Young, yes. But Davis was already a veteran actor. He started performing as a child in Arkansas at age eleven, appearing five days a week on a children’s television show.
“For me, it was the ideal training environment,” he recalls. “A local program, produced and directed by two professionals who preferred being independent to the Broadway rat race. The show was derivative, an Our Gang format of skits, routines and playlets.
“I didn’t realize at the time how much I was learning. We sang, tap danced and acted short scenes that involved a wide range of emotional behavior. By the time I reached high school, I was better prepared than anyone else in the school drama club. I got all the good roles.”
Davis continued studying at the college-level Arkansas Arts Center, an experimental project sponsored by the Rockefeller foundation. At the same time, he was playing in community theatre productions.
“I received good notices and a lot of local attention,” he says. “And I could have stayed there to work in regional theatre. But I had been hooked by what was probably a very ordinary Dream, performed by an amateur company. Still, it represented everything I wanted to do. So I applied for a place at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival in Ashland, and I was accepted. My real training began when I became a salaried ‘actor,’ carrying spears and filling space.”
The decade of all-purpose performing arts study and experience served Davis well. During his summer at Ashland, he was cast in the important role of Cardinal Wolsey in the not-often-produced Henry VIII.
“I was twenty-two years old,” he says. “Raw and untried. Then suddenly I was doing professional work. Shakespeare, at one of the country’s oldest festivals. I knew then, beyond a doubt, I was committed to theatre and to Shakespeare.”
He went the next year to the newer but prestigious American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut.
“The first year there was another baptism. Eva Le Gallienne, Morris Carnovsky and Brian Bedford headed the company. I was so awed that there was no part too small or chore too menial if it meant I could remain in those exalted presences. And when I was chosen to understudy Brian in Hamlet, it was the greatest thrill of my life.”
During his second season in Connecticut, Davis played Hamlet for the first time. “I was far too young, twenty-four years old, and lacking in knowledge for such a complex role; and too naïve to be as frightened as I should have been. I had trained for it, and I had the advantage of an excellent director and company. These gave me the confidence to do the best I could. I probably sounded and acted a bit like Brian that first time, but I was where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I had dreamed about and worked for.”
Davis has played the Danish prince in other major productions since then. His 1971 Hamlet at the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts Theaterfest in Santa Maria, California is one to which subsequent performances on the West Coast are usually compared.
“Davis’s Hamlet is closer to the metaphysical shock that Shakespeare returned to again and again in his treatment of regicide,” the Los Angeles Times critic said. “…This is one of the extremely rare productions that gives us genuine theatrical evidence of Hamlet’s high place in world literature. However often we’ve heard it and read it, every syllable feels newly minted.”
Davis recalls it as “the most memorable event in my professional career. For the first time, I understood Hamlet – after I had played him three times. And the circumstances were ideal. I shared the vision of Allen Fletcher, the director. The other actors were superb, and we had worked together long enough to have established an unusual rapport. The scenic and light designers, the ambiance – everything combined in a rare theatrical experience.”
It was also a demanding one. “The PCPA Theaterfest produces shows on a true repertory basis in two locations, thirty miles apart. This could mean performing another play in the indoor theatre at a matinee, then Hamlet outdoors at night, or vice versa.”
Although the physical demands are great, Davis returned to PCPA to play Shakespeare on similar repertory schedules: Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and the Fool in King Lear. In one of his most unusual castings, he alternated Macbeth with Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.
In his nearly twenty-year association with Shakespeare, Davis has performed in all but six of the Bard’s thirty-seven plays. He played Hamlet for the fifth time, and once more for Allen Fletcher, during the inaugural season of the Denver Theatre Company.
He spent six years with the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where he played Iago in Othello and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He also appeared in thirty other productions and taught Shakespeare in the conservatory.
Davis has played in King Lear three times, including once at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. He has also played three roles in As You Like It.
“It was fortunate,” he says, “to be available while there were still several festivals and repertory theatres that produced Shakespeare. That enabled me to play a lot of roles. And learn.”
“I’ve played the entire gamut: from the pageant plays where the scenery and costumes are the entire show, to the minutely psychological with every movement and gesture calculated to demonstrate a particular emotional motivation, to the revisionist – Shakespeare distorted to conform to a particular theory.”
“None of this is necessary. He didn’t write to provide grist for scholarly mills. He wrote scripts! For actors! All the information we need is in the play. In the story. That should be the emphasis of the production. The words give us the characters, their relationships and emotions, the sense of time and place.”
“The operative words are on the beat and identifiable. Allen Fletcher emphasized the intimate world of a play, what he referred to as the ‘domestic’ life of the story. But he wouldn’t fault you for going one hundred percent within that life, so long as you gave it your best. When that happens, and when everyone concerned is close to equal in talent, experience and dedication, Shakespeare soars.”
“Sometimes the psychology is hard to find, because it may not be there. Shakespeare wrote for a relatively unsophisticated audience, one not concerned with psychology. Garland Wright says if we remove psychology from behavior, all we have left is behavior. Shakespeare, Moliere – anyone writing prior to the twentieth century often dealt with ‘humors,’ not psychology.”
Despite an impressive list of Shakespeare credits, and a corresponding collection of favorable reviews, Davis has not confined his talents to the work of a single author, venue or media. He has played the title role in Peer Gynt twice, the drunken Uncle Sid in Ah, Wilderness!, and Ko Ko in The Mikado. Off Broadway, he was the self-doomed poet Alan Squire in The Petrified Forest, and the hero who falls in love with a pig in Futz.
“I’ve worked steadily,” he says, “but it’s kept me on the move.”
He played a wide range of classic and contemporary characters during seasons at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, the Charles Street Theatre in Boston, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Milwaukee and Seattle Repertory Theatres, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Davis played in two national touring companies. He was the hysterical and temperamental couturier Sebastian who sang “Disaster” in Katherine Hepburn’s Coco. He was standby for Ian McKellen in Amadeus on Broadway, then played the lead when McKellen left, and on the road.
During the last few years, Davis has worked steadily in television, confining his live theatre appearances to the summer. He was Eliot Carrington on “Texas” a few seasons back, and is seen often in a recurring role on “Dynasty.” He has also appeared recently on “Matlock,” “Cheers,” “Cagney and Lacey” and “Highway to Heaven.” He was seen in the television movies "George Washington, Part II" and "Blind Justice".
In the spring of 1987, he played the lead in the world premiere of The Film Society for the AT&T Performing Arts Festival at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
“I suppose it’s fair to say the TV studios subsidize theatre. For me at least. Last summer I played The Misanthrope at the Guthrie, and I may go back for another short season.
“There are still several roles in Shakespeare that I want to play, or to do again differently. I’m mature enough now to play Lear, which I’d like to do while I can still lift Cordelia. It’s ironic that by the time you understand Romeo, you’re too mature to play a teen-ager. And when you’re ready for Lear, you may not have the stamina.”
I’d like a chance too at the plays no one does anymore: Pericles, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus. Once you’ve been bitten by the Shakespeare bug, it’s a lifetime commitment.”