How understudies and swings learn a track

The call comes at five. Someone lost their voice, or went over on an ankle in the fight call. You are on at seven thirty. Two and a half hours, most of it eaten by a costume fitting and a fast conversation with the stage manager about the act two transition.

Nobody in the building is going to run the scene with you. The cast are getting ready to do the show. Between now and the half hour call, you have to get a part you have never played with these people into your body, alone, in a dressing room.

That is the working condition, and almost none of the advice written for actors is written for the person covering a track.

A track is not a part

Understudies talk about learning a track, not a role, and the word is doing real work. The role is the lines. The track is everything the body of that actor does for two and a half hours: which wing they enter from, the spike mark they hit before the lights change, the prop they take out of the stage manager's hand and the bar of music where they take it, the order of the quick change, who they stand next to in the finale so the picture does not have a hole in it.

Lines are the part of the track you can learn on a train. The rest lives in the room.

Learning a track from the back of the room

You learn a track by watching someone else rehearse it. You sit at the back of the house with the script open on your knee and write down in pencil what the person on stage actually does. Not what the blocking notes say. What they do.

Write every move against the words it happens on. "Crosses down left on 'you never asked.'" The move has to be triggered by dialogue, because dialogue is the only thing that will be the same on the night. A move you remember as the shape of the scene arrives half a beat late, which is enough for a lighting cue to catch you in the wrong place.

Then write the things that are not blocking. That they take the glass in the left hand because the right one still has the letter in it.

Two things you cannot get from the back of the room: how the lines feel in your mouth, and how the cues sound aimed at you. The first you fix on your own time. The second is the hard one.

The voice memo problem

Nearly every understudy builds the same tool by hand. Actors describe it like this: "I made myself tracks of all the lines in a scene using voice memos (read and then re-recorded over my lines with silence)." You read the whole scene into your phone, then record silence over your own lines. What is left is a track of cues with holes where you speak.

It beats reading the scene silently, and for memorization it earns its keep. But it fails at the exact thing an understudy needs.

Every cue in that recording is in your voice. Your timbre, your pace, your idea of how the other character talks. You train against it for three weeks, then walk on and the cue arrives out of somebody else's mouth. Lower. Faster. Landing on a different word, with a half second of air in front of it you have never heard. On stage you are not listening for words. You are listening for one person's rhythm and sound, and you trained on the wrong one.

There is a second cost. Recording silence over your own lines freezes the gap at whatever length you left, so the scene runs at your tempo, in a show whose tempo was set months before you were cast to cover it.

What you want is dull and specific: the other characters' lines out loud, in voices that are not yours, with a pause that lasts as long as you take. That is what blablabla does. Import the scene, mark which character is yours, and it speaks the rest and waits.

How do swings hold six tracks without contaminating them?

Understudies cover one or two parts. Swings cover a chunk of the ensemble, and their failure mode is not forgetting. It is bleed. Track four and track six do the same number, to the same music, and cross in opposite directions. Under pressure the body picks one and commits, and it is not always the one you are doing tonight.

The fixes are physical rather than mental.

• Anchor each track to a person, not to the counts. Whose shoulder is on your left in the second verse. Bodies hold relationships longer than they hold numbers.
• Never run two tracks back to back facing the same direction. Rehearse track four facing the window and track six facing the door, so the body files them in different rooms.
• Keep the grid on paper in the same layout every time. One page per number, one column per track, marked in color. Swings often recall a track by recalling where it sat on the page.

The gap between watching and your put-in

If you are lucky you get a put-in rehearsal: one run on a Tuesday afternoon, half the company present, the stage manager reading the rest off the production desk. If you are less lucky, your put-in is the performance.

Either way there is a stretch of weeks where you know the track and have never spoken it opposite another actor. That gap is where understudies get caught out, because the version living in your head is silent, and a silent version is always slightly too fast and too smooth.

Closing it is ordinary solo rehearsal work done properly instead of in your head: out loud, on your feet, with the cues arriving from outside you. I compared the ways of doing that in how to rehearse lines alone.

Do the scene work too, even though somebody else already made the choices. The blocking is inherited. The intentions have to be yours, or the audience gets an impression instead of a person. Breaking the scene down takes twenty minutes.

How do you keep a track warm when you never go on?

Most understudies never go on. Some go on once in a nine month run, with three weeks of notice or none. So the skill is maintenance: holding something ready that you may never use, over months, with no rehearsal and nobody to tell you whether it is still there.

A rota is what works, and it is boring by design. One track a day, in order, twenty minutes. Tuesday is act one of track three. Say the lines out loud with the cues playing back. Walk the entrances in the corridor while the number you are not in happens upstairs. Maintenance happens in stairwells and empty dressing rooms and that is fine.

Two markers tell you where you stand. Can you say the first line of every one of your scenes cold, with nothing in front of you? Can you name the cue that brings you on for each entrance? Those go first, long before the lines in the middle of a scene do, and they are what matters at seven thirty.

Told at five, on at seven thirty

You do not try to run the show. You rank by what breaks other people.

Entrances first. Write them on a card and put it in the costume: cue line, which wing, what you are carrying. Then the moments where you touch another actor or hand something over, because those wreck somebody else's track if you get them wrong. Then the scene you are least solid on, run once, out loud, standing up, with the cues coming at you rather than from you.

Then stop. Fifteen minutes before curtain, more running makes it worse. Get quiet and let the stage manager walk you through the transitions.

You will not be as good as the person you are covering. That is not the assignment. The assignment is that the show goes up and the audience never has to think about it.

The rest of the solo rehearsal picture is in the complete guide to rehearsing alone.