Having started my career on the stage, this is an issue I can relate to! I used to hate when I had just acted my heart out on stage and some well-meaning person would look at me with wide-eyed admiration and simper "How ever do you remember all those lines?"

I didn't know how I remembered "all those lines". As your article indicates - it was about the role, not the lines. If a play is well written, the lines are fairly intuitive. I could usually be relied upon to know my own lines as well as everybody else's by about halfway into the rehearsal period.

I once acted in a murder mystery playing a character who made a long speech in which she said pretty much the same thing three times over... only slightly differently each time. It was a terrible speech. Really amateurishly written and it was a pain to learn.

I had no such trouble with Second witch in Macbeth, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, or Aunt Eller in Oklahoma. I did several David Woods children's musicals and they were a breeze.

That said, I often used to appear with an actor who was notoriously bad at learning lines. Which meant you had to really be on your toes to field all the curved balls he pitched during the course of a single performance. He had a habit of muddling through his own rough approximation of what the character had to say at each point. Since he was Welsh, this meant that each character suddenly acquired a Welsh turn of phrase. Let me tell you - until you have seen a version of the dream scene in Fiddler on the Roof in which Tevye declares in a strong Welsh accent that the ghost "was stood right by thur", you haven't lived!