
Pamela Anderson. Amber Heard. Dancing on ice. All in one theater festival.
For die-hards, all that and more can be experienced as a whirlwind three- or four-day binge during one of the festival's three consecutive long weekends, which conclude Aug. 3. (Choosing shows a la carte is also an option. I saw eight in 48 hours.) Spread across four venues — two regular stages, a black box in a strip mall and an ice rink bordering a graveyard — the concentrated programming is a weekender-friendly feast of risky and captivating multidisciplinary performance.
It's a big swing from a legacy institution that until recently appeared on the brink of collapse. A longtime magnet for top talent and incubator for New York productions, Williamstown has struggled to find a way forward since 2020, when operations shut down due to the pandemic, and an investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed a history of troubling labor practices. As the nonprofit has endeavored to remake its creative and financial model, visits there in recent years have been characterized by half-staged works in half-empty theaters.
Not so on opening weekend of the reimagined festival, the first in a three-year term as creative director for Harris, the 'Slave Play' author whose career includes screenwriting, producing, acting (in a recurring role on 'Emily in Paris') and being Extremely Online. The world premiere of his new play stars Amber Heard, ushering in her self-described 'theatre era.' There are sufficient faces from young Hollywood among the casts — such as Nicholas Alexander Chavez of 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,' Whitney Peak of 'Gossip Girl' and Tonatiuh of the upcoming Jennifer Lopez-starring 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' — that Vogue did a photo spread. Crowds flush with industry insiders spilled onto the main stage lawn between acts and perched elbow-to-elbow at area restaurants. A giddy conviction of stamina accompanied the comparison of itineraries. (There are six different routes to seeing the core lineup, depending on how many days you have.)
Tennessee Williams is the season's curatorial inspiration, and the recurring themes are especially suited to midsummer heat: memory and existentialism, languor and confinement, horniness and forbidden desire. The vibes are loose-limbed and playful, irreverent toward convention but mindful of its place among the region's tony patrons. Three of the offerings are full-length plays, two by Williams — the surreal and purgatorial 'Camino Real' and the posthumously published prison drama 'Not About Nightingales' — and Harris's own boozy oddity steeped in Williamsian influence, 'Spirit of the People.'
That play's title, a reference to mescal and the modest means of its original distillers, characterizes the festival lineup as a whole: Significant barriers to entry notwithstanding (getting here isn't easy, and staying isn't cheap), there's a pervasive effort to ensure that everything presented can be at least understood by anyone living in present reality. (With the exception of 'Camino Real,' but more on that in a minute.) Harris's mission as both a playwright and producer to position theater as vibrant pop culture gives this season the buzzy air of a music or film festival.
'Spirit of the People' is an overfilled and sloshing glass raised in that direction. The story is one I happen to recognize, as a frequent visitor to the coastal hamlet of Zipolite, where a heartbroken Canadian woman (played by Heard) decamps to reinvent herself as the owner of a Mexican mescaleria. A group of American millennials (played by Brandon Flynn and two 'Slave Play' alums, Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer, among others) overstays their vacations, and Harris engages in anthropological study of their queerness (image obsession, compulsive mating, drugs, etc.) while mining the impacts of Western tourism on the land and its people.
Where 'Slave Play' zeroed in on race and desire, here Harris broadens his lens to explore how power functions across borders by means of money and ignorant entitlement. The play, directed beautifully here by Katina Medina Mora, brims with compelling insights on contemporary anxieties (the dangers of AI, the sullying of social ideals under capitalism, etc.), but is also overrun with what we in the community call 'gay mess' (petty rivalries, bed-hopping and the like) and with heavy-handed reveries about the symbolic significance of mescal. As with pours of straight liquor, moderation will be key to the play's future. (Like several shows on opening weekend, it ran significantly over the approximated run time, clocking in at over three hours.)
'Slave Play' director Robert O'Hara delivers 'Not About Nightingales' as an erotic fever dream, in which the inmates of an Alcatraz-like island and their weasel-like warden (Chris Messina) are in heat. Written by Williams in 1938 and inspired by real events at a Pennsylvania prison, the play chronicles an uprising over wretched food in a brig that resembles a Berlin sex club.
The raw animality of the staging emphasizes everyone's appetite for both survival and satisfaction. A triangle of desire develops between Messina's warden, his new secretary (Elizabeth Lail, of 'You') and the Black prisoner (William Jackson Harper, of 'The Good Place') he beats into submission before recruiting him to work in his office. O'Hara draws out the story's resonance not only with present mass incarceration but with the legacy of chattel slavery. It's a brutal production with a touch of Old Hollywood noir and the most affecting of the season's full-length dramas.
'Camino Real,' in which a menagerie of characters (among them Don Quixote, Casanova and Lord Byron), rattle around a carceral town square, is the most remote. The staging from director Dustin Wills evokes a desert landscape by Dalí and is equally beguiling to behold and confounding to interpret. Making sense of the play, a departure for Williams into modernist abstraction, may be beside the point — the author defended its rife symbolism as 'nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.'
Funnily enough, of the sprawl of ensemble members, Anderson is the most engaging and accessible. She has no great facility with language or modulation, and a tendency to swallow words — but her unaffected air is endearing and suited to absurdism. As the beleaguered and faded beauty Marguerite, she got the most laughs and a mid-show round of applause.
The fest's other happenings — most of them in what's called the Annex, a hollowed-out Price Chopper outfitted into an elongated playing space — benefit from their inclusion in a broader lineup that offers a wide berth for experimentation.
The most striking among them, 'Vanessa,' is a chamber opera about a doomed love triangle composed by Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, themselves forbidden lovers when it premiered in 1958. (My colleague Michael Brodeur has the full review.) 'Many Happy Returns,' a dance piece from Monica Bill Barnes inspired by 'Mrs. Dalloway,' combines everyday musings addressed to the audience (by her collaborator Robbie Saenz de Viteri) with lighthearted movement she executes with wiry precision. In 'The Things Around Us,' musician and writer Ahamefule J. Oluo likewise delivers a shuffle of anecdotes that could be disparate pages torn from a memoir. They're combined with an astounding display of musicianship, in which he wails on the trumpet, controls soundboards with his feet, and creates a score by recording and looping playback in real time. In an after-midnight stand-up set, Julio Torres delivered an earnest plea for job mobility as Pigasaurus, the hog who eats food scraps on 'The Flintstones.'
The extreme-sport nature of the marathon schedule reaches its pinnacle on ice, where a virtuosic company of five skaters (lithe, limber and queer-coded) perform interpretive, disco-scored dance inspired by the Williams novel tucked into the show's title, 'The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason.' Viewers bundle up, park rinkside in folding chairs and don headphones through which Harris narrates the impressions of a struggling writer in 1970s Manhattan who dated a figure skater. Conceived by director Will Davis with ice choreographer Douglas Webster, the hour-long spectacle includes swooping, synchronous glides, passionate pas de deux and a handful of Olympic-style stunts.
The forms don't quite synthesize — you could bag the voice-over and just enjoy the icy grooves — but the daring is the point. Summer theater ought to be wild, a playground where soaring high and falling flat are both welcome results. Williamstown's reinvention is a thrilling testament to what's possible when artists are given license to let loose.
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