Stage director Will Davis likens his experience growing up as a girl to A Christmas Carol‘s Ebenezer standing outside the window, looking in at the living. “I thought that intense isolation was just the human condition, that that’s what it means to be alive,” he says, then adds, laughing: “I didn’t know, I didn’t know! So every day for me now is like, ‘It’s another day! And I’m here! And I am alive!’” In conversation, Davis punctuates painful recollections with a loud, boisterous laugh. He uses the word “joy” often.
Now Davis, a director drawn to physically adventurous new works, wants to turn ATC—known for documentary-style issue plays and, like much Chicago theater, naturalistic dramas—into a place for “wild theatricality,” he says. “I’m very interested in making ATC a Chicago home for formally experimental work. I have no issue with the deft naturalism of much of the work here in Chicago; I just wouldn’t know how to make it.”
—Will Davis
For Davis as a young child, the arts meant ballet. In middle school, Davis began to feel an inkling that life as a girl wasn’t the life for him. “I didn’t have any context for what was going on for me, but just an awareness that I wasn’t fitting into the world of black leotards, pink tights, and toe shoes. I felt a lot of shame at not being good enough or delicate enough,” he says. “For someone experiencing a lot of body dysmorphia as a trans person, and compounded on top of that the regular dysmorphia of being in middle school, it was a pretty intense time.”
