As the Williamstown Theatre Festival returns this weekend for its 71st summer season, the northwesternmost corner of Massachusetts is set to once again teem with actors, directors, playwrights, and all manner of other performers and artmakers for 18 densely packed, creatively ambitious days.
Although the 2025 festival celebrates the work of Tennessee Williams, author of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and countless other Southern Gothic classics, W71 is studiously unnostalgic, its references to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter embracing ingenuity and invention. These include a production of Camino Real directed by Dustin Wills and starring Pamela Anderson, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, and Whitney Peak, as well as Will Davis’s The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason, an adaptation of Williams’s 1975 novel staged… on an ice rink.
The festival itself has also been transformed by the addition of a Creative Collective to its leadership structure. The inaugural group, assembled to help curate the summer’s programming, is made up of playwright Jeremy O. Harris—who also has a new show, Spirit of the People, 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, once said, ‘There’s magic in those woods,’ in regard to the verdant woods around Williamstown I’ve found myself in this summer,” Harris tells Vogue in an email. “He was right: There is a magic to the madness of making theater out here that has infected all of us this summer. Perhaps it’s the giddy ‘theatre camp for adults’ energy, or just the ways in 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 many more—have thrown themselves headfirst into this world and aren’t just keeping up but pacing some of their peers.”
He adds, “I’m in awe of each of the people assembled this summer, and I hope the experience of meeting these gorgeous works of raw, ambitious art will give you something to chew on as we all dive headlong into this precarious moment in American history.”
Here, in a kind of curtain-raiser, Hunter Abrams and Sam Lee capture members of the casts and creative teams behind Camino Real, Spirit of the People, Not About Nightingales (another reimagined Williams work at the festival this summer), a new version of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1958 opera Vanessa, and The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason on location in Williamstown. Happy WTF-ing!