WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL PRODUCTIONS & CASTING FOR UPCOMING 2025 SEASON
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ON MONDAY, MARCH 10
TONY AWARD®-WINNING
WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL
ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL PRODUCTIONS & CASTING
FOR ITS UPCOMING 2025 SUMMER SEASON (W71)
WEEKEND PASSES ON SALE TO DONORS STARTING
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12 AT 12PM, A NEW FESTIVAL VENUE,
AND FESTIVAL DATES
“MANY HAPPY RETURNS”
CO-CREATED AND CHOREOGRAPHED BY MONICA BILL BARNES
CO-CREATED AND WRITTEN BY ROBBIE SAENZ DE VITERI
“THE THINGS AROUND US”
THE SOLO MUSICAL
CREATED & PERFORMED BY AHAMEFULE J. OLUO
“LATE AT THE ANNEX”
A SERIES OF LATE-NIGHT EXPERIENCES WITH ROTATING ARTISTS
FROM A VARIETY OF WORLDS INCLUDING MUSIC AND DANCE
“CAMINO REAL”
WRITTEN BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
DIRECTED BY DUSTIN WILLS
“NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES”
WRITTEN BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
DIRECTED BY ROBERT O’HARA
TO FEATURE SAG AWARD WINNER CHRIS MESSINA
New York, NY (March 10, 2025) – Today, Managing Director, Strategy & Transformation, Raphael Picciarelli, and Managing Director, Operations & Advancement, Kit Ingui, announced three new productions as passes go on sale to Williamstown Theatre Festival donors starting Wednesday, March 12 at 12 PM for this new vision for Tony Award®-winning theater festival’s 71st season (W71). The complete festival takes place from July 17 through August 3.
At the center of W71 is the inaugural Creative Collective, a new collaborative leadership model, led by Jeremy O. Harris, with 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 and member of American Theatre’s “2023’s 6 to watch”, Christopher Rudd.
W71 is a multi-disciplinary theatrical eruption that investigates and celebrates playwright Tennessee Williams, as well as the spaces he inhabited and inspired. This Festival is not nostalgic, and these artists are not simply heralding this canonical icon. They are diving deep, scrutinizing the conditions that influence human behavior, and asking the question, “who tells our stories and why do they tell them the way that they do?”
This season, WTF announces “The Annex” a new venue in the North Adams Gateway Center in North Adams, MA that is being converted to a flexible performance space for an intimate, non-traditional audience experience. For W71, it will be home to four core productions.
New productions announced for W71 are:
Many Happy Returns (Friday, July 18 – Sunday, August 3 at The Annex), the acclaimed dance piece co-created and choreographed by Monica Bill Barnes and co-created and written by Robbie Saenz de Viteri.
It’s a dance version of a memory play. With movement and language, Barnes and Saenz de Viteri create 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. Many Happy Returns is a hilarious, heartwarming look back at who we thought we were and a communal search for solace in who we’ve become. Many Happy Returns casting will be announced later this year.
The Things Around Us (Thursday, July 17 – Friday, August 1 at The Annex), the new solo musical created and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo.
This narrative stage show is a collection of seemingly unrelated stories and anecdotes that swirl and dance with a live musical score created through looped trumpet, clarinet, and drums. From acclaimed Seattle musician and writer Oluo (Now I’m Fine; Susan at On the Boards), this dark and humorous, uplifting and bleak, deep, and silly work is about trying and failing to find order in chaos.
Late at the Annex (Thursday, July 17 – Saturday, August 2 at The Annex). Each weekend features a series of late-night experiences featuring artists from the worlds of music, comedy, and theatre. Artist line up and more information to be announced in the coming months.
TICKETING
Patrons will buy a Weekend Pass that guarantees tickets to eight core projects, and the option to add additional events to their itinerary.
Weekend Passes for Williamstown Theatre Festival donors go on sale Wednesday, March 12 at 12PM ET. Passes will go on sale to the general public starting Tuesday, March 18 at 12PM ET.
A Weekend Pass is the best way to experience W71 and offers a curated itinerary over the course of an entire weekend. Each of the weekends will include upwards of 10 singular events. The price of a pass remains the same whether patrons choose to join for three or four days. Patrons can select when they plan to arrive (Thursday or Friday) and depart (Saturday or Sunday).
All Weekend Passes include a reserved seat for Camino Real, Spirit of the People, and Not About Nightingales and general admission seats to Vanessa, Untitled on Ice, Many Happy Returns, The Things Around Us, and Late at The Annex. Seating assignments are based on donation level.
A number of $71 Standby Passes will be made available for each weekend as well. This option is offered at a reduced rate, includes guaranteed admission to at least two performances, and the opportunity to join standby lists for other events. Standby Passes will go on sale later this Spring.
For season updates, please visit www.wtfestival.org.
