In Amazing Grace Erin Mackey plays Mary Catlett, the privileged young lady whose world is turned upside down upon realizing of the brutality involved with slavery. Throughout the show we see her character transform from a naive girl into a woman who craves social change. It makes sense that Mary is played by the graceful Mackey, who possesses the kind of intellectual gravitas needed to avoid the part from falling into didacticism, while being able to make a powerful emotional impact in her scenes with Josh Young who plays songwriter John Newton. The talented performer is no stranger to biographical musicals, having also played Oona O’Neill in Chaplin opposite Rob McClure, but in Amazing Grace she gets the chance to shine brighter than ever.

We talked to Ms. Mackey about playing such an important part onstage, as well as her dream roles, her passion for history and her very well documented love of food, which she might just turn into another side of her career sometime...

Did you know the history behind “Amazing Grace” before taking on the part?

I really didn’t, when I got the audition for the show I did the research to find out what the story was and how much of it was true and where it had strayed. I just couldn’t believe some parts of it, and those usually turned out to be the parts the writers hadn’t made up for the script! Once I got the part I read more about it as well.

Younger generations seem to find history boring or uninteresting, do you find that’s usually the case?

I’ve always loved history, in fact I’ve been attending Hunter College part time and in trying to debate what to major in history is one of the things that I’m very interested in because you’re looking back at society to understand why society is the way it is now.

Especially with a show like Amazing Grace which touches on topics like racial inequality which are still very relevant now. Do you feel like theatre has a responsibility to address social issues?

Absolutely, I think that’s a huge part of it, whether you decide to tell your story by comedy or drama, musical or plays, one of the goals to making shows should be to have the audience reflect on current society, themselves and the state of our world. I think that should be a goal of theatre and I see it in our show a lot, I’m always struck by how relevant it is despite the fact it takes place in the 1740s in England.

In the show you can see it almost instantly in the end when audience members join in to sing the title song.

I’d never had that before, everyone knows that song and it used to be such a thing in our society that everyone knew the same songs and people had to memorize them, they weren’t on podcasts or radio. Now we don’t have many of those songs, we have the National Anthem and “Amazing Grace”, it’s one of those songs that everybody wants to sing, and it’s so powerful.

You’ve played real life people before, how is this different than taking on parts other people have played, like doing Glinda in Wicked for instance?

When I played Oona O’Neill in Chaplin there was more information available about her, there isn’t a whole lot of information about Mary out there, so the writers were able to take some liberties and exaggerate with feelings we thought she’d have. What’s available about Mary were things John wrote about her, so it’s clear that he was in love with her and that they did grow up together. Eventually both he and Mary fought to abolish slavery, but we exaggerated to give the audience a better perspective on how people perceived abolition in that time, it was very underground and wasn’t a big movement at all.

Oona O’Neill and Mary Catlett are two women who we can argue justify that idea that “behind a great man, there’s a great woman”. Can you talk about the importance of shining a light on women that otherwise get neglected by the history books?

That’s something that really drew me to Mary, she was very progressive for her time, she’s a woman in the 1740s, she doesn’t have a lot of options and yet she proves that you can still influence your society, it’s important to her to speak for people without a voice, even though she herself is oppressed. I found that to be very courageous and inspiring, I think Mary is pretty awesome (laughs).

Something else Oona and Mary have in common is that they’re both parts you originated in brand new Broadway musicals. Can you talk about your involvement in creating these parts which now will forever be linked to you?

That’s always so exciting, it’s so freeing as an actor to have no limitations necessarily. Obviously there’s the book and direction, but as an actor you dream of having an opinion and to influence your character, in Amazing Grace the writers and director really listened to what I said, it was a very collaborative process, they would change things according to how I acted, so you get to see in the script little things that you helped do.

I wanna go way back time to talk about when you were in The Parent Trap and I’m curious as to whether you had any interactions with Natasha Richardson and did you know she was a famous theatre actress who was about to do Cabaret?

Yeah, it was around that time. I remember her on set having a secret next job that we all didn’t know what it was and then when we finished making the film they announced she’d be in Cabaret. I loved that experience, I was 11 years old and I had no idea of what I was doing, it was my first audition for anything ever so I was not a seasoned child performer, I was just trying to not screw things. Working with Natasha was awesome, she just always made me feel like I was part of the team, when you’re playing a double you’re not getting your face on camera and it’s a humbling job at some points. So I did a lot of off-camera work with the adults because Lindsay and I were children so could only work nine and a half hours, so I did a lot of over the shoulder shots just so they could use Lindsay's time on set to get more of her face. I spent a lot of time with Natasha and all of the other actors and at the end of the shoot, Natasha gave Lindsay and me gold lockets from Tiffany’s with our initials in them. She was just such a warm, wonderful person.

Is Sally Bowles by any chance among the characters you’d like to tackle some day?

I have to be perfectly honest and confess I’ve never seen Cabaret. I missed it when it ran in New York and I need to become more familiar with it, but I can imagine when I see it I’ll add Sally to my dream list.

What roles are on that list now?

I really love the traditional golden age musicals, I wanna do every single Rodgers and Hammerstein show! Carousel and Oklahoma! and The King and I, I did South Pacific and had such a ball playing Nellie. I also got to play Clara in The Light in the Piazza which is my favorite show, so I would play her again in a heartbeat, but I’m looking forward to when I’m older and can play Margaret. I love a good soprano role.

You appeared in Sondheim on Sondheim. Pick your three favorite Sondheim songs!

Gosh this is going to be hard. I’m gonna try to not pick all the songs from the same show, so definitely a tie between “Children Will Listen” and “No One is Alone” and “Moments in the Woods” from Into the Woods. Oh gosh, that was three!

I’ll allow that, you get two more.

“Sunday” is such a glorious song, and...ugh this is so hard, but I’ll go with the “Joanna” trio from Sweeney Todd.

You played her as well in the concert production with Emma Thompson, which also had Bryn Terfel, Audra McDonald and Sondheim himself showed up to a few performances. I went to see it and it was so great!

You were one of the few lucky people who saw it, cause we only did five shows. It was thrilling! Jay Armstrong Johnson who played Anthony and I would just look at each other as if asking “how did we get to be here?”, it was pretty cool.

You’re notorious for being a foodie. Do you have any plans to explore this food passion of yours by opening a restaurant or maybe writing a cookbook at some point?

I love this question (laughs), a cooking show would be cool! But as of now I have no plans, maybe I might start a blog because blogs are how I get most of my recipes, so that is interesting. Last night my husband took me to Del Posto which is a fantastic restaurant, we did an eight course tasting menu, my opening night treat for Amazing Grace, and when we were sitting there I told him “I’d like to do this some time” not necessarily cooking because I don’t have the skills to do that, but in restaurants everyone looks like so much fun. So he said “give it a go!”

Maybe do a musical version of Julie and Julia to combine both your passions?

Oh my god, that would be a dream come true!

Amazing Grace is now running. For tickets and more visit their official website.