Improv + Sex Ed: An Interview with Amber Nash
Whether you see her in a giant pink wig as Vavianna Vardot or on stage doing short form improv as herself, Amber Nash certainly leaves an indelible impression. As a long-time Dad’s Garage ensemble member, she has brought her humor and artistry to many shows over the years. We sat down with Amber to discuss her journey as a performer, what makes Dad’s Garage a creative incubator and the most burning question of all: what kind of sheets does Vavianna slide into after a long night of sex partying?
DG: Can you tell me a little bit about your Dad’s journey?
AN: Okay. So I was in college studying psychology—or I might have been studying biology before I realized that I was not smart enough to do that as a job—and I had a friend that was like, “Hey, have you seen these things called improv shows?” He took me to Whole World Theatre, which is over in Midtown, and we saw a show and I was like, “This is amazing.”
So I went and took classes there. At the time I was also waiting tables at Dave and Buster's (it was the worst job I've ever had. On Earth. It was horrifying.) and that’s where I met Tommy Futch, an ensemble member of Dad's who's passed away. Tommy was doing stuff with Laughing Matters at Dave and Buster’s—a murder mystery show—and I met him in the kitchen. He just struck up a conversation like, “I run an improv theater!”
I told him I’d just taken an improv class and he said they were doing auditions [at Laughing Matters], so I went. I had only taken like two levels of improv class—I didn't know what I was doing—but I auditioned for Tommy and started doing stuff with Laughing Matters. Around that time I met Leslie Sharp and Keith Hooker, who were part of Laughing Matters and also doing stuff at Dad's Garage.
Back then, Dad's was doing a weekly sketch show and they {Leslie and Keith} got like four slots (with Mary Craft) doing sketches for free parking. They asked if I wanted to be in their sketch group, and so the first time I walked into Dad's Garage at 280 Elizabeth Street, I walked in through the back door to do a show. I'd never even been in the building before.
So I did that show for a few weeks and then I ended up taking a level one class at Dad's. I stuck around, I bartended, I cleaned toilets. I just did whatever I could volunteer-wise to get to know people better. And then eventually I made it into the ensemble, which took like five years of just kind of being around all the time.
DG: Can you tell me a bit about the differences between Whole World and Dad’s Garage—their styles, philosophies?
AN: This was the nineties and Dad’s was pretty new. Whole World, I think, had been around for just a couple years longer and they were both doing short form. Dad's Garage used to that Laughing Matters set up a lot more to the audience before the scene ever started than [the Dad’s Garage ensemble] would ever consider doing.
Usually [at Dad’s], we just get a word or an idea and then [begin the scene], where they would ask, “Okay, uh, what's a word? Okay, how do these two people know each other? Okay, so they went to college together. Okay. How does she know his dad?” They would get so much information from the audience and then start the scene, which to us at the time felt very constricting or like, “we’re such artists who would never do it that way.”
I think they taught that way. I still think that's part of what they do, is they get a lot from the audience in the beginning, and lots of short form theaters do it that way. So that was one of the big differences—how they have approached short form in the beginning and with classes.
I don't honestly remember much of what I learned in either classes at Dad's or at Whole World, but I do remember the improv director at Dad’s was Chris Blair, and he was in charge of the education program also. There were only two classes: level one with Chris Blair and level two with Chris Blair—as far as I can tell, it was the same thing. You just did more of it the next time. So there wasn't a real format of how we were teaching or anything.
Then, later, I became the education director. I worked with the ensemble to expand the class—we had never really had a true class system, level system, and curriculum—so I worked with the ensemble to create our four levels and the curriculum using a lot of Keith Johnstone stuff. Dad’s is a Keith Johnstone-based theater, so that's how we do a lot of our improv as well as where we come from, whereas Whole World is, I think, just pretty much a pure short form theater.
DG: Do you think Dad’s approach to improv impacts how shows are created here?
AN: I think that because we are such an improv theater and we're such a comedy theater, a lot of people wouldn't even guess that we do scripted shows, because we are who we are.
What's interesting about us is our pitch process and how we create our season, which we borrowed from the Neo-Futurists in Chicago. We had an early relationship with them and they would come down and teach workshops with us and also work with us on a staff-level to help us create some of these processes that we now have for pitching and making the season.
There’s a lot of voting—the ensemble votes, the staff votes, and there’s different weight weights to people’s votes. It’s very collaborative. The company decides and the administration has the final say, but we very much put forward what we want this company to do artistically. How we make decisions as a group is very improv-based and I think that bleeds over into how we decide what kinds of shows we’re going to do.
