Jeremy O. Harris To Lead New WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL As Creative Director

Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced the inaugural Creative Collective of a new collaborative leadership model led by Jeremy O. Harris, along with initial projects for the Tony Award-winning theater festival's 71st season. 

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, join Jeremy O. Harris as part of the 2025 Creative Collective. 

Williamstown Theatre Festival also announced the overarching theme of the 2025 Season. Jeremy O. Harris said, “I want to give myself and you, our audience, something unifying to hold onto. A theme. And because I am queer, Southern, and a playwright who enjoys a nice dinner and a better martini, I thought what better theme to unify a season at the historic Williamstown Theatre Festival than Williams, Tennessee. Throughout the summer of 2025, I invite you to wander through multi-genre theatrical experiences: culinary, musical, choreographic, operatic… in search of the Williams that exists within them. In some cases, as is the case in our MainStage show Camino Real, the connection to Williams will be literal. In other offerings the relation might be further afield, yet the sense that each is asking questions about our canon and what's been birthed from it should permeate throughout. Because when taking on this role, the only thing I knew to be true of a theatre festival is that it is a site for experimentation and a site to question who tells our stories and why they tell them the way they do.”

The Festival will include Lucille Lortel Award-winning theatre and opera director Dustin Wills' reimagination of Camino Real by Tennessee Williams on the MainStage. Camino Real casting to be announced later this year. This sprawling phantasmagorical epic Tennessee Williams play written in 1952-53. Of Camino Real, Williams said, “...not a play that is conceived just as spoken drama. It would have to be a play whose values are mainly plastic, 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 fever dream of a story, unbothered by theatrical conventions, takes place in an imagined plaza at the end of a road in an unspecified Latin-Mediterranean-American country where corruption, cynicism, and censorship reign supreme.

In addition, WTF will produce the world premiere of Jeremy O. Harris' Spirit of the People, “one of the most hotly anticipated events in theatre” (GQ) on the MainStage. 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. Harris is workshopping this new play during a Works & Process LaunchPAD residency at Potash Hill with showings on Friday, February 7 at Mass MoCA and Sunday, February 9 at Works & Process at Guggenheim New York. 

Each of the following presentations will take place over multiple weekends, beginning July 17. 

The Festival will also present:

Not About Nightingales by Tennessee Williams will take place on the Nikos Stage and is a front row seat to America's prison industrial complex that is too often avoided and denied. Director Robert O'Hara (Slave Play) returns to Williamstown to immerse audiences in this searing testament to what happens when we leave people in prison to rot while the ‘outside world' is run by rich, entitled gangsters.

Director Will Davis will create a wholly original new work inspired by Williams' work, to take place at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink. Casting and additional creative team members for this world premiere will be announced later this year. 

Samuel Barber was one of the most celebrated American composers of the twentieth century. His music, masterfully crafted and built on romantic structures and sensibilities, is at once lyrical, rhythmically complex, and harmonically rich.  In collaboration with librettist Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber created Vanessa and won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1958. A reimagined version of this chamber opera will be presented in association with Heartbeat Opera. Director, venue, and more information to be announced. 

Picciarelli and Harris, in collaboration with the Creative Collective, are planning a season that runs over the course of multiple weekends beginning Thursday, July 17. Patrons will buy a Pass that guarantees tickets to eight core projects, and the option to add additional events to your itinerary. This reimagined programmatic model was prototyped during the WTF IS NEXT weekend, an integral part of the 2024 Season. A limited number of single tickets will also be available to productions Camino Real and Spirit of the People. Single tickets to other projects will be based on availability. For updates, please visit www.wtfestival.org.

The full slate of programming for the 2025 season, as well as the casting and creative teams for these six productions, will be announced later this year. Passes will go on sale in March. 

If you have additional questions regarding your visit, please contact our Box Office at 413 458 3253 or by email at tickets@wtfestival.org.

For more information about employment and professional training opportunities at the Festival, please visit https://recruiting.paylocity.com/recruiting/jobs/All/f561d1f9-7344-4fb2-bd3c-18a1118a8ff1/Williamstown-Theatre-Festival.

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.