Williamstown Again Williams' Town in Summer of '25
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced a 2025 season with five full-scale productions, including two world premieres and two revivals of dramas by Tennessee Williams.
The summer festival lists the five productions on its website, which provides no information about dates and says tickets go on sale "in March."
In addition to two of his own works, Williams' influence is seen in one of the new works planned for the summer season, according to the WTF.
Williams, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was to have been included in the WTF's aborted 2020 season with a production of "A Streetcar Named Desire."
After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of that season, the festival made its production available on a streaming service.
His canon has been a longtime staple of the festival, including a 1999 production of "Camino Real" on the Main Stage. Williams himself had a summer residency in Williamstown in 1982, one year before his death.
"Camino Real" returns for 2025 along with a production of "Not About Nightingales," one of Williams' earliest works, which he penned in 1938.
Williams' "Camino Real" premiered on Broadway in 1953, six years after his best known work, "A Streetcar Named Desire."
This summer's world premieres at the WTF will be Jeremy O. Harris' "Spirit of the People" and a new work said to be "inspired by the work of Tennessee Williams."
Harris wrote "Slave Play," which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2018. He was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2022 for writing the screenplay for the film "Zola."
The Williams-inspired new work, "Untitled on Ice" is described on the WTF website as "dance/theater" and will be staged "live in an ice rink." The festival's website does not identify the rink, but Broadway publication Playbill reported the production will be staged at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Memorial Rink in North Adams.
The fifth show in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's season is a revival of the American opera "Vanessa," composed by Samuel Barber with a book by Gian Carlo Menotti. "Vanessa" was first staged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1958.
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