DAVIS SHOWS CHARACTER
Actress returns to the stage
Twenty-two actors take to the Centaur stage this week for Djanet Sears’s epic 2002 drama, The Adventures of a Black Girl In Search of God, an ambitious co-production between Centaur, Black Theatre Workshop and the National Arts Centre. It’s the biggest cast ever assembled at this theatre. As well as playing townsfolk, family members and a comically inflected team of aging social justice warriors, they’ll also be playing trees, the wind, even the undulations of a river, all the while dancing and belting out traditional African songs.
With all this teeming activity going on, you might think the lead actor would have her work cut out drawing the audience’s attention. Not when that actor is Lucinda Davis, widely recognized as one of Montreal’s most compelling stage presences right now.
As it happens, Davis is something of a specialist in creating sizable gatherings of characters all by herself. In The Book of Bob, also at the Centaur, she played various mortal manifestations of God. And in the Black Theatre Workshop/Imago co-production of Debbie Tucker Green’s Random, she played all the members of a South London family devastated by a senseless act of violence.
It was this last production, especially, that had critics running up and down their lists of superlatives to describe a performance that was astonishing, protean, a tour de force, funny, touching, subtly devastating, etc., etc.
And yet despite all this, Davis demurs somewhat on the subject of her talent.
“I never really thought I’d pursue acting as a career,” she says during a pre-rehearsal conversation. “I didn’t really have the confidence. I didn’t think I was as good as the people I saw. With every single opportunity that’s put before me, I’m always in shock: ‘Really? You want me to do this?’ ”
Now, this might read like calculated modesty. But Davis seems genuinely yet to be convinced she has the right stuff. She also, initially, makes for a nervous interviewee, as though she hasn’t got the hang of exuding that aura of indestructible diva-dom with which her triumph in Random should rightly, as she herself acknowledges, have armed her: “An actor friend told me that once you’ve done a one-woman show, you can conquer anything.”
If you’re still not impressed, I should also mention that Davis performed Random with a broken ankle, incurred from a fall on an icy road.
It was a decidedly more happy accident that launched her acting career in the late ’90s and in her late teens, when her photo ended up in the wrong pile on a casting director’s desk, landing her a lead in the kids’ TV show, Radio Active.
“My character was the school ditz, and for whatever reason every actor that was submitted was blond. And so the director was just flipping through these photographs and mine was there by accident. So I stood out a bit. The director pulled it out from the pile and said, ‘I wanna see her.’ “
After playing Radio Active’s Tanya Pandy for three years, Davis joined Black Theatre Workshop where, as well as Random, she starred in Sears’s Harlem Duet at the Segal, for which she won a META award for Outstanding Female Actor. Her
character was an updated version of Othello’s first wife, abandoned for a white woman and left to stew in a toxic mix of vengeful rage and race resentment.
Black Theatre Workshop’s mandate is, of course, to tell black-related stories, but Davis was also involved in launching Metachroma, a company whose visible-minority members give themselves the opportunity to go beyond expected roles.
“We wanted to put on theatre with diverse casts,” says Davis, “but without being tied to telling culturally specific stories. So when we debuted with Richard III, we didn’t want to change the historical period or the country where it’s set. The idea is that the more we’re on stage playing non-traditional, non-culturally-specific roles, the more audiences will accept it. It means not having to explain our presence on the stage or adapting the material to fit.”
For the moment, though, she’s more than happy to immerse herself in the world of Adventures of a Black Girl, which is steeped in black history and searching questions about black identity. Set near an actual place called Negro Creek in Ontario — originally a settlement granted to black soldiers who had distinguished themselves during the War of 1812 — it centres on a young woman called Rainey who is plunged into a spiritual crisis following the death of her daughter. As in Random and Harlem Duet, as well as in Intimate Apparel in which she played a romantically duped turn-of-the-century seamstress, Davis is put through the emotional wringer.
Asked about her character, Davis offers: “Rainey’s a doctor and she feels incredibly guilty because she feels she let her daughter die. She begins to question how God could allow it, and
it becomes a search for philosophical answers, because if it’s all intellectual and in her head, she can be comfortable there. Once the heart begins to allow itself to feel, she doesn’t know what will happen.”
Despite this grim premise, there’s also exuberance, partly in its musically and physically extravagant staging — the Governor General Award-winning Sears is herself directing — but also in the comic subplot involving a crusty old gang of lovable activists, led by Rainey’s ailing father. As well as opposing the proposed, politically correct name change of Negro Creek, they spend their days “kidnapping” lawn jockeys and other racially demeaning ornaments.
Davis, for her part, is appreciative of this comic strain. She’d like to do more comedy in the future: she cites Michael Frayn’s frenetic farce Noises Off as being high on her wish list.
And despite the fundamental tragedy in Rainey’s life, there’s an optimism there that chimes with Davis’s own take on life. “Rainey’s just not ready to accept that everything will be OK, which makes you just want to hold her
and cradle her and walk with her. Horrible things do happen in life, whether it’s poverty, war, violence. But we’re designed to support and love and tell each other: ‘It’s going to be OK.’ ”
Lucinda Davis was nominated for a Montreal English Theatre Award (META) this week for her performance in Random. The
Black Theatre Workshop/Imago production was also nominated for direction, sound, lighting and most outstanding production. Other multi-nominated productions include Hosanna and Travesties with seven apiece, and We Are Not Alone and The Tashme Project with six each. The winners will be unveiled at a ceremony at the Rialto Theatre on Oct. 26.