Should You Run Your Lines in the Audition Waiting Room?

You signed in, you found a chair, and the assistant said they’re running about half an hour behind. The sides are in your hand. You know them. You think you know them. The actor across from you is mouthing their whole scene with their eyes shut, and the one by the door is doing it at full volume.

So you start running yours, just to be sure. By the third pass a line you had cold this morning feels slippery, and by the fifth you’re not sure you know any of it. Then they call your name.

The short version: do your last full run before you leave home, not in the chair. In the waiting room, check your first line, the cue lines, and your last line, silently: once when you arrive and once more shortly before you go in. Spend the rest of the wait on the person you’re talking to and what you want from them, and keep your body calm. If a line goes at the door, think of the cue line; in the room, a glance at your sides is allowed. Here’s why each part works.

Why running the scene over and over makes it feel worse

Rereading feels like work, but it mostly checks that the words look familiar. Familiar is not the same as retrievable, and a waiting room is a stressful place to find that out. In one study, pressure hurt recall of material people had only restudied.

There’s a useful study on exactly this. Researchers at Tufts had 120 students learn words and images either by restudying them or by testing themselves. A day later, half the students did a stress task: an unexpected speech and math problems in front of judges, peers, and a camera. According to the 2016 study published in Science, the restudiers showed the usual memory drop under stress. The students who had practiced recalling did not.

That’s a lab task, not an audition. But the lesson carries: what protects your lines under pressure is the recall work you did the days before, not a cram in the hallway. The hallway can’t add much. It can, though, shake your confidence if you go looking for gaps.

There’s a second reason. Each nervous pass through the sides is a pass where you’re checking words instead of playing the scene. Helga and Tony Noice, who studied how professional actors learn roles, found that actors seldom learn by rote; they learn lines by focusing on what the words mean. A waiting room spent proofreading turns the scene back into a list of words.

Do your last full run before you leave home

Give yourself one clean, complete run on the morning of the audition, out loud, with the sides face down. Not five. One good one, plus a second only if the first had a real stumble. Then put the sides in your bag and leave.

Make that run a test, not a reading. Have someone read the other lines, or record them, and say yours from memory. If you rehearse alone, Offbook can read the other character while your lines are hidden, and it waits for you to say yours. The video below shows how to hide your lines, use first-letter cues, or hide the whole script for a final run.

Notice what slips during that run and fix only those lines. If you got the night-before email late and you’re still learning, our overnight plan for an audition tomorrow covers how to get there by morning.

On the way, you can keep the scene in your ear without saying it out loud. On your phone, Offbook’s listen mode plays the whole scene, and you can leave your own lines as silent gaps and say them in your head. That works on a train, and it works in a waiting room with earbuds in.

What to do with your lines in the waiting room

A quick, quiet look at your sides is fine. Bridget Coyne Gabbe, writing about the cast of characters in a waiting room, puts it plainly: “Quietly reviewing your lines is fine.” Rehearsing out loud next to someone going in for the same role is, to her, “a bit mortifying.”

Keep the check small and specific. Here’s the order that helps most:

1. Check that you have the right sides. Casting director Marci Liroff’s advice on surviving the waiting room is to check in with the assistant when you arrive and confirm you have the correct set of sides. If they’ve changed, you’d rather know now, and our guide on how to cold read for auditions covers reading new pages well.
2. Read your first line once, then look away and say it in your head. A clean, looking-up start matters most.
3. Go through the cue lines, not your lines. Cover your lines with your thumb and read only the other character’s line before each of yours. You should hear your reply arrive on its own.
4. Look at any long speech for its turns only. Where does the thought change? Two or three words per turn are enough.
5. Read your last line once. Then close the sides.

That’s five minutes, at most. If something didn’t arrive when you covered it, look at that one line, say it in your head twice, and move on. Don’t go back to the top. Our guide on learning lines out loud or silently explains when a silent check is enough.

Try it with first letters

First letters are a good middle step between looking and recalling, and they fit on a scrap of paper in your pocket. Take Cecily’s reply in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II. Algernon says: “Oh! I am not really wicked at all, cousin Cecily. You mustn’t think that I am wicked.” Her first sentence back is:

If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner.

As first letters, it becomes:

I y a n, t y h c b d u a i a v i m.

If you can say the line from those letters, you know it. If you can’t, the gap is now obvious, and you know which word to look at. You can turn any of your lines into cues like this with our free first-letter tool before you leave home.

Spend the rest of the wait on the scene, not the words

Once the check is done, close the sides and put your attention on the person you’re about to talk to. Liroff’s advice is to concentrate on your scene and your character and not get caught up in the room. She also suggests earbuds; as she points out, if you have them in, no one will talk to you.

