Williamstown Theatre Festival

The famed Williamstown Theatre Festival has enjoyed a star-studded history over the past 70 years with a bevy of luminaries such as Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, Christopher Reeve, Christopher Walken, Kate Burton, Olympia Dukakis, Bradley Cooper and Paul Giamatti gracing its stage.

For the past seven decades, the regional theater has launched productions that have gone on to Tony-winning Broadway and Off-Broadway runs. More than 75 works have transferred from the festival to theaters and screens around the world.

The 2025 season will be no exception, with notables such as Susan Sarandon, Kate Walsh, Tony Danza, Pamela Anderson and Chris Messina traveling to the bucolic college town to participate in a summer repertoire that includes two lesser-known Tennessee Williams plays, an ice show inspired by one of Williams’ works, a reimagined opera, and the world premiere of Spirit of the People, written by Creative Collective Creative Director Jeremy O. Harris.

Harris’s provocative new season is titled Williams, Tennessee, playing on the name of the famed 20th-century southern playwright. “A ‘theatre festival’ in 2025 is a curious proposition for a litany of reasons,” Harris says. “First of all, what is theater? And who is it for?

A theater festival in the Berkshires is an entirely different proposition altogether because it brings to mind a history of summer stock and communities that are quite foreign to those within which I was raised. But I wanted to give myself and our audience something unifying to hold onto. A theme. And because I am queer, southern and a playwright who enjoys a nice dinner and a better martini, I thought what better theme to unify a season at the historic Williamstown Theatre Festival than Williams, Tennessee.”

The festival will run July 17th through August 3rd, kicking off with award-winning theater and opera director Dustin Wills’ reimagination of Williams’ Camino Real on the MainStage. The cast includes Tony Danza, Vin Knight, Pamela Anderson and Nicholas Alexander Chavez.

Camino Real is a surreal play set in a dreamlike town called Camino Real and explores themes of disillusionment, the search for meaning and the struggle against despair. The Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in an imagined Latin-Mediterranean-American country and an inescapable condition.

Characters from history and literature such as Don Quixote, Casanova and Camille inhabit this phantasmagoric plaza where corruption and alienation have nearly destroyed the human spirit. Williams said that he wanted “to give these audiences my own sense of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water in the mountains or clouds changing shape in a gale or the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream.”

Wills says, ”Camino Real is—in my entirely objective, unwavering, factual opinion—Tennessee Williams’ greatest work.”

Simultaneously, on the NikosStage, Williams’ Not About Nightingales will be produced with Robert O’Hara directing and Elizabeth Lail, Brian Geraghty, William Jackson Harper, Sydney Lemmon and Chris Messina filling roles. It, too, runs July 17th-August 3rd.

Not About Nightingales tells the story of a hunger strike in a 1930s Pennsylvania prison where inmates are brutally punished for their actions. The play follows the experiences of these prisoners, focusing on the love story between an inmate and a prison secretary and the lengths they will go to expose the injustices they face.

Not About Nightingales was written in 1938 and was not produced until its world premiere in 1998, 60 years after it was written and more than a decade and a half after Williams’ death. O’Hara says that the fact that Williams never saw a production of his play in his lifetime “is a devastating fact to me as a playwright and director. This play is dark, dangerous and absolutely necessary.”

The only Broadway production of this play garnered six Tony Nominations, including Best Play.

Harris’ Spirit of the People will premiere on the Main State, July 17th through August 1st, with Tonatiuh, Emma Ramos, Julian Sanchez, Christopher Geary, Amandla Jahava, Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer performing. It will be directed by Katina Medina Mora.

Harris’ play explores the complex relationship between land and its destruction, focusing on “uncomfortable truths” about land ownership and cultural identity.

Harris said he was inspired to write the play by a Mexican beach that he and his friends saw change dramatically over the space of decade. “One of the major harbingers of that change was this mezcalería … that this Canadian woman started. It's a very long story and it’s really good,” he said. “Basically what she told me was that after the Spanish legalized tequila, after saying all indigenous spirits were illegal, they gave Don Julio a farm, they gave Jose Cuervo a farm–a little plantation to make tequila–(but) the workers couldn’t afford tequila. … So, they would sneak and make mezcal and drink it. … They would call tequila the ‘spirit of the kings’ and mezcal the ‘spirit of the people.’”

Harris concluded by saying, “You can’t call a play Spirit of the People in this moment and not hold some responsibility—or hold yourself to some responsibility—to ask questions about what the spirit of the people is right now.”

Returning to the Williams’ motif, Director Will Davis has created a new work inspired by a Williams’ story, The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason. To be staged at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, it features ice choreography by Douglas Webster with special choreography by US ice dancing champions and Olympic medalists, Maia and Alex Shibutani.

It will be performed by skaters Danila Berdnik, Dan Donigan, Canadian elite skater Benjamin Guthrie, Isaac Lindy and US Nationals qualifier Rohene Ward on Fridays and Saturdays on all three weekends of the festival. Those planning to attend should dress warmly as the arena is kept at 45 degrees.

Moving even farther afield, Samuel Barber's Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Vanessa, with a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, has been reimagined as a chamber opera by the Heartbeat Opera, pairing the work down to five singers with a new arrangement. The Festival’s first opera, it will be performed at The Annex, a new venue for the Williamstown Theatre Festival, located at 245 State Road in North Adams.

Vanessa premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and tells the story of a love triangle between Vanessa, her niece, Erika, and Anatol (the son of Vanessa's former lover).

Also at The Annex will be presentations of Many Happy Returns, a dance version of a memory play, with movement and language by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri. The duo created a shared character, a woman in the middle of her life who moves with total clarity but can’t stop revealing the doubt she’s desperate to dance over.

“In Many Happy Returns we’re sharing a character,” said Saenz de Viteri. “Monica is the body, moving through the memories. I’m the voice, trying to turn these quick flashes backwards into a story that helps us make sense of ourselves. It’s our version of a memory play. I don’t know if Tennessee Williams would recognize it as such but I’m grateful that he wrote Tom Wingfield (a version of Williams himself) some lines that describe our work perfectly.”

On two weekends The Annex will be the site for “late-night experiences” at 11PM, each one for one night only—Jensen McRae on July 25th; Rostram Friday, August 1st, and Delta Rae, August 2nd.

Finally, the New Play Reading Series (formerly called Fridays@3) will bring playwrights, directors and professional actors together for one week of rehearsals and an opportunity for audiences to get closer to the creative process.

This year, the series will be presented in partnership with the Clark Art Institute and will showcase White Girls Gang written by Rianna Simons, directed by Gus Heagerty and starring Kaia Gerber. It will be performed July 29 at 7PM in the auditorium at the Clark Art Institute.

Also being presented is Worms, written by Gracie Gardner, directed by Dustin Wills and featuring Susan Sarandon and Kate Walsh. The work, commissioned by WTF, will be staged July 31 at 1:30PM on The MainStage at '62 Center.

For more information or tickets call the Box Office at 413.458.3253 or tickets@wtfestival.org.