You could say that Julia Ressler '05 is in touch with her masculine side.
Since her freshman year in high school, many of her plum parts have been those of Shakespearean men — Prospero in "The Tempest," Caius Lucias in "Cymbeline," a gentleman in "Pericles" and most recently, Romeo in "St. Mary's English 201 Class Presents Romeo and Juliet," which she performed along with nine other women on campus last spring and in New York City's Central Park this past summer.
This most recent play in her repertoire, directed by former Princeton professor Christopher Sanderson, added another level of complexity. Ressler played a Catholic school girl playing Romeo in a middle school production put on for parent's night.
In undertaking this double-gendered role, she worked to blend the insecurities of a middle school girl and the buoyant swagger of a teenaged boy in love.
"I have a little experience playing guys," Ressler said. "There were many more girls than guys in my Shakespeare troupe in high school, and if you're tall, you end up playing a guy."
But it took more than Ressler's statuesque height and strong stage presence to prepare her for the role.
"I didn't pluck my eyebrows," Ressler explained of exploring the physicality of the role starting last January. "I also cut my hair into a pageboy cut in the basement bathroom of Campbell Hall and I tried to take the red out of my lips with makeup."
Ressler also kept her chest flat with a sports bra and, over her costume of a Catholic school uniform, donned her father's old gray wool cadet parade coat from his days in the military academy at West Point. "It makes you look more muscular," she explained.
To develop her character – this complex combination of schoolgirl Mandy Vanderwahl playing Romeo—Ressler watched and imitated her male friends and her 21-year-old brother, Dan.
"I would pay attention to the way they walked. I did a lot of thinking about how weight is distributed differently. I imagined that the weight in women's hips is sunk in the calves. Men have more motion in the shoulders," Ressler said as she paced around the room, demonstrating her manly stride, "I imagined feeling tighter."
Ressler got backaches and neck aches from holding her trapezius muscles so tight for such long periods of time, "but that's what I needed for Romeo," she said.
Ressler said that the physical tension carried over into her interpretation of Romeo's personality. "My Romeo was very energetic and wound up. He was constantly in the air being very emphatic," she said.
Sanderson's vision for the play included some comic elements to ease the weight of the tragedy. The comic moments also captured the youthful passion of the schoolgirls in the production.
"We tried to create a play that had a lot of youthful, comic energy and yet, at the same time, it would be even more poignant when it turns tragic," Ressler explained. One of her favorite moments in the "two hours' traffic of the stage" is when Romeo slays Juliet's cousin, Tybalt. Ressler said it was the perfect example of the director's vision — a combination of comedy and tragedy. The death scene was done in slow motion with a "cacophony of sound," Ressler said. Hand puppets were incorporated to represent townspeople.
According to Ressler, the only criticism the audiences had was that the play was too fast. Over the four weekends of production in New York, Ressler said that the company "mastered the speed but the acting suffered and any subtlety was taken out."
The production's transition from the Princeton campus to New York City was also initially problematic. When they played in Central Park, they competed with a bongo drum show.
"It ended up working out well because we would incorporate dancing to the drums into our warmup," she said. "The drummers would also tell their audience to come watch our show."
The cast made other friends in New York, including a homeless man named Hugh who would hug and kiss the actors and scare away hecklers.
In the tradition of the struggling actor/waiter, Ressler spent the rest of her summer working in a Burger King in West Point, N.Y. She is now equipped to dispel any rumors about the fast food industry.
"I didn't flip a single burger," she said emphatically while clinging to the back of her chair as if to cling to her point. "I fed them into a broiler. There's a big difference and the public must know," she said.
"Every time I pass that Burger King on Nassau Street, my heart goes out to those people in that uniform," she said of her experience.
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