Every morning, before writing, walking his dog, or beginning the 45-minute commute to George Mason University’s main campus in Fairfax, Rick Davis gives himself time to admire the sunrise. If it is notable in some way, or merely spectacular, he’ll take a picture and post it on his Facebook page.
Davis thinks of it as a gift. “As someone who has spent his life using the arts to create communities, the sunrise does just that. For me it’s a performance to be shared.”
As Mason’s Dean of Visual and Performing Arts, Davis has been one of the most important influences on Northern Virginia’s and the greater DMV’s cultural scene. Ask him his favorite performance and he’ll offer a list that includes choreographers Susan Shields and Mark Morris, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, several soloists, musicians, dancers and productions that have taken their bows at the University’s Arts Center and the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, two auditoriums that, in addition to his faculty duties, Davis supervises.
He’ll also mention student performances. But he returns to the sunrise as “simply beautiful, one of those things you discover over time that tells you that, in being able to see it, you’ve made the right decision.”
Twenty years ago, Davis and his wife Julie Thompson, who is the Arts Center’s Executive Director, didn’t know the sunrises would be so compelling when they bought their Winchester Street home. “We had been living closer to campus,” Davis continues, “and were taking a country ride when it was just about lunchtime, and we found ourselves driving into Warrenton. We parked, walked around, we had soup and very good club sandwiches and decided right then to relocate. Even then Warrenton was a foodie paradise. Now it’s our great escape.”
Thompson, who often commutes with her husband, says he is the same person he is at home as on campus, “only with lower blood pressure, probably.”
What makes his blood pressure rise these days is the reduction, and even elimination of college level arts programs and what is broadly called the humanities, to make room for more courses in computer science and technology.
“I’m happy to say that at Mason, we’re fighting the good fight and encouraging engineering students to give the arts a try. But I don’t know anyone teaching the arts who hasn’t felt this pressure. It concerns me deeply. I understand the desire to explore the sciences and get careers in evolving technologies. But if you look at the people who have been the most successful in these fields, you see they are individuals with extraordinary imaginative, creative talent. Studying the arts—even if it’s just one course–is precisely how you learn to find this talent in yourself and use it. I know because, if things had just been a little bit different, I would have gone into engineering myself.”
Born in the Mississippi River town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, Davis’s childhood fascination with electronics led him to amateur (ham) radio. Asked to maintain the lighting controls at the town’s community theater, Davis noticed that it was the director, and not the actors, who shaped the play into a performance. “I can act, and I have acted when we couldn’t find an actor for a part, but I am much more interested in how to bring so many different elements—acting, set design, music, sound and, of course, lighting– together and turn it all into a performance that connects directly with the audience.”
He discovered he liked teaching and singing (he is a tenor). He graduated Lawrence University, a Wisconsin liberal arts college with a music conservatory, summa cum laude with a B.A. in Theater and Drama (where met Julie Thompson, who was studying arts management). He then went to Yale for a doctorate in dramaturgy—the study of performance. While there he made a special study of Henrik Ibsen,and translated works of the 17th century Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca.
From there he landed an assistant professorship at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and began to stage numerous theatrical productions there, and at the Baltimore Center Stage, where Julie Thompson was stage manager. Thompson also stage-managed productions at Wolf Trap and the Kennedy Center’s Washington Opera.
“While I was in Baltimore, I was contacted by the provost of George Mason. The first thing I said was, ‘Where’s that?’ I’d never heard of the place.”
He and Thompson made the drive south to the leafy Fairfax campus where Davis became artistic director of the Mason’s Theater of the First Amendment, a theater company dedicated to staging new plays that would not normally find a home in commercial or community playhouses. He and Thompson would also teach in the theater department.
“I guess you could say we came to Mason as a package deal,” Davis said, “But for me, Mason and I were a perfect fit. Things happened for me at Mason. It felt like the place where I was supposed to be. I liked, and I still like, everything about it. I was given permission, within parameters, to do great things. When openings in administration appeared and I was asked if I could fill them, it never occurred to me to say no. Could I be a dean and still could do theater, teach classes, and bring artists and performers to the campus who are excellent at what they do? Why not? Excellence is important. It inspires people. It shows the students and the community that the arts are wonderful things to study, experience, and share.”
In nearly 35 years at Mason, Davis has staged—on campus, at the Kennedy Center and at venues throughout the country—more than 40 works of theater and opera. Among the many students who have followed Davis’s teachings is Debra Smyers, Executive Director of the Fauquier Community Theatre. She earned Mason’s first Masters in Arts Management largely because of Rick Davis.
“My favorite was a theater class, Advanced Studies in Directing/Dramaturgy,” she said. One of the assignments … was to create a scene where the actors would end up in positions from a well-known painting.” Davis, she added, “is a teacher and mentor to all who work with him. On the artistic side of the arts at George Mason, from the first table read through opening night, he empowers actors and the production team.”
When he is at home, among several theater works he has in process is The 100th Meridian Project, a “multidisciplinary inquiry” into climate change that had an early work-in-progress performance last April at the Kennedy Center.
Though he is 65, he doesn’t have a thought about retirement. “I see no reason to. I’m too busy having fun.”
At least twice a month, Davis and Thompson anchor a table at Claire’s where he has his favorite Bombay Sapphire martini (shaken, not stirred). During the summer they’ll take time off and fly a four-seater Piper Cherokee airplane (Davis has a private pilot license) for sunny days and relative isolation on North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island.
“I still count the days I spend at home among my best,” Davis says. He recalls a moment shortly after he and Thompson moved to Warrenton, when their dog, a border terrier named Dickens, abruptly ran away. “We did our due diligence. We put up lost dog posters and told everyone we knew. What surprised us was the many people we didn’t know, who helped us look. When things like that happen, you know you’re living in the right place.”
Dickens was found about two weeks later, and hasn’t left since.
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This feature appears in the October 2023 issue of Haymarket-Gainesville Lifestyle Magazine. You can read the entire issue here https://issuu.com/pamkamphuis/docs/hglm_oct_2023_weband pick up copies at these locations.