Because the Williamstown Theatre Pageant returns this weekend for its 71st summer season season, the northwesternmost nook of Massachusetts is about to as soon as once more teem with actors, administrators, playwrights, and all method of different performers and artmakers for 18 densely packed, creatively formidable days.
Though the 2025 pageant celebrates the work of Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Need, Cat on a Scorching Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and numerous different Southern Gothic classics, W71 is studiously unnostalgic, its references to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter embracing ingenuity and invention. These embrace a manufacturing of Camino Actual directed by Dustin Wills and starring Pamela Anderson, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, and Whitney Peak, in addition to Will Davis’s The Gig: After Moise and the World of Purpose, an adaptation of Williams’s 1975 novel staged… on an ice rink.
The pageant itself has additionally been remodeled by the addition of a Inventive Collective to its management construction. The inaugural group, assembled to assist curate the summer season’s programming, is made up of playwright Jeremy O. Harris—who additionally has a brand new present, Spirit of the Folks, premiering at WTF—Kaia Gerber and her Library Science co-founder Alyssa Reeder, producer and entrepreneur Alex Stoclet, and dancer Christopher Rudd.
“Tennessee Williams, in an interview with Jason Grissom, as soon as stated, ‘There’s magic in these woods,’ in regard to the verdant woods round Williamstown I’ve discovered myself on this summer season,” Harris tells Vogue in an electronic mail. “He was proper: There’s a magic to the insanity of constructing theater out right here that has contaminated all of us this summer season. Maybe it’s the giddy ‘theatre camp for adults’ vitality, or simply the methods during which so many new theater artists—Katina [Medina Mora, director of Spirit of the People], Nicholas [Alexander Chavez], Whitney [Peak], Amber [Heard, also of Spirit of the People], and plenty of extra—have thrown themselves headfirst into this world and aren’t simply maintaining however pacing a few of their friends.”
He provides, “I’m in awe of every of the folks assembled this summer season, and I hope the expertise of assembly these beautiful works of uncooked, formidable artwork offers you one thing to chew on as all of us dive headlong into this precarious second in American historical past.”
Right here, in a form of curtain-raiser, Hunter Abrams and Sam Lee seize members of the casts and artistic groups behind Camino Actual, Spirit of the Folks, Not About Nightingales (one other reimagined Williams work on the pageant this summer season), a brand new model of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1958 opera Vanessa, and The Gig: After Moise and the World of Purpose on location in Williamstown. Blissful WTF-ing!