A limited number of single tickets will be available to productions Camino Real and Spirit of the People will go on sale to donors on April 15th and to the general public soon after. Single tickets to other projects will be based on availability. For updates, please visit www.wtfestival.org.
For additional questions regarding W71, please contact the Box Office at 413 458 3253 or by email at tickets@wtfestival.org.
As previously announced, the Festival will also present:
The world premiere of Jeremy O. Harris’ Spirit of the People (Thursday, July 17–Friday, August 1 and the MainStage), “one of the most hotly anticipated events in theater” (GQ). Spirit of the People casting to be announced later this year. Blistering, shocking, funny, and provocative, this new play confronts uncomfortable truths about land and what it means to destroy it.
Untitled on Ice (Friday, July 18 – Saturday, August 2 at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink). Director Will Davis will create a wholly original new work inspired by Williams’ work, to take place at the Foote Ice Skating Rink. Full title for the piece, casting, and additional creative team members for this world premiere will be announced later this year.
The “categorically imaginative and radical” (The New Yorker) Heartbeat Opera is creating a brand-new adaptation of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti‘s Vanessa (Thursday, July 17 – Sunday, August 3 at The Annex) for Williamstown this summer. Barber was one of the most celebrated American composers of the 20th century, and Vanessa was a hit upon arrival at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and won the Pulitzer. It could have remained in the canon as one of the great American operas of all time, but its unique brand of gothic creep and fiercely emotional music did not jive with the overly academic tastes of the time, and over the following decades, the piece receded into near-obscurity. The directors of Heartbeat Opera, “an enterprise that has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American opera companies,” (New York Times) have planned a reinvention of this classic, stripping away the gewgaws and doilies of its original imaginings, and allowing the riveting extremes of these palpable characters to break through. Heartbeat’s version pares the work down to five singers, trapped inside their own circumstances, with a new arrangement by Dan Schlosberg.
Camino Real (Saturday, July 19–Sunday, August 3 on the MainStage). Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award-winning theater and opera director Dustin Wills’ reimagination of the play by Tennessee Williams.
Wills brings what New York Magazine calls his “mad scientist zeal” back to Williamstown to reimagine this sprawling Williams epic written in the lead up to the McCarthy trials. Camino Real, Williams said, is “…a play that is less written than painted. A play that is painted? Why not! At least I could try. I did. And here it is.”
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. Enter Kilroy a prize-winning boxer and all-American fella with “a heart as big as the head of a baby.” In an ambitious first significant revival since the ‘99 Williamstown production, Camino Real unfolds over a series of sixteen dizzying “blocks” and is a clarion call to the Romantics of the world – drowning in an ocean of cynicism, suspicion, and censorship – to use their indefatigable spirit as a life raft.
Not About Nightingales (Thursday, July 17 – Sunday, August 3 on the NikosStage), by Tennessee Williams and directed by Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara (WTF’s A Raisin in the Sun and Slave Play), is a front row seat to America’s prison industrial complex that is too often avoided and denied featuring SAG Award winner Chris Messina and others to be announced.
- Hitler is invading Austria, Stalin is putting on show trials, America is lynching Black people, thousands are rotting in state prisons, the world is slowly climbing out of the Great Depression, Hollywood is filming The Wizard of Oz and auditioning for Gone with the Wind, all while a 27-year-old Tennessee Williams is pulling all-nighters to finish a blistering homoerotic Prison Drama. He would never live to see a production of this early masterpiece. Not About Nightingales is a front row seat to America’s prison industrial complex whose atrocities are too often avoided and denied. O’Hara will immerse us in this searing testament to what happens when we cage men, remove their humanity, and let them rot while the ‘outside world’ is run by rich, entitled gangsters.
VENUES & ADDRESSES
MainStage and NikosStage
The ’62 Center for Theatre & Dance
1000 Main Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
The Annex
North Adams Gateway Center
245 State Road, North Adams, MA 01247
Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink
1267 South Church Street, North Adams, MA 01247
ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL
After seven decades of helping to shape the American theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival is bringing emerging and professional artists together in the Berkshires to create a thrilling summer festival that expands the expression of theater and its essential role in society. The Festival will continue to produce the world premiere plays and musicals and bold new revivals that it’s come to be known for, while expanding into other forms of theatrical expression that brings many art forms together in exciting and innovative ways.
Williamstown Theatre Festival has always been, and continues to be, a creative hothouse for established and emerging artists and their work. More than 75 productions have transferred from the Festival to other regional theaters, Off-Broadway, and Broadway, with many productions being adapted for television and film. Thousands of actors, writers, designers, directors, and aspiring theater professionals from all fields that have come through the Festival to challenge themselves and their craft have gone on to prominence and recognition on Broadway, in Hollywood and beyond.
Learn more about Williamstown Theatre Festival at www.wtfestival.org. A complete new website will launch later this month.
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