# How to Learn a Role as an Understudy (When You Barely Rehearse It)

> A practical plan for understudies and swings: learn the lines before anyone rehearses you, steal the blocking from the wings and the stage manager's book, keep the role sharp for months, and be ready for the phone call.

- URL: https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-learn-a-role-as-an-understudy
- Published: 2026-10-15
- Last updated: 2026-10-15

You've been cast as the understudy. You'll sit in rehearsals for weeks, watching someone else find the part, and you'll get a handful of hours of your own, if that. Then one evening the phone rings at five o'clock and you are on at half past seven.

That's the strange thing about covering a role. You have to know it as well as the actor who plays it every night, with a fraction of the rehearsal. You get little time running your scenes and few notes, and the role can sit untouched for months before the night you need all of it.

The short version: learn the lines early, before the understudy rehearsals start, and test yourself instead of rereading. Learn the blocking by watching from the wings and by reading the stage manager's book, not by guessing. Once the show is open, keep the role alive with regular runs that get further apart as it settles. And prepare for the call long before it comes.

## Get off book before anyone rehearses you

The main cast learns their lines while they're rehearsing them. You won't get that luxury, so the lines have to come first. Understudy rehearsals tend to be short, so arrive knowing the words.

Actor Jordan Lage's advice in Backstage's [Ask an Understudy](https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/broadway-understudy-acting-advice-75160/) is to hit the book early and often and make it part of your daily routine. He's honest that it's drudge work with no shortcut. The good news is that the drudge work can be more efficient than rereading.

It's tempting to learn lines by rereading. It feels productive because the words look familiar, but familiarity isn't recall. In [Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study](https://psychology.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/216/2019/03/Roediger-Karpicke-2006.pdf), students who reread a passage did better on a test five minutes later, but students who tested themselves remembered more two days and a week later. The rereaders also felt more confident. For an understudy, that's the trap: the role feels fine on the page and falls apart in the dark.

So read the cue, say your line out loud from a small prompt, then check. Start with first letters, then cover the line completely once the whole line comes easily. Jack's line from *The Importance of Being Earnest*, "I do mean something else," becomes:

> **JACK.** I d m s e.

*Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1 (public domain). Read the full play in our [Earnest](https://www.offbook.com/plays/the-importance-of-being-earnest) library.*

Our free [line memorizer](https://www.offbook.com/tools/first-letter-memorizer) turns a whole speech into cues like that in a few seconds, with no account.

The other half of solo line learning is hearing your cues. Upload your script to Offbook, pick the role you cover, and realistic voices read every other character, then play the next cue when you finish your line. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere.

Video: [Upload a script and rehearse](https://www.offbook.com/learn/upload-and-rehearse) (1:03)

## Learn the blocking from the wings and the book

Lines are only half the role. You also have to know where to stand, when to cross, which door you leave by, and which prop is in your hand. Nobody will have time to teach you all of that from scratch, so you collect it yourself.

Start with the stage manager's **prompt script**. As [ControlBooth's guide to the prompt script](https://www.controlbooth.com/wiki/Prompt-Script) explains, the prompt script records and updates every actor's blocking, so the stage manager can give the right moves when understudies or put-ins go on. Ask politely if you can copy the blocking for your role into your own script. Asking is better than guessing.

Then watch, and watch with a pencil. Sit out front for a run, and stand in the wings for another. Write the moves in your script in shorthand: X for a cross, DL or UR for stage positions, a small arrow for a turn. Note what the actor is doing with their hands and props, not just where they go. Our guide to [memorizing blocking](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-memorize-blocking) covers the notation in more detail.

Finally, put the moves into your body. The memory researchers Helga and Tony Noice found that actors learn through meaning, and that lines learned with movement are recalled better, as the [MIT Press Reader's summary of their work](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines) describes. Mark out the set with tape or furniture at home, and walk the moves while you say the lines. The first time you hit the real stage, your feet will already know the way.

## Rehearse the scenes nobody rehearses with you

The hardest thing about understudying is that you never get to play the scenes. You see them from the outside, which teaches you the shape, but not what it feels like to be inside them with another actor looking back.

So run the scenes alone, out loud, at playing speed, with the other characters' lines spoken rather than read silently. Hearing the cue is a different skill from reading it, and it's the skill you'll need on the night. Our guide to [rehearsing a scene alone](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-rehearse-a-scene-alone) walks through how to work on the acting, not just the words.

Make your choices, but hold them lightly. You're stepping into a production that already exists. The other actors are used to the timing, the volume, and the moments of the actor you're replacing. Your job on the night is to keep the show safe for everyone else, so match the staging and the big beats exactly, and save your own discoveries for the moments in between.

