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 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, you know, contemporaneously to when it was written, which was actually very exciting, you know, feeling like you were really getting into the nuts and bolts of how it would have been done at the time, and I think it’s great to know that because then if you do choose to, in the future, take liberties, hten you know where the source material is really coming from and then I think you have more of a right to take liberties if you actually know how it was meant to be done originally. 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 little 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, I think because I grew up on the east coast and I’ve just been here all my life. 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. Quite honestly, 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. I have to say that out of all the experiences with Velvet Chain, we were signed for a while with an indie label and we did the college tour circuit across the country, it did more my ability on stage just owning your own body and owning your own presence then 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 had seen us a few times and had our demo CD at the time. And 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…That was fantastic. We sang two songs on the show, “Strong” and Treason,” and “Song” was the one that ended up on the soundtrack album a few years later. It was really a fantastic thing for us.

MN: Has the band since dissolved, or is it still active?
EA: It’s still active in writing and recording. We haven’t put out a full-length album in about four years now, but we’re still working on stuff. Jeff, who is the base-player and also my husband, is the primary sort of guru behind the band…We definitely do want to put out another album. But we don’t play live as much especially since I got back into doing theater.

MN: You also wrote the music for those songs. You’ve been singing your entire life, but where did you get the training to write music? Was that at Vassar, or did you gain that skill earlier?
EA: I was the kind of kid that used to sit down by the piano in my parents’ house and play by ear when I was about three or four years old and just sort of clank out melodies and stuff. So my parents put me into piano lessons around age five, maybe six. I was lucky enough to go to an all girls private school in New Jersey that was really liberal-minded about arts education, and by the time you were in high school your junior and senior year you could do independent studies in things that you were interested in, so I actually took music theory. But I did not do much in the music department at Vassar. I was actually part of Madrigals my freshman year, which is part of the music department. Other than that, I didn’t take any courses in the music department. You just get real world experience. You hear things in your head and know how to put them on paper or tell people how to play them.

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 stand, and I’m angular, people say that I look like a younger version of Angelica Houston. 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 think character roles are just, you can’t really beat them for having a good time as an actor.

MN: How would you compare your singing style that you cultivated through Velvet Chain with the singing style that you’re going to use for this musical?
EA: With Velvet Chain, depending on the style of the song, whether it was more of a ballad or a rock kind of thing, I would sing in an almost unsupported style where you’re pushing a lot of air through so you kind of have that sort of whispy sound, and then the belty stuff. It’s really funny with rock-and-roll, there’s like a rock-and-roll pronunciation. If you over-enunciate, you don’t sound rock-and-roll; you have to sound cool. There’s just a way to sing rock-and-roll where yeah you want people to understand the words, but you cannot sing it the way you sing musical theater or jazz or anything classical. Particularly with this show, it’s much more of a traditional Broadway sound, where it’s very far forward, I don’t want to say nasal, and definitely enunciating to the moon. We’re doing it in a small space where no one is wearing mics, so you definitely need to be projecting and enunciating if anyone is going to understand anything that you’re singing. So yeah, they’re incredibly different…Going back to Vassar, that’s something that gave me incredible training; I don’t know if it’s the same situation there, but when we used to do those shows in Avery, like a 400-seat house with no amplification whatsoever, so you really had to learn how to fill a large space without amplification, and a lot of people don’t know how to do that anymore. So it’s great when I do these smaller shows where there’s no micing whatsoever to know that I do have the background and the training to know how to do it without hurting yourself.

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. There are two completely different schools of thought on that: there are people who went to conservatory schools and said they served them incredibly well and they were really happy with what they got out of it; I just think Vassar does an excellent job of balancing the two. You get a lot of stage experience, but in addition to that you get to really concentrate on the academic side…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’m coming at things from a slightly different angle than perhaps other actors that they’ve worked with in the past may 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 his story 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 is telling a story from ancient Greece.

MN: You clearly understand each of these temporal periods. How would you say that they’re interacting in “Triumph of Love”? How does this interaction complicate the play?
EA: I think for the audience it may a little bit confusing to see characters in full 18th-century costuming with tricorner hats and the whole thing, but they’re talking about Sparta and everyone’s name is Hermocrates and Hesione and then the lead character’s name is Leonide and her friend is named Corine, which are French names. It’s definitely complicated. We need to focus on just telling the story so that all of the other elements are like frosting on the cake, so that if some people get it, great, and if they don’t then it won’t take away from the experience of the show…The supporting characters they call the botanicals, which is very much like the botanicals in Shakespeare; they actually speak quite often in anachronistic, modern day English, which is kind of fun. So Hermocrates and my character, Hesione, and Agis, who is the love interest, he is the male protagonist, speak 99 percent of the time in very sort of traditional, classic language, and then everyone around them is speaking in this sort of anachronistic jargon, saying things like, “Yeah that sucks, but you go on,” which I think will help the audience to understand that we’re not just playing with class but we’re also playing with all these different time periods…I think if you just don’t get it, you don’t get it. It’s not “Anything Goes.” It’s asking the audience to pay a little bit more attention.

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. 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, and he would take the Path train in every morning. 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, and it was just a really cathartic day, and that day made me sort of 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 really 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 where 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. Because like I said before, if I hadn’t decided to do the film and TV thing, I never would have done Velvet Chain because I wouldn’t have been in L.A. in the first place. I’m so happy to have done that; I met so many people doing that. I learned an entirely different way of singing, which has helped me a lot even in musical theater because there are so many pop rock musicals now, and I get called in a lot for those.

published on 04/25/08

Erika Amato ’91: The Full Interview

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