Great Barrington Public Theater Reveals Summer 2025 Season Featuring Premieres of New Works and More

Following its most successful season on record, Great Barrington Public Theater is launchig into 2025 with a full lineup of new works, all written by Massachusetts playwrights.

“The productions we’ve selected for the 2025 season are both of the past and of the moment.” says GB Public Artistic Director Jim Frangione. 

The season kicks off in the Liebowitz Black Box Theater with up-and-coming playwright Maggie Kearnan’s’ How to Not Save the World with Mr Bezos, presented in association with Boston’s Playwrights Theatre. GB Public Artistic Director Jim Frangione comments, “We find ourselves in a surreal contemporary world, watching the upending and dismantling of decades, even centuries, of America’s core democratic institutions. How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos kicks off our 2025 season by challenging us, to make us think about who we are, where we’re headed as a nation, and more importantly, can we survive this, or will it make us stronger?”

Next up on the McConnell stage, GB Public Associate Artistic Director Judy Braha will direct Anne Undeland’s commissioned work, Madame Mozart, The Lacrimosa. This is the first piece to be commissioned by Great Barrington Public Theater. A live pianist accompanies the cast in Anne Undeland’s work of historical fiction about an underestimated woman struggling to survive through dint of her own sharp wits and under severe financial duress, all while living in a patriarchal society.
GB Public Associate Artistic Director Judy Braha, who has been part of the development of Madame Mozart, The Lacrimosa since it was first commissioned, says “Constanze’s plight is alive and well today. She's surrounded by men who want to steal Mozart's work and thereby his legacy, others who want to possess her body and her ideas. Sound like any women we know – sound like any women we are?”

Our final production of the season, Grant: An Evening With the General, has been a part of GB Public since 2021. Longtime audience members will remember its first Staged Reading as a part of our Wet Ink series in August 2021 as well as Treat Williams’ performance at the 2023 “Sneak Peek” Benefit.

When Treat Williams first proposed the play to GB Artistic Director Jim Frangione, he jumped at the opportunity to help develop the piece. “With the country seemingly in a bit of a civil war itself, I thought, who better than Grant to serve as an exemplar to help us understand the roots of how our currently entrenched public vitriol and political brawling could escalate into a battle between the red and the blue, or in Grant’s case, the blue and the grey. Grant was a man who unified the country through not only his battlefield command, but through his everyman appeal to a people and a nation on its knees, searching, even demanding, a durable and proven hero.” 

Grant, An Evening With the General, is a play at the crossroads of our collective past. Even as we watch events unfold today, each new revelation makes it clear to us that the very fabric of our nation is being pulled in two different directions and, the question is, will it hold together? 

Mark St. Germain has picked up the late Treat Williams’ pen to bring the finished piece to the stage. Matthew Penn returns to GB Public to direct after his success with the critically acclaimed Survival of the Unfit. 

“I wanted to help bring Treat Williams' idea to the stage.” says St. Germain, “The more I researched Grant the more impressed I was with him as a man and a leader. I was most touched by his patriotism, and a quote by him that ends the play seems frighteningly prescient: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on one side and ambition and ignorance on the other.’”

GB Public Theater is equally excited to announce the creation of a new Berkshire Voices program, Stepping Up: Plays in Development. In addition to the full summer season, GBPT will host select two works emerging out of Berkshire Voices that have previously had a public reading with GBPT. The chosen works will be given 16 hours of development with a cast and director over two to three days, culminating in a public staged reading at the Daniel Arts Center in July and August. 

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