Erin Davie is quiet, with an unassuming manner and a voice that’s downy soft. So she’s not an obvious choice to play young Little Edie Beale in the current Broadway production of “Grey Gardens.” Because if Little Edie is anything, she isn’t quiet. She is a delightfully ambitious firecracker who harbors dreams of stardom but ends up becoming captive to her aging mother and their dilapidated East Hampton, N.Y., estate.
Still, Davie insists she understands Little Edie’s lot in life. “I tend to get people who others think are off,” the actress says sweetly, sitting in her shoebox of a dressing room at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where she makes her Broadway debut this evening. “Edie just wanted to enjoy life and beautiful things. She was doing the best she could in the circumstances she was in.”
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Of course, this Nashville native knows little of living on Long Island’s East End and wandering through the house with sweaters on her head, turban-style. And as a “horribly shy” child and the youngest of seven, she was reluctant to take to the stage. “I was a late bloomer in all kinds of ways,” Davie explains. “And I didn’t have a lot of friends.”
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So to entertain herself she sang songs from “The Little Mermaid” around the house. It wasn’t until her mom dragged her to a local performance of “Cats” that she caught the acting bug. “I was like, please, how stupid will this be? But I walked out of there thinking, ‘If I could do anything in my life, it would be that.'” The epiphany didn’t seem to do much to cure her shyness, though, because her mom still had to force her to try out for school plays. “I was careful about getting my hopes up that I could actually [succeed as an actor],” she explains. “But I still steadily went on that path.”
Davie traveled from Nashville to New York, with a pit stop at The Boston Conservatory. She toured with “Swing!” and “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” but her big break continued to elude her. Finally, she was called in to audition for an understudy role in “Grey Gardens.” “I had a callback,” she recalls, “and I missed it. Communication problems.” In the end it turned out to be serendipitous, because the casting director allowed her to come in for the role of Little Edie. “I think they kind of felt sorry for me,” she says, looking down.
Whether or not that was the case, her performance blew everyone away. “I thought it was a ruse,” says her co-star Christine Ebersole. “You couldn’t not pay attention. She has sort of an air about her that’s very patrician. It just feels like she was born to the manor.”
Of course she wasn’t, but Davie admits there are strains of “Grey Gardens” that hark back to Tennessee. “The way my mom and my grandmother talk to each other sometimes, they’re not quite as unkind as the Edies can be, but definitely yelling from room to room,” she smiles. “And the singing together. My grandmother used to be a big singer.”