This is my personal life

Nov. 10, 2022 – DENTON – Brenna Petersen is at home.

Comfortable. Relaxed and at ease, even as she's being interviewed. Attired in a dark, loose-fitting button down blouse, dark trousers and tall Renaissance-style boots and sitting with her long legs outstretched in the green room of Texas Woman's University's Redbud Theatre. The room is full of TWU's theatre company in bits of costume, cradling props and affecting English accents. No, it's not Halloween. Petersen and her colleagues are rehearsing for a Shakespearean-era play, The Children of the Queen's Writ.

Petersen is coming off co-starring in TWU's season-opening play, The Effect. She's also currently in Scrooge! The Musical for the North Texas Performing Arts. For that production, she's assistant director. And costume coordinator.

"I feel like I need to stop doing so much," she said. "All I really do is school, rehearsal here or rehearsal at the other theatre."

Doesn't leave much time for a personal life. She laughs at that.

"This is my personal life," Petersen said.

A junior theatre major at TWU, Petersen has been in or around theatre most of her life and is closing in on 20 shows on her resume.

"She comes at this with a great deal of maturity and a sense of seriousness and responsibility," said professor and head of the TWU Division of Theatre Patrick Bynane, who is also directing The Children of the Queen's Writ. "I think the world of her. She's a promising young talent. I won't be at all surprised that 20 years from now, I hear that she's out there with a successful career."

The pursuit of that career has had a number of stops along the way. Originally from Kentucky, her family moved frequently due to her father's work as a transportation manager. That meant a lot of home schooling, made practical by her mother who is a teacher. It was the rest of her family that passed on stage fever.

"I grew up in a performative family," Petersen said. "I have a composer for a grandfather, a classically trained mom, and all my aunts and uncles. I’ve been involved in music for a very long time."

She had the usual youthful activities and distractions: piano ("didn't like it"), swimming ("liked it, but it wasn’t helping me grow as a person"). She did the typical elementary school plays and musicals, but performing really took hold when Petersen was 12.

"My mom found out they were having auditions for a Rapunzel musical," Petersen said. "I auditioned (and landed the part of the wicked witch) and that was it. I started going show to show and was constantly in one when I was about 16, and I’ve not stopped that since.

"It seemed, I don't know, like the natural thing for me to do. Once this became a major part of my life, it definitely did shift my perspective. At 17, I was looking at shows that would expand my repertoire. This group is doing Newsies and I want to do Newsies again, but this group over here is doing Sweeney Todd and I haven't done Sondheim before. That type of thing. But I didn't realize at the time that that was me actually sort of subconsciously building a future."

So subconscious, in fact, that Petersen began college as a music major, fueled by her interest in opera.

"That was a big period of adjustment to try to figure myself out," she said. "But I realized how much I really needed to be in this world, not just doing opera. I liked working on my voice and all of that, but I thought about the theater every single day. Every single day. I was like, 'Why am I not there?' So I just went.

"But I think having that time to get to know myself and my goals without having my parents there or having someone tell me helped me adjust to actually being an adult."

Playing adults has been part and parcel of her resume. In The Effect, she played a 47-year-old woman. In The Children of the Queen's Writ, she plays an older man: William Shakespeare.

"We were talking with the writer (TWU associate professor of theatre Steven Young) and he mentioned a scene with Shakespeare and Richard Burbage," Petersen said. "He explained that Shakespeare says, 'Get your f***ing nose out of the book,' or something like that. And I thought, I feel like I could really pull off that line. The script wasn't available to us yet and I had no idea how big the role was. I just hoped for the best. They had me read for Shakespeare and I really, really enjoyed it."

"We have a line in our audition form that asks, is there a specific role you wish to audition for?" Bynane said. "There's no guarantee that they're going to get it. We just like to know if they have a particular interest so they have a chance to be read for that role. Just about every other student said any role. She had down in her form, ‘Shakespeare.’ She really wanted to be Shakespeare. So I read her for it and she had a great read. And, lo and behold, here she is as Shakespeare."

This is Petersen's closest brush with Shakespeare since doing a Dr. Seuss version of Romeo and Juliet ("I had a blast with it") when she was 16. But Petersen is no stranger to playing trouser roles – female performers portraying male characters.

"When I started in theater, my hair was pretty short," she said. "And being tall and lanky, I gave off a more masculine vibe than a lot of the girls my age. I auditioned for a lot of trouser roles as a kid. I played trouser rolls all summer." That includes Heathers, in which she played J.D., the antagonist made famous by Christian Slater. "I played him as a transsexual transgender man."

Her transformation to play a 40-something balding man is substantial. Makeup (including prosthetic beard and mustache) and clothing that masculinizes her face and body, slicking her hair back to approximate Shakespeare's retreating hairline, darkening her hair and adding an English accent. Then there's deepening her voice.

"I'm a soprano, so playing trouser roles is more difficult for me. I have a pretty nasal speaking tone which I wasn't aware of until I actually started paying attention," Petersen said. "In order to denasalize it I try to resonate up in my forehead and in my chest rather than in the mask of my face. This helps me have a rounder tone. It helps me pitch lower and takes more of my personality out of it, I think."

If you can't already tell, Brenna Petersen is immersed in the world of theatre. That includes its backstage aspects.

"Once you have worked in some way that is not just directly on stage, you immediately have a much broader perspective of what you’re looking at."

• Costume coordinator: "I’ve learned how to do my research. I do a lot of historical shows, and I learned how to find the proper resources. What did they actually wear, how is this functional, if we need to mix in modern elements how do we do that?"
• Lighting: "I had never stepped in a lighting booth and none of it made sense to me, but I had a really great teacher who is now a TWU alum, and he taught me lighting design. Now I understand better why costumes appear the way they do, why our makeup has to be the way it is, how lights can play into the theme of a show."
• Directing: "A whole other ballgame. You do not know how different it is to act and direct until you’ve been on the other side of the table. You can bring such an amazing story to life. Once you’ve had that experience, even if you don’t align with your director’s vision, you have a new respect for that vision and a new willingness to try everything."