Even in the development of shows, a lot of stuff is created by our ensemble and the stuff we do that isn’t is usually from another theater that we know or other people we respect comedically. So I do think improv impacts the way that we process it, for sure.
DG: Can you walk me through the pitch process for Murder on Vavianna Island?
AN: So I'm trying to remember exactly how it went down, but I think it was during the pandemic and you know, a lot of people, particularly artists, were trying to figure out how to continue to be artists, and I had this idea—we had been doing Vavianna Vardot’s Famous Sex Party for a while at Dad's—since 2017—and I had seen lots of other shows and was getting into seeing immersive theater and I was like, “What if we did a murder mystery immersive event at Dad's with cocktails?” and “I think cocktails are a key component because people wanna go out and get free drinks at this show.”
So I reached out to Megan [Leahy] immediately because Megan is a brilliant writer, but also has a puzzle mind. She's really good at writing mystery and she loves it; she consumes it as an audience member too. So I was like, “I think Megan's the right person for this.”
I knew that La [Schaffer] had done a lot of immersive stuff and was into the scene and had gone to cons about interactive theater. So I reached out to them and Royal Tee, obviously, who helped me create the original Vavianna show, and was like, “Is this something people wanna do?”
Everybody was really excited about it, so I got them all on board and then I pitched the idea. I think Megan had written one scene, which is still in the show, where Vavianna and Remington are fighting, but they're also kind of making out, so they'll kiss each other and then she'll slap him and then they'll kiss each other and he'll slap her, and it's just this ridiculous scene. We read that scene at season planning and it got great laughs, which is a tough room 'cause it's a bunch of artists that are there on a Sunday, and I think that's how the show got in.
There definitely still were some starts and stops because it was like, are we having a season? Are we not having a season? So I don't remember how early it got pitched and when it actually got in, but finally we're here—which I know Hot Jambalaya had that problem too—it's been years and years and years since we even came up with this idea, but we're finally doing it.
DG: What kind of sheets does Vavianna prefer? Is she a silk girl or a cotton girl?
AN: I feel like Vavianna would very much like silk sheets. I, Amber Nash, feel like I would slip right outta the bed. But Vavianna would love silk sheets.
DG: How much of a divide is there between Amber Nash and Vavianna Vardot?
AN: It's weird because I think the reason I created this alter ego is because I genuinely—and I think this is a comedian thing, particularly with women, but I think men fall into this as well—the sexiest people aren’t comedians. You know what I mean? I don’t think of people that are in comedy as particularly sensual people, and I very much feel that way. It’s more about things that you can say that are funny or being physically funny, but not about being sexual and sensual.
So that was something that was so lacking in my life, but I knew there was something there and I wanted to explore it in a way that I felt safe. What was safe about it was still being able to make fun of it. I was like, “How can I do this in a way that is funny that I feel comfortable with?”
I don't feel sensual and sexual when I'm doing shows at Dad's Garage, I feel funny. So I was like, “Can I do both those things?”
Royal Tee, who is such a sensual person and comes at life in such a beautiful, wonderful way, really helped our company, and me in particular, to be more cool with bodies and different bodies and sexuality of all types of people, and that it's a human thing to be sexual. I think that she really broke that open for us and our audiences, because that's not what people were thinking about seeing when they came to Dad's Garage, you know? So it was for me, to kind of help find that.
When I'm improvising as Vavianna, there are many things—because I think good comedy comes from personal experience—there are many things that I think, but then I filter through Vavianna's world in order to get it out on stage. She's also very rich and very fabulous and very old, so these are all things that I can just kind of click into, this ridiculous worldview that I've been creating over many years. I'm still sometimes trying to find who she is, but it's very fun to be able to play one character for so long.
DG: Can you talk a little bit more about how Dad’s can serve as a crucible for many different avenues of performance to create something new like this?
AN: I think one of the things that is so exciting about Dad's Garage and what’s so lucky for us creators and our audience too, is that anything can happen here. It might take a while, we might not always have all the budget and the bells and whistles we want or need, but sometimes that can make for more creativity. We've got an idea and we work at it and present it, like “Hey, this might sound crazy…”—Hot Jambalaya is another great example of that. It took a lot of iterations to get it on stage because it wasn't ready in the beginning, and the company will let you know that they think there's something there, but it's not ready yet. That happens on stage here too, where it's an improv thing, so we don't put as much thought into it. We try it on stage and we're like, “Okay, there's something there, but that wasn't it, so let's keep going back and finding what it is.”
