Following the beat
Although Cariani is now an actor, he was primarily involved with music during college. He had already participated in a number of musicals in high school and went on to join various musical groups on campus. As a member of the Men's Glee Club, the Rhythm and Shoes, a song and dance group, and the Zumbyes, his skills on stage were already evident. He participated in the Zumbyes from his sophomore through senior year and was the group's musical director during his junior year.
Because of his involvement in so many music groups on campus, he and his friends spent a lot of their free time in the Arms Music Building. Another popular spot for Cariani and his friends was Memorial Hill. They would often smuggle trays out of Valentine Dining Hall and go sliding down the hill. Susan Banki, who was also in the Rhythm and Shoes, remembers how they used Memorial Hill for screaming contests as well. "John and I would walk down to the hill and scream out our stress and frustration during the exams," she said. "It was pretty funny when someone standing around heard us."
Wendy Rich Stetson '91, a friend of Cariani's who is also an actor and will be featured in his next musical, said that he is remarkably funny. She also remarked about his popularity. "He was an extremely busy person, and he knew everybody on campus and everybody knew him. He was a wonderful personality on campus, and has such enormous talent. We met each other on the first day of college and have been friends since," she said.
They both enjoyed pranks and were always "up to crazy stuff." "Once we decided to stretch out a roll of toilet paper across campus, and whilst I stood holding one end of the roll on the second floor of Pratt, there was John dashing across the quad, towards Morrow, trailing toilet paper behind him."
The acting bug hits
It was Rich-Stetson's involvement in theater that inspired Cariani to think about acting. "I saw her act as Olivia in Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night,'" she said. "The play was staged as a modern story in Texas. I remember thinking how cool it was that a human story could survive anywhere."
During his senior year, Cariani decided to participate in a series of one-act plays put on by theater majors. It was the first non-musical play in which he participated.
"I found that I really liked it. I especially liked communicating orally and through acting. So much of the work at Amherst is reading or writing. And it always interested me to see how people reacted after listening to something together."
In the late 1980s, Cariani was not contemplating a career as an actor, and with a B.A. in history, he was considering teaching as a possible profession. After graduating, he and a friend, Brad Aspel, moved to the west coast to establish teaching careers."We were all set to become teachers when we moved to San Francisco after college, but we ended up fixing telephones in a high rise," he said.
Thriving on the East Coast
When Cariani decided to pursue a career in acting, he had to move back to the east coast. In 1992, he auditioned for the position of acting intern at Stagewest in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He spent the next three years studying the Suzuki method of actor training under Eric Hill, who was the chair of the theater department at Brandeis University. Soon after, he moved to New York and performed Shakespeare at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, where he conducted workshops on Shakespeare for children of all ages.
A few commercials followed before his first Hollywood feature, "The Shack" which starred Naomi Watts. He has also appeared in "Scotland P.A." with Christopher Wilkin, "Showtime" with Robert Di Niro and Eddie Murphy and "Kissing Jessica Stein." Additionally, he appeared as Beck, "an enthusiastic forensics scientist" for three seasons on the television show "Law and Order."
Cariani returned to the stage early this year with a Broadway debut in the musical "The Fiddler on the Roof." His performance as Motel, the tailor, is his most famous so far and won him not only the "Outer Critics Circle Award", but also a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
"I never thought I would get to be on Broadway-Broadway is for great singers and famous people. So to get to play a major role has been way more than a dream come true," he said. I love it because I get to do physical comedy. It's fun to let loose every night." He added that theater is his favorite acting medium because of the greater involvement that is required by someone performing on stage.
"Acting on television, in movies and on stage each requires a different concentration. TV and film are very similar; they're easier because if you mess up it's at least not in front of 2,000 people," he said. "Doing a play requires an actor to tell the story with his/her voice and body. Film requires telling a story with the eyes. It's all about thinking; the camera can capture true listening and thinking."
Cariani is currently acting in another Broadway play, one he has written himself, called "Almost, Maine." The title refers to Presque-Isle which means "almost island" in French. He describes his play as a tribute to the town he grew up in. "It's a play about the town of Almost. [In the play] four actors play 19 characters," he said. "It's a place where things seem so normal, and then suddenly nothing's normal. Promotional material describes it as a 'mid winter night's dream'."
Lessons from college
Cariani believes that being a history major at Amherst has helped him a lot in interpreting and bringing stories into context. History professor John Servos remembers him as "a bright and keen student-always busy, full of good cheer and already in love with the stage."
"He was a thoughtful reader of primary sources, someone who liked to imagine his way into the minds of their authors. That skill can serve both actors and scholars, and while I hope I contributed some little bit towards nurturing it, the truth is that he came to me as a careful reader. I just got to enjoy the results. Now, his audiences do!"
Cariani has visited the campus quite often in the past decade. Since he was a student here, some things around campus have changed. Stearns Hall, his first year dorm, and James Hall, where he was a resident counselor as a junior are no longer recognizable. According to Cariani, the food at Valentine wasn't as good as it is today and the dining services weren't as fancy. He also recollects that his was the last class to participate in the annual Amherst-UMass snowball fight before the event was banned.
Cariani was the chosen commencement speaker for his graduation ceremony. Jim Zuffoletti '91, a fellow Zumbye, recalls how he finished writing his speech a few hours before he was to speak. "We had to break into the computer center early on Sunday morning to get a laser printout of his speech," he said. "And you could always count on him to sleep in. He would never show up for breakfast. But though he appeared really happy go lucky, he was very serious and dedicated to what he wanted to do, especially his acting."
In the speech, Cariani talked about how the year of their graduation, 1991, was a palindrome and pointed out how important palindromes such as MOM and DAD had been in their lives.
"I remember saying these palindromes made our lives stable because they're the same forwards and backwards. I thought it miraculous that Amherst had become home to me and my classmates in four short years. And I felt it was really cool that these four years at Amherst were just as significant to our development as were our real homes! I remember looking out across the quad, towards where the playing fields are and thinking how cool and exciting it was, that from our small home here we could look out to the skies and mountains, where we were heading!"