The Canio's Books Blog

Sometimes you just don’t know what you’re asking. When I asked
playwright/actor Keith Reddin how he memorizes lines for a performance, he
credited his wife, actor Meg Gibson. “She’s great at it,” he said. “She helped me a
lot.” Both Keith and Meg had recently played in Bay Street Theatre’s captivating
production of The Crucible.

When Meg agreed to give a two-part workshop on memorization, I was thrilled, but had little idea what I was getting into. To memorize well, Meg explained, we must make the text our own. Over two nights, she dove deeply into the poems we’d brought to learn by heart. She shared intriguing tips about how to spot patterns, and make images to help us bring the verses into our very being. We were engaging with words in a completely different way.

Meg pressed us further . . .

What did the text really mean to us? Why had we choosen this particular poem, or speech? Now there was nowhere to hide! We had to own it! Both amateurs and actors sat around a circle to try our verses. ~ MC

Staff member Evan Harris had this to say about her experience: “What a revelation to move into the act of memorizing with the assist of actor Meg Gibson! Meg’s approach to memorization is all about inhabiting the work to be memorized – in my case a rather humble poem by Robert Frost, “A Minor Bird,” about not silencing the singing of others. There were other, difficult poems brought by other, ambitious memorizers at the workshop. No matter the material, Meg led each of us to greater connection with our chosen text. We had a sense of purpose: making a bond with a meaningful piece of writing. Meg brought so much generosity, patience and curiosity to the process of speaking and learning to remember. “Do you want to work,” she would say when it was time to dive in and begin. This must be what actors say! I was intrigued, charmed. There was all kinds of laughing, and crying, and trying to understand and even actually understanding, on our own terms, the words we were setting out to learn. By the end of the workshop, the pure sentience in the warm, book-lined space of Canio’s Books had reached flying height. ~ Evan Harris