Playing Thomas Jefferson in Broadway’s 1776 takes on new meaning for Davis, who tells PEOPLE: “I feel as if I’m not in control of the story right now. And there’s something so freeing about that”
Elizabeth A. Davis opened Broadway’s 1776 last week at seven months pregnant, something she did not foresee when the production began to take shape.
Davis, 41, plays Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in the musical’s revival, a revolutionary take on the piece that includes a cast of performers who identify as female, non-binary and transgender.
“I never intended to find myself in this scenario,” Davis tells PEOPLE. “I had two [miscarriages] in 2021. And that’s why I had no idea that I was pregnant.”
The Tony Award nominee and her husband, TV and film director Jordan Richard — who share 5-year-old son Josiah — began trying for another baby when the theater industry went virtually silent (and fully virtual) amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She became pregnant twice, though Davis did not carry to term.
“I realized that I was going into a world that so few people really knew existed. It was a pocket of pain that was so … It was an ocean deep,” she says. “And I felt almost a privilege to enter into that world. As artists, we’re alchemists. We enter into pain, and we empathize, and we convert the pain into meaning.”
A singer, songwriter, musician and actress, Davis began to channel the emotional loss into her art. Along with Richard, the couple created a short film titled For You — an impromptu venture during a pre-planned trip to Italy in hopes to provide comfort to others who endured or would experience the same private pain.
As 1776 began performances out of town at Boston’s American Repertory Theater, she and Richard weren’t necessarily trying again for another child. However, Davis had a “vision” that something greater was in store.
“I knew that a pregnant body on stage playing the character of Thomas Jefferson, who was the famous lover who gave birth to the Declaration [of Independence], was exactly what the show is trying to say,” she explains.
Playing the Founding Father suddenly took on new meaning. “Historically, [his wife] Martha was at home having a miscarriage while he was stuck in Philadelphia writing the Declaration,” Davis says. “There are so many layers of complexity on top of each other that the pregnancy just seems … to make it feel like the most unbelievably delicious creative meal I’ve ever been able to partake in.”
“I consider it miraculous,” she adds. “I feel as if I’m not in control of the story right now. And there’s something so freeing about that. It’s a gift, and sometimes you can’t necessarily take credit for a gift.”
Davis and Richard’s baby girl is due Jan. 1, 2023, and the Broadway actress hopes to keep performing in 1776 until Christmas. Being part of a company comprised of females, non-binary and transgeder actors, Davis feels a sense of “peace.”
“There’s just a felt understanding of what I’m walking through,” she explains, adding that her son Josiah has even been backstage while Mommy has gotten into hair and makeup. “I had him in the wig chair with me. And they provided a room at the [American Repertory Theater], so I would go up to him at intermission with my wig and costume on [to] play ball, play dinosaurs.”
The former Once actress is among a crop of Broadway moms proving that being both a performer and a parent simultaneously is possible.
“I feel an extraordinary mantle of responsibility,” she says. “I had made a decision in 2020 to say: When I get to the end of my life, I do not want to resent the theater that I have so fully loved. I do not want to resent it because I feel as if it took away the opportunity for me to have a family.”
She hopes to prove that people who are pregnant are not a “disability” to a production. “It doesn’t mean that I’m somehow now handicapped from telling stories. I hope that what my presence can reflect on stage is that there is a new dimension offered.”
Being creative while creating a new life is something that is “emotionally and mentally” fulfilling for Davis (who coincidentally performed when she was pregnant with her firstborn, in a New York City production of William Shakespeare’s King Lear).
“To be sitting on the stage [when] the bright lights are being adjusted [during tech rehearsal], and to feel her jumping around because she’s feeling the bright light, it is such a full feeling,” she says of her current experience.
Still, she candidly admits, “I’m a hot mess. There are all sorts of details that are falling through the cracks — our family production calendar is like maxed out! But I can’t complain. I won’t complain.”
“The grind is real, but the joy and the love are greater.”
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