The College Voice: How did you choose Conn? Did you come already knowing that you wanted to be a theatre major?
Julia Larsen: I’m from Alexandria, Virginia, which is outside [Washington,] DC. I knew that I wanted to go to a liberal arts college and stay on the east coast—just to stay as close to home as I could. But I was having a lot of trouble finding schools that fit what I wanted. I did know that I wanted to do theater, but I wasn’t really sure if that meant I wanted to major or if I just wanted to explore it more… I was really trying to keep myself open to the possibilities.
My high school guidance counselor actually transferred from Yale to Conn after her sophomore year, and she loved it. She was like, “This would be a really good fit for you; you should check it out.” So I went on a college tour with my mom over the summer, and we came to Conn and it was so disgusting out! It was pouring rain—so nasty—and I thought it was the most beautiful place ever. And I was like, “Well, if I think it’s beautiful when it’s rainy, I’ll think it’s beautiful when it’s sunny!” I had a wonderful tour and I just felt comfortable on the campus. I wanted to take in a little bit of everything, and I felt like this was a really good place to be doing that. And then I applied ED II and I got in, so I was set. [laughs]
TCV: What’s been your most challenging role here and why?
JL: That would’ve been my role in Four Dead [in Ohio]. That’s because I couldn’t approach it the same way that I knew how to. I had to break down my preconceived notions of how I approach a role simply because of what David Jaffe [the director] was requiring of us, and because of the way that we’d structure the process as this devised piece. I’d never done devised theater before. I grew a lot that junior year, and that process really informed all of my growth.
The play really became parts of all of us; we all felt that we had equal investment in it. In Four Dead, I was playing a character I created who was very similar to myself, and that character was playing Antigone. We did a thing where we reconstructed our life as somebody who was living in the ’70s. We had to write about where we were when JFK was assassinated, and things like that, really thinking about paralleling parts of our childhoods and seeing what that would’ve meant back in that time period: “Did I go to Woodstock?” “Did I go to Summer of Love?”
Once we had that, we started thinking about ourselves in terms of what the play meant to us in 1970 at Kent State and how our upbringing would’ve influenced how we felt about the National Guard being on campus. This was all dramaturgy in a way, a lot of background work that we were doing as opposed to going through the text and analyzing what’s already there.
TCV: Do you think of yourself as an actress first and foremost?
JL: From this growth after Four Dead, I started to think of myself more as a theatre professional. I act and that’s my medium. But everyone in the theatre profession is a storyteller in some way, and whether they’re helping to bring that story to life through the design process or through directing or through acting, it’s all part of this storytelling… unit, I guess you could say. But I do think of myself more as a performer. I just enjoy it more. And I feel like a lot of the work I’ve done at Conn has been from a performance angle, so I have more experience there.
TCV: Do you have a dream role?
JL: Oh, god. I was actually talking about this with Ken [Prestininzi, Associate Professor of Theater] the other day. For my thesis, he was saying, “You need to compile a list of all the great roles that you would love to play.” Man, it’s such a hard question! I just like to do different things, you know? I’ve been in Chekhov, I’m in Shakespeare now, I’ve been in modern plays. With each one, while I’m doing it, I think it’s the most fun thing I’ve ever done. I’d love to take on a lot of those traditional lead female roles, but I wouldn’t say I have one that’s like, “Oh, if I could only play Lady M [Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth], I could die happy.”
TCV: What’s the best non-theatre course you’ve taken while at Conn?
JL: My freshman year, I took an introductory anthropology class. I didn’t really know what I was doing and my student advisor was an Anthro major, so she was like, “You should take this!” I can’t remember what it was called… It might’ve just been Intro to Anthropology, but I feel like it had a better name. Anthropology was so new to me. It was nothing that I’d ever experienced in high school, so I really loved it.
TCV: Do you have any embarrassing or funny backstage stories to tell?
JL: Always. My sophomore spring, I was in Hay Fever, which was directed by Molly Clifford [’13], who at the time was a junior. I was the youngest daughter of this very crazy family. Alex Marz [’13] played my dad and Liz Buxton [’13] was my mom, and Ben Zacharia [’13] was my brother. At the very end, we’re all in our pajamas having breakfast, and we get into this big fight about how the streets of Paris work. Alex wheels over this cart that has all our breakfast on it, and he’s supposed to start lining up the plates and show us how the city of Paris is structured so that he can make his point.
The top of the cart is this glass sheet, and it falls off and shatters all over the floor. There were two or three seconds where we all were just froze, like, “What do we do?!” Then we just went with it, and started kicking some of the broken crockery with our feet. I picked up a piece of apple (and wiped it off on my shirt to make sure there was no glass) and took a bite of it… You couldn’t imagine anything going more wrong, but people ended up asking us, “Was that supposed to break?” Which is of course the biggest success, when you don’t want the audience to know that’s something going wrong.
TCV: What’s the best piece of theater advice you’ve ever gotten?
JL: When I was little, my dad would always tell me to keep my mind open and to try new things. Usually that was with regard to food, because I was a really, really picky eater. But he was the one who was always pushing me to step outside my comfort zone and do something that I wouldn’t normally do. I think that keeping your mind open is the key to theatre. When you read a play for the first time, you want to keep your mind completely open to all the different possibilities, and it’s the same when you approach a character.
