Because the Williamstown Theatre Competition returns this weekend for its 71st summer season season, the northwesternmost nook of Massachusetts is ready to as soon as once more teem with actors, administrators, playwrights, and all method of different performers and artmakers for 18 densely packed, creatively bold days.
Though the 2025 pageant celebrates the work of Tennessee Williams, creator of A Streetcar Named Want, 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 embody 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 Cause, 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 Individuals, 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 mentioned, ‘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 e 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 lots 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 individuals assembled this summer season, and I hope the expertise of assembly these beautiful works of uncooked, bold 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 type of curtain-raiser, Hunter Abrams and Sam Lee seize members of the casts and artistic groups behind Camino Actual, Spirit of the Individuals, 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 Cause on location in Williamstown. Glad WTF-ing!