Acting coach Haley Hartle sets out a three-minute routine for the waiting room, in three one-minute parts. First, downshift your body: a long exhale, shoulders down, jaw loose, feet on the floor. Second, remind yourself what you control, such as starting clean, a clear objective, and real connection. Third, prime only the first two beats: your entrance, your first line, and the first shift in thought. She’s explicit that you don’t run the whole piece.

That last step is the useful replacement for running lines. Picture where the other person is, what they just said or did, and what you want from them right now. Say the first line in your head as an answer to that. It gets you ready to start the scene, which is the part of the scene you control most.

• Ask yourself one question for each scene: what do I want from this person, right now?
• Pick the image or the thing that just happened before your first line.
• Leave everything else alone. You did that work at home.

Bring something else to do for the long stretches. A book, a playlist, a walk to the end of the corridor and back. Liroff says you can stand if sitting drains your energy, as long as you stay close enough for the assistant to find you.

If the nerves are loud

One more idea from research, with a caveat. In a small 2011 lab study on test anxiety (20 college students), students who spent ten minutes writing about their worries just before a high-pressure math test improved their accuracy by 5 percent, while a group who sat quietly dropped 12 percent. That’s test-taking, not acting, but it’s an easy thing to try: a few lines in your notes app about what you’re scared of, written before you head in. If the nerves feel bigger than that, our guide on audition anxiety and panic has more.

Holding-room etiquette: what not to do

The waiting room is shared, and it’s often full of people going in for the same part. A few rules from casting director Marci Liroff and actor Bridget Coyne Gabbe help everyone in it.

• Don’t run your scene out loud. Quiet review is fine. Full-voice rehearsal is something the actors next to you have to sit through.
• Take any warm-up somewhere else. Gabbe asks actors who need a vocal or physical warm-up to kindly go around the corner.
• Don’t listen through the door. Liroff asks actors to try hard not to listen to the audition happening inside, because hearing another take can change your choices. Earbuds help here too.
• Be kind to the assistant. Liroff calls her assistants her eyes and ears. How you treat the person with the clipboard gets back to the room.
• Don’t talk down the material. In her waiting-room advice, Liroff warns against dissing the material, since you never know who’s in the waiting room.

Our guide to audition room etiquette picks up from the moment you walk through the door: the slate, the reader, and leaving well.

If a line vanishes at the door

It happens to working actors. You stand up when they call your name and your first line is gone. Don’t open the sides and start reading from the top. You know this scene; one line has gone missing, not the whole thing.

First, take the sides in with you, unless you’ve been told not to. A line you can find at a glance is a line you don’t have to be afraid of losing. Then, if a line goes in the room, use them. Liroff’s advice in her piece on recovering in an audition is to gracefully dip down and check your sides, find your place, look up, and continue. If you’re early in the scene and clearly off track, she says you can tell them you’re going to start again, and then do it straight away.

What she warns against is the apology spiral. Saying sorry over and over, she writes, is how you lose the room. A glance at the page costs you a second. Stopping the scene to apologize costs you the scene.

In the doorway itself, the cue is your friend. Think of the other person’s line, not your own. Your reply came from that line every time you rehearsed it; it often comes back. For what to do if the same thing happens on stage, see what to do when you forget your lines.

Questions actors ask

Should I run my lines in the audition waiting room?

A quick, silent check is fine: your first line, the cue lines before each of yours, and your last line, once. Don’t run the whole scene over and over, and don’t say it out loud. Do your last full run at home, and use the waiting room to focus on what you want from the other person in the scene.

Is it rude to rehearse out loud in the holding room?

Usually, yes. Other actors are trying to focus, and some of them are reading for the same part. Quiet review is accepted. If you need a vocal or physical warm-up, find a corridor or step outside, and stay close enough that the assistant can find you.

How do I keep my lines fresh if they’re running an hour late?

Don’t fill the hour with run-throughs. Do your five-minute check once when you arrive and once more about ten minutes before you think they’ll call you. In between, read, listen to music, or walk. Your lines were learned before you got there; a long wait doesn’t erase them.

What if I blank on my lines right before I go in?

Breathe out slowly and think of the other character’s line before yours; the cue usually brings the line back. Take your sides in with you. If a line goes in the room, glance down, find your place, look up, and carry on. A glance at the page is normal; repeated apologies hurt more than the glance.

Can I listen to my lines on my phone while I wait?

Yes, with earbuds. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere. Offbook’s listen mode can leave your lines as silent gaps, so you hear each cue and say your line in your head.