Work out the hard spots before the understudy rehearsal does it for you. Note every place where your cue comes from an unexpected direction, where two lines start the same way, or where there's a long gap between your speeches. Those are easy places to go up, and they deserve extra drilling. Our guide to [picking up cues](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-pick-up-cues) shows how to drill just the last few words before each line.

## Keep the role alive once the show opens

Here's the part most advice skips. Getting off book is one job. Keeping the role ready for six months is a different problem, because every week that passes without a performance, the lines quietly fade.

Some understudies deal with it by touching the whole role every day. Stephen Rowe, who covered Alfred Molina in *Red* on Broadway, told [NPR](https://www.npr.org/2010/06/13/127602015/waiting-in-the-wings-with-broadways-understudies): "I feel that I have to touch all of the lines in the play every day." He also watched the show from the audience twice a week, taking notes, and ran lines backstage with the other understudy.

If daily runs aren't possible, use spacing instead. A large review of the research by [Cepeda and colleagues](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16719566/), covering hundreds of experiments, found that the best gap between study sessions grows as the time you need to remember gets longer. One way to use that: run the role often at first, then space the runs out once it's solid. Keep each run a real test, as the retrieval research above suggests.

One way to apply this is to taper. Run the whole role every day for the first few weeks of performances, then every other day, then two or three times a week once it holds up cold. If a run goes badly, go back to daily for a few days. And keep your runs active: hidden lines and spoken cues, not a quiet reread on the train.

Track changes as they happen, too. Shows change after opening: a cut, a new piece of business, a line that drifted. When the stage manager posts a change, write it into your script that day. Watching the show regularly catches the changes nobody thinks to tell you about.

## If you swing, keep every track separate

A swing covers several ensemble parts, each called a **track**: every entrance, position, prop, and costume change one performer has across the show. The numbers can be startling. In Playbill's piece [Understanding Broadway: The Swing](https://playbill.com/article/understanding-broadway-the-swing-com-170521), Brian Wanee covered 12 ensemble tracks in *Wicked*, and his fellow swing, who was also the dance captain, covered five. Wanee said he keeps relearning the show, because some tracks would go months without being performed.

The trick is to keep each track in its own place, on paper and in your head:

- Give each track its own sheet, with the entrances, positions, props, and changes in show order, so you never have to untangle two tracks in one script.
- Use one color per track if you mark a shared script, and write the track name at the top of every page where it has something to do.
- Learn the moments where your tracks are near each other, the scenes where track A crosses right while track B crosses left, because that's where it's easy to mix them up.
- When you watch the show, follow one track for the whole performance, instead of trying to watch all of them at once.
- Rotate your review so each track gets a full run in your head every week or two, not just the ones you went on for recently.

## Be ready for the phone call

When the call comes, the hours before the show go fast. Decide now what you'll do with them, so you don't waste any on panic. Here's a plan you can keep on your phone:

- Tell the stage manager you're on your way, and ask if there's time for a walk-through of the trickiest entrances and the fights or lifts with the other actors.
- Run the scenes you know least, with the cues spoken aloud, once each. Not the whole show, just the weak spots.
- Check your costume changes and props with wardrobe and the props crew before half hour, since changes are easy to miss.
- Talk to the actors you share the big scenes with. A quick word about any spot where you might differ from the regular actor saves both of you a surprise.
- Go through your blocking notes one last time, then put the script away. You know more than you think.

Once you're on, expect a few small slips. Jacob Dickey, who covered in *Company*, told Backstage's [Ask an Understudy](https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/broadway-understudy-acting-advice-75160/) that on a first performance you should accept a small flub, keep going, and let it pass. If you go up completely, our guide to [what partners do when a line goes](https://www.offbook.com/blog/scene-partner-forgets-a-line) shows how the actors around you can carry you back in.

## Questions actors ask

### How early should an understudy be off book?

As early as you can, and certainly before your first understudy rehearsal. That rehearsal is for blocking, timing, and the other actors, so don't count on time to learn lines in it. If you have the script before rehearsals start, use the extra weeks.

### Do understudies get the same rehearsal as the main cast?

Usually not. Understudies often watch the main rehearsals and get less time of their own. Plan to learn most of the role on your own.

### How do I keep two covered roles from blurring together?

Learn them as separate scripts, each with its own cue list and blocking notes, and drill the scenes where the two characters appear together most, since that's where you're most likely to say the wrong one's line. Run each role on different days at first.

### Can I practice an understudy role on my phone?

For listening, yes. Offbook lets you listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere, with your own lines spoken, skipped, or left as silent gaps to fill. Rehearsing out loud with spoken cues happens on a laptop or desktop.