Yahoo Lifestyle Jeremy O. Harris, Raphael Picciarelli on Reinventing the Williamstown Theatre Festival With a Bold 2025 Season
When Jeremy O. Harris was tapped to help reinvigorate the Williamstown Theatre Festival, he didn’t just think about traditional showcases for plays and musicals.
“The American festivals that work the best and that people are most thrilled by are our music festivals,” he says. “Like Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza. They do a really good job of creating a sense of community. And that’s something that summer stock theater has let slip over the last few decades.”
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In the old days, he notes, Williamstown Theatre audiences would flock to the Berkshires and spend days going from one production to another.
“You’d have all these vacationers who would trek from New York City or the tri-state area to see Olympia Dukakis and Blyth Danner in the main stage show, but then they’d also stay and see a bunch of smaller shows with new talent like a young Bradley Cooper, whose careers they’d get to follow for decades,” he says.
Harris, the Tony-nominated writer of “Slave Play” and “Zola,” has a chance to shake things up as the inaugural creative director of the festival’s Creative Collective, a new leadership model that will see him help guide the organization’s artistic direction. And the group is hoping to recapture that spirit of community and discovery with a season that will draw its inspiration from that master of Southern drama, Tennessee Williams.
“We want to evoke, either directly or indirectly, memories of Tennessee Williams and what his contributions to the theater were,” Williams says.
That means highlighting some of Williams’ lesser-known or more polarizing works, such as “Camino Real,” a fever dream of a show that will be reimagined by Lucille Lortel Award-winning theatre and opera director Dustin Wills, as well as “Not About Nightingales,” one of the playwright’s early works that director Robert O’Hara will use to interrogate America’s prison industrial complex.
“Do you want to see another ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ or ‘Glass Menagerie’?” Williams says. “The trouble of someone who is as legendary as Tennessee Williams is that the things that are most lauded are so overdone. So we wanted to wander away from those best-known works.”
Not everything that the festival stages will have been authored by Williams. Director Will Davis will create a wholly original piece inspired by Williams’ work, that will take place on ice at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink. There’s also “Vanessa,” a reimagining of Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chamber opera. And the organization says it plans to keep adding shows and events over the next few weeks.
“We’re really pushing the form in really expressive ways,” says Raphael Picciarelli, Williamstown Theatre’s managing director, strategy and transformation, who has worked closely with Harris. “We want this season to be a reflection of many different sensibilities and many different artists.”
Williamstown is still one of the country’s most prestigious festivals, but it has endured a bruising period, one that saw major leadership shakeups, as well as allegations of a “toxic work culture” that left the organization reeling after they were made public in 2021. At the same time, the theater world, particularly in the non-profit space, has suffered from declining attendance that threatens its financial underpinnings. The hope is that a new artistic vision will reinvigorate Williamstown and allow it to attract new festival-goers.
“We’re really taking a big swing,” says Picciarelli. “We’re doing some of the biggest shows that that we can do, and that’s on purpose. What we’re after is scale. What we’re after is building something that feels like a cultural phenomenon that people have to be at the heart of in order to understand what’s happening. A few years ago, we had two options — either shrink to survive or scale to thrive. We chose to grow.”
“It’s kind of a dilapidated building right now, but the foundations are still really strong,” Harris adds. “So hopefully we can build upon those foundations and rebuild it bigger and better than it was before.”
The idea of the Creative Collective, Picciarelli says, was to include a guest curation model, which would help the festival amplify a wider range of voices and a more diverse array of projects. In addition to Harris, the other members include actor, model, and co-founder of the online book club “Library Science,” Kaia Gerber and her co-founder Alyssa Reeder, entrepreneur and producer Alex Stoclet, and dancer Christopher Rudd. The season they have curated will run over the course of multiple weekends beginning July 17. To help ensure that Williamstown is more of a cultural gathering, patrons can buy a pass that guarantees tickets to eight core projects, and the option to add additional events to their itinerary.
“We want to drive home this effort to make this a full experience and you’re not just coming to see one show,” says Picciarelli. “It feels really important to us that there’s a bigger thing to engage with.”
Perhaps the buzziest project is the world premiere of “Spirit of the People,” Harris’ new play. According to the official description, the show “confronts uncomfortable truths about land and what it means to destroy it.” Harris says it represents a huge creative risk, comparing it to the leap that Williams took with “Camino Real,” which was much more surreal and expressionistic than his previous plays.
“This is a really ambitious and different play for me,” Harris says. “I wanted to challenge myself. The play is half in Spanish, and I don’t speak Spanish. The play has a significant level of prose within it. I’m not a prose writer. I’m trying a lot of different things.”
Helping to program the 2025 season has also led Harris to reflect on Williams’ influence on his own work.
“I am the sort of inheritor of a legacy related to Tennessee,” he says. “I’m queer. I’m from the South. I love writing about ladies. I feel a kinship to him. I never got to meet him, but I adore him.”
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