A New West teen actor is stepping out of the limelight to direct a play aimed at giving audiences a better understanding of the LGBTQ+ culture.
Isaac McAndless-Davis, who identifies as queer and non-binary (non-conforming to either male or female gender types), is part of Eternal Theatre Collective. The non-profit organization, founded in 2015, is made up of youth whose mandate is to cultivate performance and learning opportunities for emerging artists.
Part of the group’s work for 2016 includes four short plays, one of them written by McAndless-Davis (who goes by the pronouns ce, cir and cirs).
Person in the Woods follows the lives of three queer teenagers as they struggle to understand and express themselves. There’s Harry (Daisy Hulme) who, when clearing her head in the forest one night, stumbles across W (Valen Oliver), a non-binary teen who soon becomes her friend. Events seem to unravel non-chronologically, with a death in the plot, but everything comes together at the end, according to the playwright.
“It has bothered me for a long time how queer people are presented in media,” ce said cirs reasons for writing the story. “The vast majority of times I see queer people represented in stories, it’s cis-gender heterosexual people. It leads to a lot of our experiences and the ailment of our culture being misrepresented, not being shown and leading to false narratives.”
McAndless-Davis gave the example of The Danish Girl, a movie based on the true story about Lili Elbe and her transgender journey during the early 20th century. Cast for the role was Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything and Les Misérables), a situation McAndless-Davis called “problematic.”
“It (requires) an actual trans woman to accurately portray what their experiences might have been. Most importantly, it perpetuates the unemployment of trans people and trans actors and clearly shows their motive wasn’t to help dismantle transphobia or to help trans people, but to sensationalize trans experiences.”
For the NWSS student, coming to terms with being non-binary was a struggle. Ce remembers feeling really uncomfortable for a few years, starting around 14 years of age.
“I didn’t know what to make of that, what it meant. I just tried to let it go. It wasn’t until years later when friends of mine came out as non-binary, seeing them transition.
“Outside of male and female, it’s very difficult to try and actually construct a sense of self, so seeing that, learning more about who they were, I saw myself in that experience.”
The soon-to-be Grade 12 student hopes Person in the Woods has a “positive impact” on audiences. The play makes a point of describing negative queer experiences through dialogue and narration, but shows all the positive moments on stage, in the safe place – the forest.
The play takes place on Aug. 15 and 16 at Studio 1398 on Granville Island at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door. Email [email protected] to reserve. Both nights will include all four plays, with a short intermission between the first and the second. Run time is about two hours.
