Amie Enriquez is feeling fine.
The decline of COVID cases and increase in vaccinations have ushered in a welcome revival of the live arts, and the New York-raised, Hollywood-based actor, writer and producer is itching to get back to work. Trained in improv and puppetry, Amie is familiar to audiences of The Second City Hollywood. Pre-pandemic, she regularly performed in The Second City’s Really Awesome Show for Kids and taught a popular puppetry course.
The Second City Hollywood is also where Amie premiered Lightweight, her hit autobiographical solo show about recovering from eating disorders, dealing with family during recovery, and overcoming addiction. She initially conceived, wrote and performed the show under the direction of Lauren Weedman. Lightweight was scheduled to be part of the United Solo™ Festival in New York City in September 2020, before COVID-19 forced cancellation of the festival. Now that live performances have resumed, Amie is excited to perform at this year’s festival on November 9, with the possibility of further additional shows.
Told through the perspective of several characters, the 60-minute comedy is based on the true story of Amie’s year-long journey through a 28-day addiction treatment program. It examines a young woman’s attempt to survive anorexia and maintain a debilitatingly positive attitude in post-9/11 New York City.
Discussing the genesis of Lightweight in a Zoom chat, Amie explains that she knew this story was stirring inside of her. Initially, “however, I did not know how to express it.” At the time, she not only lacked confidence but was suffering the dissuasive effects of “imposter syndrome”. “Oh, who am I?” she asked herself, “There’s a lot of survivors of eating disorders. There’s lots of addiction survivors! Who am I? ” Her instinct was to tell that story in a way that is funny, but she didn’t know how. So for a time, she let the idea percolate.
She had recovered from her eating disorders by the time she met her husband, actor Ithamar Enriquez, but her struggles spanned from age 17 to 30 and included intensive treatment and hospitalization. “It was a scary time for my family and my friends,” she recalls. “Eating disorders are really difficult to understand that it’s not about being thin. It’s really not about your body, even though that’s an outward expression of the addiction. It’s a mental disease.” So after her recovery, Amie knew that she “wanted to find a way to educate people about it, and to see the unglamorous side of people starving themselves to have more control over their worlds.”
Prior to recovery, she perceived certain people as having it all together, being very much in control, and so having an easier life: “I just thought life is easier if you could just not have to lay down to button your jeans.” She concludes her thought with quiet understatement: “When that’s the only thing you obsess over, it makes your life very, very difficult.”
It was only when she began to train in improv at The Second City Hollywood that the show began to take shape in her head. This is no accident: Amie credits The Second City with helping her to find a caring and supportive community. “The friends that I made the first day at Second City are still my friends today.” She muses that she and her husband “attract really magical humans and beings into our lives, so I’m not surprised – but it was just such a supportive community. And I found my voice, as cliché as that sounds”. She also credits improv as a crucial element of both her journey to wellness and the growth of her performance skills. At The Second City, she realized what works onstage and what doesn’t – for the simple reason that “Second City just lets you get on stage and try things out. You don’t have to go through this grueling audition process in order to get stage time at Second City, which not every improv training company lets you do.” And not only did she find her “sea legs” as a performer and comedian at this time – she realized that she could write.
So with the personality of an introvert, Amie wanted to just “sit down and write”. However, Lauren Weedman, who would go on to direct her, advised Amie to think about the work-in-progress as a piece to be performed, rather than as text to be read. Amie recalls Weedman exhorting her, “no, I want you to get up on your feet! I want you to move around the space. I want you to work it out on your feet.”
Ultimately, Amie credits the successful development of Lightweight to Weedman’s sound advice and, more broadly, to her training at The Second City: “there’s no other way that Lightweight would exist today because that would have terrified me so much. I just would have failed, to be honest.” And far from failing, Lightweight proved to be a hit. The Second City encouraged her to debut the show on their stage, and it resonated widely with audiences. Amie was gratified, but surprised: “Everyone was laughing and crying. I had no sense of so many people who were struggling or had come out of that same struggle. It really, really got them. In a good way. I was so happy! I hoped that I would find audiences who would be brought to tears and laughter and to a better understanding of the addictions of people in their relationships with their bodies and their families. I did not expect it to go over well, but it did. And there’s been a lot of interest in developing it further.” That interest began with her invitation to take Lightweight to the off-Broadway United Solo Festival:. “We would have had an off-Broadway run right smack-dab in September of 2020, so it got canceled,” she laughs.
Reflecting a year later on the development of Lightweight, Amie notes that she was able to revisit these dark places, write about them, and perform the piece not as her therapy, but because she did the real work in therapy, for over a decade. And that work is ongoing: “We have come a long way in lifting the stigma surrounding mental illness, and there are many free resources to utilize now, but there’s still much left to be done and to learn. Recovery is a lifelong journey that needs professional guidance.” Amie’s life – and the show – offer a hopeful reminder that recovery from eating disorders and addiction is possible.
At this time, The Second City Hollywood, like The Second City Toronto, remains closed, with actors and audiences awaiting news of reopening. In the meantime, festivals like the United Solo Festival provide us all with optimism that soon, the shared experience of theatre will once more be possible for all. Looking ahead, Amie is excited about Lightweight’s off-Broadway debut at the festival: “I’m a native New Yorker, and I know my people out there would love to see it.”
Reserve tickets to Lightweight at the United Solo Festival here.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021
