Erika Amato ’91 on acting, singing in NYC

The Miscellany News: “Triumph of Love” is a musical based on a commedia dell’arte play. It uses stock characters and an improvisational technique. Did anything from your undergraduate experience at Vassar prepare you for the stock character situation typical of commedia dell’arte?

Erika Amato: Yeah, definitely. It’s actually a pretty odd piece. It’s a little bit commedia dell’arte, but it’s also very much like the French farce along the lines of Molière. It’s sort of crossed the line between both, and I was actually fortunate enough to do “Tartuffe” at Vassar. So besides studying it, I actually had some onstage experience.

MN: What other experiences have you had where your education at Vassar has served you well in the theater world?

EA:Well, I also did another Molière play. In English, it’s called “The Bungler,” and it’s not terribly well known. But the way the director worked, he really just expected you to know the genre and know what you needed to do and just sort of try things out. And because of the fact that I did know what was sort of expected, we were able to do a lot of really creative things, staging-wise: jumping on each others’ backs and doing all kinds of crazy things that perhaps I would not have had the wherewithal to try if I didn’t know that was acceptable in commedia dell’arte.

MN: How did Vassar produce a Molière performance in Avery Hall, Vassar’s former theater facility, when you were here?

EA:It was my senior year and it was in Avery, and they did it in an incredibly, absolutely traditional way. William Rothwell was the director, now deceased, and everything was absolutely historically accurate right down to the boning in your corsets. At the time, we were not doing anything experimental. It was definitely: “This is how you’re going to do a Molière play if it’s going to be done”...I think it’s great to know that because then if you do choose to, in the future, take liberties, then you know where the source material is really coming from and then I think you have more of a right to take liberties...It’s like what they say about majors: You have to know how to paint realistically before you’re allowed to go off and paint abstract.

MN: One of the characters in “Triumph of Love” needs to infiltrate a “men-only” zone in the musical. How does that compare to Vassar, since Vassar was breaking into a “men-only” zone, academia, when it was founded?

EA:Quite honestly, in this musical, it really plays so much like a broad farce. And the reason that she’s infiltrating this “men-only” zone is really just to get beyond the garden wall so she can get the guy that she’s fallen in love with. I don’t think it really explores those issues, although that’s a great issue. Also, it’s a bit of a misnomer because my character Hesione is already in the garden, and she’s a woman, but she’s the only one who’s allowed in because she’s so stern and she’s a philosopher.

But it’s not really a “men-only” zone because I’m already there…In drama, in acting, in theater, it’s really not a “men-only” zone, so I really haven’t had any of those issues in my adult life, like having to break into a “men-only” zone. You know what, I correct myself because I also was the lead singer of a band for a while, and I have to say: Rock-and-roll is very much a “men-only” zone, and sometimes it was a bit difficult to have people take you seriously and have people listen to you as a woman, and that can be a bit frustrating. So I guess I do relate to that whole experience, and I’m very grateful to all the women’s studies classes that were available at Vassar. So you can have that sense of presence. And say, “Get out of my way; I’m a girl; listen to me.”

MN: I’d like to speak about Velvet Chain. I know that your band performed the song “Strong” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Could you talk about that experience? Why did you create a band?

EA: I graduated from Vassar and ended up moving to Los Angeles, pretty much immediately after graduation even though I was trained in theater and everyone said I should probably go to New York to pursue theater. So I went over there, and I was pursuing television and film, but I really missed the outlet of singing, because I’ve been a singer my whole life. I didn’t found the band as much as I started singing in an existing band that then dissolved and re-founded with me as lead singer. It was just the ideal outlet for me ...We were signed for a while with an indie label and we did the college tour circuit across the country. It did more for my ability on stage—just owning your own body and owning your own presence—than quite honestly anything I did in theater in school.

