The Chicago-based American Theater Company ( ATC ) asks a question that is complex, multifaceted and provides as much fodder for the imagination as the country: What does it mean to be an American?
On Feb. 18, ATC announced the successor to its visionary artistic director PJ Paparelli, who passed away in May 2015.
As he returns to Chicago to step into that role, director and choreographer Will Davis will not only import into ATC's future a lifelong, ingrained passion for the art of theater alongside a catalogue of groundbreaking audience, critical and award-winning successes nationwide but a significant expansion of the organization's open-ended question.
There are those who would consider a transgender male in a position of artistic leadership to be groundbreaking but, as Davis tackles what it means to be an American, he ushers in a day when the value of trans and gender nonconforming people in the arts and the world at large will be equally assessed through their ability and contributions to it—the norm rather than the exception.
As one of Davis' early role models—choreographer Martha Graham—once noted, "No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times."
Certainly Davis' own achievements in time past, present and future must not defined by identity rather his consummate skill to make theater—one honed from the moment he could walk.
Born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, Davis discovered the unlimited power of expression contained within the human body throughout a childhood shaped by movement and audacious innovation.
"My mother started taking me to dance classes and ballet until I was 13," he told Windy City Times. "My godmother, Stephanie Golino, was a playwright, director and a choreographer and she would put together these amazing shows that she'd adapted from stories like Pinocchio and Huck Finn."
In 2012, Santa Cruz Sentinel journalist Wallace Baine wrote "If you were around in 1991 to see Stephanie Golino's production of Pinocchio and Carlo Collodi, you've certainly never forgotten it."
Davis never did.
"They were immersive, specific and massive spectacles," he said. "As a child it was my first exposure to the culture of making theater—the collaboration, of making something out of nothing. It was a huge part of how I started to understand my aesthetic and style."
At the time, he also understood that ballet was not a good fit.
"Ballet is a highly gendered form," he said. "Although I had only the most nascent sense of what was going on in my own experience of gender, I did have a full, clear sense that there was something that didn't belong, that wasn't fitting, that I wasn't getting any traction with as a ballerina."
Instead, and throughout high school, Davis thought of himself more as an actor. He described his peer theatre kids as "an island of misfit toys, but when I found those people, I found a total lifeline. They were a very important group of friends for me at that time in my life."
In his senior year, Davis directed his first show—The Diviners, by Jim Leonard Jr.
"The experience of discovering in the moment what the job description is of a director is something that sticks with me," he recalled. "Working out who was going where and what it was going to look like was less important than trying to figure out the container of the world. What do I want the audience to feel? I was interpreting a set of facts via art and figuring out how all that coalesces and becomes a play. It was totally profound and a powerful and creative space for me."
Nevertheless, when he began to pursue his BFA at DePaul University, Davis had designs on a life as part of the on-stage population of the world in which audiences were spending their evenings rather than its unseen architect.
DePaul had other plans.
"I started as an acting major and DePaul would cut a certain number of students in the program," he recalled. "After my sophomore year, I got this form letter in the mail which said that, according to a committee, I didn't have any professional potential to be an actor. It is, to date, one of the most powerful things that has ever been said to me. In that moment, I had to ask myself, 'Do I believe these people? Do I forge ahead or is this a fork in the road?' These are questions we have to ask ourselves a lot."
Yet Davis views failure as an opportunity to be profoundly creative. "It's on us to see it that way," he said. "Places of rejection where you know for sure that something is not working are spaces where you can ask, What will work? What will feel right? Where do you want to move? We try to avoid rejection but when we do that, we lose the chance to make positive decisions for our lives."
For Davis, it is a philosophy that applied not only to the life of the artist but the transgender experience.
"If I were to worry or take to heart the number of times that people mess up my pronouns or whisper to each other when I walk into a restaurant and let that rejection rule me, I would not get out of bed," he asserted. "It's my job to have a different world view, to be forward thinking, to be exactly who I am and let the discomfort be other people's job to hold."
Davis decided to remain at DePaul as a theater-studies major under the instruction of accomplished director Lisa Portes.
"Being in the room with her and listening to the way she was talking about harnessing elements of time, space and the body was something that clicked with me," Davis said. "For the first time I knew what to do. That said, I wasn't out and I can't overstate this kind of Christmas Carol sense of watching the world through a pane of glass and feeling untethered, disconnected and sad. At that point, I thought it was just the human condition. When I found directing through Lisa, some tiny light turned on in my heart and I had a sense that this was the world that belonged to me."
His mastery of that world gave audiences at venues including New York Theatre Workshop, Clubbed Thumb, the New Museum, the Olney Theatre Center, the Alliance Theatre, the Playwright's Realm, the Fusebox Festival, New Harmony Project, the Orchard Project, the Ground Floor Residency at Berkeley Rep, Performance Studies International at Stanford University, and the Kennedy Center a rare key to unlock the unfamiliar in what has become a Davis trademark—the fusion of limitless physicality and raw emotion.
In reviewing the Olney Theatre Center's 2014 production of Andrew Hinderaker's Colossal ( for which Davis took home a Helen Hayes Award ), The Washington Post said "the beauty of bodies in motion provides Colossal with an aesthetic power that informs the entire evening."
"Time, space and the body are what makes text a piece of theater," Davis said. "I believe in the dramaturgy of the body. In any play of mine, you should be able to turn down the volume of the spoken work and know exactly what is going on."
The discovery of that dramaturgy is where Davis has found a belonging in which he is totally immersed. "Rehearsal is the place where I am my best, most grounded, present and creative self," he said. "It is the place where I have the most union between my heart, my head and my body. It is a sacred space."
Audiences entering the intimate space of the ATC under Davis' leadership should expect to gaze upon the child of that union—one that will shatter preconception.
"I will open us up to what new work for the American theater will look like," Davis said. "What is on that list is that the play is having a conversation with its form. It cherishes and lifts up the theater. In terms of projects I will direct, I only say 'yes' to those where, in some place in the work, something is impossible. I want to see pieces that have new proposals for what the theater is for."
Davis has a whole other rubric for queer bodies and transgender characters on stage.
"We're not going to the zoo," he said. "As the audience, we are not coming to observe some rare and exotic thing. On stage, when the trans character is the most naked or is the one that goes the most crazy, I don't think that's helpful. I don't think we are doing the right thing by our audiences by continuing to feed them that information. What I do want them to know is that trans women of color are the people who are the most dead, who are the most in jail because of our unequal laws and the lack of visibility for crimes perpetrated against trans people. Some trans people experience homelessness because they don't have equal access to resources and support, we need to open up those conversations."
No matter what the play is that spurs dialogue, if it has a transgender character, Davis is determined that a transgender artist will bring the role to life.
"In the cultural and political moment we live in, there's an issue of representation here that needs to be addressed," he said. "If you're going to write a role for a trans person then you need a trans person to perform it."
Davis has taken the experiences of his own life and merged it seamlessly into the theater no matter what the obstacles thrown up in front of him. Indeed, he admits an "impish glee" when he looks back on DePaul's opinion-by-committee of his professional potential.
But that is how theater is lived and performed.
As his godmother said in the Santa Cruz Sentinel's interview about Pinocchio and Carlo Collodi "we show how the story could have really taken another direction and how in your own life, there are these characters all around you that can be transformed into a work of art."
For more information about the ATC, visit ATCweb.org .