There've been so many insane shows over the years. Brawl, which was like an improvised wrestling show—these guys had this idea to do it, and they were like, “Can we do this?” and we said, “I don't know, we'll figure it out!” So anything is possible here.
Because we have such a deep well of deeply creative people, you never know where that's gonna go. If it's gonna be an interactive show, if it's gonna be a burlesque show, if it's gonna be a show that is set in New Orleans in the 1920s, there's so many different things that we get to explore. We still have to work for it and we still have to find the right way to do it, but there's so much opportunity to make some weird shit here, you know? And the audiences are like, “We know what you guys are up to. We wanna see this thing.” It's not always going be a home run, but hopefully it'll be interesting and fun to watch.
DG: How does Dad’s existence change the artistic landscape in Atlanta or present anything new, different, unique, original, especially in a state like Georgia that doesn't exactly emphasize the arts?
AN: Gosh. When I first started at Dad's, the company was pretty new and Dad’s was thought of as the “bad kids” on the theater scene, like they would do anything and people would be naked on stage—you'd never know what you were gonna see. And it's not like, you go to a show where you know there's going to be nudity and there's a sign out front that says that. No, you're going to a show and then all of a sudden George [Faughnan] is naked and there's nothing you can do about if you're gonna see it or not. So Dad’s was very much like, they would show up to events drunk and get in trouble and it was very punk rock in the early days
Now Dad’s is part of the community of Atlanta. So we're such old fogies now, but we've really earned this and grown into it. Atlanta is—we say this all the time—it's a little bit of an island in a red sea, so there's a little bit more liberal thinking, but not always. We have all things all across all spectrums of existence, but there's creativity and we're allowed to explore. It's a little bit of a safe haven. People know what they're gonna get to a certain extent when they come here. They’re going to be surprised creatively, but not always surprised by where we’re leaning when it comes to the grander scheme of things.
DG: Anything else you’d like to mention?
AN: I always say in interviews that one of the great things about Atlanta is that you can make anything happen here. And it's not Hollywood, it's not Broadway—there's nothing looming over us that's like, “We are the creative force here and you've gotta get in line.”
Atlanta's a very creatively open place and I think Dad’s is a big part of that. We allow people to do what they want to do creatively and we help them figure out how to do that. If you're an artist in Atlanta, whether you do street art or whether you do Shakespeare, it doesn't matter. there's somebody somewhere that wants to see it and there's somebody somewhere that wants to work on it with you.
It’s really amazing, especially when times are tough and nothing has funding and it feels like nobody's supporting the arts, it's the perfect time for art and resistance to well up and really make cool shit happen. I think Atlanta is that place and Dad's a really big part of that.
DG: Can you talk to me a little bit about some of the newer performers, particularly in Murder on Vavianna Island, and what you've observed of their journey? How will the show continue to give them another stepping stone in whatever they choose to pursue next?
AN: It was really interesting to have auditions for this show and see who came out for them because we didn't just need funny people. We needed funny people that could dance and we needed funny people that were sensual, which as I said before, is not an easy thing to find. So really interesting people came out to audition for this—a lot of people from the burlesque community, which we had started to form relationships with through the Vavianna Vardot Famous Sex Party shows. We knew a good handful of burlesque dancers, but people that we'd never met before that had never been to Dad's came to audition. People from the drag community, lots of artists, people that did aerial work, and just really interesting people that did all different kinds of stuff. So it's cool to see us opening our doors even wider to different types of artists, not just people that are straight-up improvisers or straight-up comedians.
When we do musicals, we usually have to bring in people that do more musical theater than we do, because they're better at it than we are, and they have better voices, you know? So we open it up and see those new communities and hope that they find a place here like Royal Tee did. This is her home now too and before that we never had anybody like Royal Tee in our ranks. We were all pretty much improvisers, so finding people like that and hoping they have a great time doing the show and stick around and want to keep creating cool, weird shit in the future so that our shows continue to be different, what we do, and still very funny and what our core mission is, but also something different and challenging that our audiences haven't seen here before.
Amber regularly appears on stage at Dad’s Garage and, on very special occasions, she brings Vavianna Vardot with her. Keep your eye out for the next Vavianna Vardot’s Famous Sex Party, coming October 2025!
