Good Dog! Actress Erin Merritt Has An Uncanny Knack For ‘Sylvia’ Canine Role

Erin Merritt, the San Francisco actress who stars in “Sylvia” at the Interplayers Ensemble in Spokane, has a slight disadvantage when it comes to portraying a dog onstage.

She doesn’t even own a dog. She owns a chinchilla.

“They’re very bad pets,” she confessed, displaying her tattered leather coat. “He’s done all of this work on my jacket.”

So she had to look elsewhere in order to prepare for this perceptively written role in A.R. Gurney’s hit play. Sylvia, you see, is an exuberant young half-lab, half-poodle. The play is about a man who falls in love with this stray, which he finds in Central Park, much to the consternation of his dog-indifferent wife.

Merritt couldn’t go home and study dog behavior, but fortunately, she had plenty of dog experience to draw on. For one thing, she owned a Labrador retriever while growing up in Berkeley, Calif. For another, she has some Portland friends who allowed her to hang out for a few days with their dog.

“I don’t even know what kind of dog he was,” said Merritt. “He was sort of the Platonic form of dog, just the essence of dog, somehow. Like Plymouth Valiants are like generic cars? This dog was the same kind of thing for a dog. Everything he did was completely dog-like.”

So she based part of her performance on that unspecified brand of Rover, and the rest of it on her own intuition of how a dog might think.

“In one scene (when the wife is telling Sylvia why she doesn’t want a dog around the house), it seemed right to just stand completely still,” said Merritt, doing an imitation of a dog’s patient, wide-eyed stare. “It was, ‘If I stand here long enough, certainly she’ll change her mind, or pat me or feed me or something. Or maybe she’ll go away.’ “

Merritt laughed and said, “I guess I found out more about dogs than I thought.”

She admitted that she had wanted the title role of “Sylvia” ever since she first heard of the play. She thought it might be her kind of role, not because she is good at playing dogs - who knew? - but because she is good at playing teens.

“I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I often play troubled teens and to me Sylvia is a troubled teen,” said Merritt. “Yeah, she’s a dog, but she’s a street dog, basically. When teenagers think something or feel something, they express it immediately. They’re still resisting the ‘proper’ ways to behave. That’s one of the reasons I like to play Sylvia. I like to play characters who don’t follow societal rules.”

This is Merritt’s third play at Interplayers. She also had the role of the enigmatic Titanic survivor in “Scotland Road” this season and as Olivia in “Twelfth Night” last season. She auditioned for Interplayers last year in Seattle and then was asked back this year.

Merritt knew from an early age that she wanted to be in theater. At age 4, her parents took her to a children’s theater production of “The Old Man and the Sea.”

“And I just thought, ‘Well, of course that’s what one would do,”’ she said. “It wasn’t like a choice, even.”

She got a theater degree from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1989 (with a minor in Russian literature) and then moved to San Francisco, where she worked for various Bay Area theaters, including the California Shakespeare Festival.

Working as a gypsy actress in a strange city doesn’t seem strange to her at all. She enjoys it.

“You don’t have to travel to be an actor, but it is certainly a lot easier if you want to be paid consistently,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me. Part of it is, I like to travel, and I like to really get to know the personality of a city.”

Interplayers actors stay with local residents who provide free or discounted rent. And there are other perks to being an Interplayers actor.

“I was in Rosauer’s and these three teenagers, they looked at me and went, ‘Oh, she was the one in that play!”’ said Merritt. “Or we’ll go over to the Europa restaurant after the show and everybody in the entire place has just seen the play, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, we love you!’ Which doesn’t happen in a bigger city, because there’s a bunch of things going on.”

She said that in Seattle, and even in San Francisco, Interplayers has a strong reputation in the theater community.

“When I go back to San Francisco and say I worked at Interplayers, they all go, ‘Oh, Interplayers, right,’ because even if they haven’t been to the theater, they know (co-founders) Bob and Joan Welch by reputation,” said Merritt. “There are a lot of theaters, I could go out of town and do a show and it wouldn’t help me in San Francisco. They’d say, ‘Yeah, you did ‘Sylvia,’ but where?’

“Whereas they have heard of Interplayers and they say, ‘Yeah, we know it’s a professional theater with a certain standard.’ They are respected from afar.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ON STAGE “Sylvia” continues through May 3, with Friday and Saturday shows at 8 p.m. and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday shows at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $13.65 and $15.75; call 455-PLAY for reservations. Interplayers is Spokane’s resident professional theater, at 174 S. Howard downtown.