By Barbara Petty

After speaking with Julie Fishell, senior lecturer for the dramatic art program at UNC-Chapel Hill and resident actor for PlayMakers Repertory Company, I felt like I had just taken a class in Acting 101. This woman understands her craft!

Julie and I spoke in October about her personal and professional life and the challenges of preparing for her next role as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which will run November 30-December 18 at PlayMakers.

“I teach in the mornings [a total of five classes a year], then at 1pm we start rehearsals,” Julie explains. “Sometimes we go to 6pm, sometimes we take a dinner break and then go to 9pm, and that’s six days a week. It’s intense but that’s how good work can happen, taking that kind of time… you can’t rush it. It’s about contact—minds and hearts in the room together. A play is just on a page; it becomes theatre when people are up and speaking the words.”

Julie has been acting professionally since she graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana. After graduation in 1980 she auditioned for a national touring company. “I was one of 13 people chosen from around the country just out of college to be a performer with A.N.T.A. Touring Company,” she remember. “We toured for a year, and then the following year I joined John Houseman’s The Acting Company.” Other members of that stellar group included Kevin Kline and David Ogden Stiers. And then she entered the Juilliard School Drama Division. “I was probably the only person to have been with a professional touring company before going to Juilliard!”

Pretty impressive credentials for a small-town girl growing up in Indiana. Her father was a plumber/electrician; her mother a homemaker. Julie and older sister Jeannette were given lessons “in anything that we had an interest in—painting, music, dance, and singing.” Jeannette took to the keyboard while Julie took to performing. “I would practice maybe a day before piano lessons and try to convince my teacher that I had practiced the whole week,” she laughs. “It didn’t really work except I was funny and amusing, pretty much the clown. I loved making people laugh; my idol was Carol Burnett. In fact I wrote her a letter once when I was in grade school, but I found out years’ later that my mother thought it was so cute, she never sent it!”

I was intrigued by this as Julie is known for her dramatic roles as much as the comedic performances. To illustrate her diversity, in the 2010-2011 season she played Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Ethel Rosenberg in Angels in America, and the year prior she was Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. I asked her if performing in a comedy was much different than a drama. She replied, “You’ve heard that saying, ‘Comedy is serious business,’ and I think that is absolutely true. There is no difference in preparing for a role—the motivation, the justification for any character, it’s the circumstances that makes the part tragic or comic. Here’s an example: someone needs to get to a door desperately. They need to get to the door so badly, they fall over the bed. As an actor you are not thinking, ‘I am going to be funny,’ you are thinking about how much you need to get the door, and the act of getting there is funny. And the need is the motivation. If I need to get to the door to keep a crazy person out, it would be a tragedy, if I need to keep a clown out it would be a comedy.”

I asked her how she ended up being a teacher/actor when she clearly had the talent to stay on tour. Julie replied, “Being with the touring companies gave me a taste of what it was like to actually make a living acting rather than just being in the studio perfecting my craft. I was fortunate to have had really good teachers that were not only dedicated to being artists but were very responsible in terms of showing me the reality.”

The reality was Julie became pregnant. After performing with PlayMakers Repertory as a guest artist, she was invited to join the company as a resident artist. Julie explains, “Although I loved my life, I loved New York, I knew my life was going to change. The thought of going up and down the subway with a stroller, I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t raise a child like that.’ So my husband at the time and I decided that this was an opportunity I shouldn’t pass up—to be able to still perform and have a more tranquil life. We came to North Carolina in 1993.”

Not only tranquil, very gratifying. “I learn a great deal from my students. Asking questions, keeping yourself interested… Because if you’re not interested, then the audience won’t be.”

Julie continued, “Acting is to ‘personalize given circumstances.’ I must relate myself to that set of circumstances—the time, the place, the people, the props, the environment, the music—everything that is there, that is my task. For example, when I put on a hat, I ask myself, ‘Where did I buy that hat?’ I personalize that—it is not a prop, it is a piece of clothing that I own.”

She went on to explain “The Triangle”—a modern, psychological approach to acting. “Actors take actions to overcome obstacles to achieve objectives.” When asked to comment on “method” acting Julie remarked, “I don’t have to be a heroin addict to play a heroin addict. I can relate addiction to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. What I am sharing with the audience is ‘The experience of me.’”

Julie summarized, “This may be paraphrasing, but someone said, ‘Education is to unsettle settled minds.’ That’s really true for me—I am still learning so much about myself. And every performance is a new experience. That’s the goal, the paradox of what we do… to know the material so well, to rehearse and make choices about how we are going to play the role, so we can then forget those choices and only know what just happened.”

 Click here for a complete listing of past Fifty & Fabulous articles