashley Judd came in, her line is, "Brick, Brick, one of those monsters hit me with a hot butter biscuit. I have to change." And Brick says, "I'm sorry, Maggie, the water was on so loud I couldn't hear you." And she says, "I simply remarked that one of those no-necked monsters hit my lovely lace dress and I have to change." And Ashley Judd took her dress off, rolled it in a ball, and threw it in a corner. And I said, in my little acting teacher way, "Play's over." Play's over. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, because they neglected to read the line where Maggie says, "Brick, I've been so disgustingly poor all my life. I only had two dresses when I married you." Now how, tell me, can you take off your lovely lace dress and throw it in a corner? That's what they're talking about, about reading the play. Ashley Judd, that stupid woman, ruined that beautiful play. And if she was here, I would tell her right to her face. It's unconscionable. It's not allowed to be that lousy. And to come from Hollywood and say, oh, you're an actor.

Script analysis is simply reading the script with an eye to the kind of telling detail that Moss highlights here. Reading it very carefully and attentively. It's a very simple technique with very powerful applications.