Howard J Davis expands his artistic and personal identities thanks to I Call Myself Princess
02 Sep 2018

"As a company we've been saying, 'How do we define this show?'," says Howard J Davis of his role in I Call Myself Princess. "It's a play, but there's opera. One could say that's a musical, or a play with music, so we've dubbed it 'a play with opera,' which I love saying. This show is so radical. Jani's redefining what theatre is."

I Call Myself Princess's playwright Jani Lauzon (The Monument, Blood Weddings) is not just exploding genre, there are many ideas and issues at work. "I  play Alex Park who is the partner of a young man named William Morin, played by Aaron M Wells, who is studying opera and in the process he comes to study an opera about the life of indigenous mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather," says Davis. "The opera is called Shanewis: The Robin Woman and was written by Charles Wakefield Cadman who was a queer composer."

Opera, theatre and gay history collide. "In the story that Jani has written, the Metis artist Morin goes to the Shanewis: The Robin Woman opera and I find it really interesting because with Charles Wakefield Coleman being queer, it's a nice representation of a contemporary queer story and a period queer story. Coleman couldn't necessarily be open so all of those social and class divisions are also exposed in the show. That Aaron and I play boyfriends in the show, though it isn't focussed on their queerness because they just are. The show isn't just about that, but the show certainly talks about their relationship."

Davis explains that the play digs even deeper. "It's also about them being diverse. This is the first time I've play African-Canadian, and that's huge. So often I feel my blackness is negated because I look pale. It's very convoluted because I walk through the world with privilege and I recognize that, but there's a complexity to being neither one or the other. Jani even goes into that with dialogue about what it means to be black in Canada, as well as what it means to be indigenous in Canada. There's actually a point in their relationship where they start measuring between themselves as to who is more oppressed in our culture."

But Davis emphasizes that I Call Myself Princess is not a political screed, "Jani is not pointing to how racist we are, it's how connected we are. What Jani is encompassing in this show is the cyclical nature of the circle of what it means to be indigenous, that we are connected. It's an incredible way that she exposes difficult subjects to mend those wounds a step at a time. It's scary to go there but we need to start talking about it. Not that we've ever all been homogeneous by any stretch, but we are all mixed, we all come from various backgrounds."

First time playing bi-racial and also the first time, discounting the deliberate ambiguity of his studly turn in Bombay Black, gay. "It's really exciting," says Davis. "For myself, as an artist I would have shied away from that even four or five years ago. I've realized in this creative process that what it means to be queer is to be culture, to be queer is to be diverse. To be queer is to be artistic. It encompasses so many things."

As well as exploring his personal identity, Davis also gets to revisit his song and dance roots. "I started in musical theatre and then I figured I should go to theatre school because that's what real actors do. I did put musical theatre aside to study classical work, I went to Ryerson, and then right out of Ryerson I just booked musicals. I did The Wedding Singer and then transferred from there to the Shaw Festival for Sweet Charity. I've been broadening my definition of who I am as an artist. I've been moving into filmmaking with C'est Moi. I don't want to be defined by one thing. That's what makes artists an anomaly, they find the things that speak to them. And right now a lot of things speak to me. I don't want to say 'no' to anything and when an opportunity arises, I would rather say, 'yes.'"

Of course singing, particularly opera, is strenuous. "They're all muscles that you need to keep oiled," he says of artistic disciplines. "I don't know if that's the right analogy . . . I haven't sung opera before, I did when I was younger, I trained as a boy soprano and it's funny that some of that I can still play around with. But my voice and what I learning from Marion Newman who plays Tsianina in the show, is realizing that you have to keep it going or it gets rusty. So I'm singing every day now just preparing for the show. And I don't sing nearly as much as the leads do."

It's a busy time for Davis. "I do a preview of I Call Myself Princess on the 12th and then I go to a Q&A for C'est Moi at the Caribbean Film Festival, and TIFF is happening to so I have a few events I've been invited to. It's very fun to be doing as much as I'm doing and I'm very grateful for it. It's exciting to be part of this show which is redefining every day for me what it means to be an artist."

Before he rushes back to rehearsal, Davis has one more theme that I Call Myself Princess has caused him to wrestle with. "Charles Wakefield Coleman was sort of coined as an 'Indianist,' and a lot of those people would go to the reserves and idealize some of the culture. Essentially they were stealing songs from the tribes and I find it so incredible that Jani is bringing it up. It's contentious. There was an American photographer who felt that he needed to photograph subjects in order to remember what it is to be Indian. Because of him we have those photos but because of him, we also have antiquated notions of what it means to be indigenous. The old stereotype is what western culture knows, but what I've learned from this show is that everyone deserves to have their authentic voices heard. That's a good part of why I did this show. We need to become allies, we need to come together. I know it sounds clicé but there's a reason clichés exist, because they're true. It's been eye-opening for me. It's ambitious."