Even though Vassar gave me an incomparable education in the drama department, there’s something about having to basically carry an entire hour of a rock-and-roll show by yourself as a lead singer that’s basically an experience, like trial by fire. It’s stuff that you just can’t learn in class. But back to Buffy, that was just a serendipitous situation where we had been playing in town for a while in L.A., and the music supervisor just happened to be a fan of our band and seen us a few times and had our demo CD at the time. He asked us if I wanted to do it, and since it was the very first season they had a lot more liberty to use unknown, unsigned, up-and-coming indie bands. We sang two songs on the show, “Strong” and Treason,” and “Strong” was the one that ended up on the soundtrack album a few years later. It was really a fantastic thing for us.

MN: How would you describe your character in “Triumph of Love,” Hesione? She’s a philosopher; she’s the aunt of the protagonist’s love interest—she’s very traditional, conservative and almost strident. What is it like playing a character like that? Is it similar to your personality or different?

EA:It’s actually not at all similar to my personality, but I get cast as that role all the time because of my look: I’m angular; people say that I look like a younger version of Anjelica Huston. I just have that very severe look about me. So I’ve gotten quite good at playing that part because it’s what people seem to want me to do. My own personality is a little bit goofier than that, but I’ve had a lot of experience playing roles like that even at Vassar. I played in “Blithe Spirit,” and I played Ruth, who of the two wives is the very uptight, proper English lady…It’s so much fun, though, to play those roles because they’re so specific and you can just have so much fun with them because you can’t really be too over-the-top with them because the more ridiculously severe they are, the funnier they are. It’s a joy to play those kinds of parts. Ingénues are fun, but you can’t really beat character roles for having a good time as an actor.

MN: What is your appraisal of Vassar and the drama department? I know that you graduated with both departmental and general honors, so it seems like you really threw yourself into your studies while you were an undergraduate.

EA:Well, yes and no. I definitely did, but I definitely had a lot of fun because I was quite the Mug rat. I was one of those people who worked hard and played hard. I adored the drama department there. I thought it was beyond excellent…I really wanted to go somewhere where the focus was slightly more on dramaturgy and history and really understanding the full scope of what you were studying rather than just the mechanics of it. I think it served me incredibly well to have gone to a school where they cared as much about whether you could write a cogent paper about what Strindberg was trying to say and being able to make pretty sounds on stage…It has served me incredibly well.

When I’m working on a new piece, I tend to get along very well with the playwright and the director because...I do come at it sometimes from an intellectual angle. It’s just a lot of fun being able to see all the aspects of it and to know where you’re coming from, historically. Like just showing up for “Triumph of Love” and knowing where it comes from in the long history of theater, rather than just looking at it as a musical. It’s actually such an interesting piece in that way because it’s a musical that’s based on a French farce from the 18th century, but it’s telling a story from ancient Greece.

MN: How did you find your way back to theater after moving to L.A. and pursuing film and television?

EA: I had done a couple, I want to say three or four, very small sort of pieces while I was still pursuing television and film in L.A. I never completely left theater…Honestly, when you’re trying to pursue TV and film, unless you really hit it well, you always need a survival job. So I had my survival job, and there I was: out in L.A. working at Bloomingdales and waiting for the phone to ring for my next commercial audition or whatever it was going to be and doing Velvet Chain, which was all great.
What happened was, when Sept. 11 happened, my dad happened to work down in that area—he worked at 1 Liberty Plaza...So it was just a really hard day where we weren’t sure if he was alive or dead for a couple of hours before we were finally able to get through. It was just a really cathartic day. That day made me take a look at what I was doing with my life, and I thought, “You know what, life is really short, I don’t know that I want to have working in retail be my survival job right now.” And I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere with the TV and film thing, and I knew I was a singer, and I knew I had always done the musical theater thing. I had done “theater” theater forever, and that was what my degree was in. I just quit and auditioned for a show and got it and just went from there…And I’ve been very fortunate to have been working on stage ever since.

It’s just something where I felt like I came home. I knew that was where everyone had always told me I should be, and I’d sort of been resisting it, and I decided to finally go with the flow. And it looks like that’s probably what I should have been doing. But I’m glad that I took the path that I took.