Two boys sit on a fire escape together, tracing stars in the city sky.
They are brothers, and they have lost their father — but now the older brother is a memory, and his younger brother and his mother are facing his loss. Myles and Gideon came to a Berkshire stage in the world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’ When Storms Are Born at Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Theaters are thriving in the Berkshires. Some have brought nationally known playwrights and actors for more than 60 years, and today we have an expanding body of work on college stages and in repertory companies. They foster new work, and they take risks. Plays emerge here before they open Off Broadway. Musicals revive and move on to New York. And Puck calls to Oberon from the branch of a tree in Edith Wharton’s garden on a real midsummer night.
Young actors and interns gather here from across the world. Obie awardwinning veteran actors explore new work with old friends. Playwrights come for residencies in mountain cabins and coffee shops. And some have gone on to win the Pulitzer prize.
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Barrington Stage Company has been known for 25 years for re-imagining lavish musicals and taking on deep and timely challenges in its theaters. The company fills two stages in Pittsfield with concerts and performances from June to October and a festival of short plays in the winter.
READ MOREWith classics like Fiorello and contemporary work, Berkshire Theatre Group merges two historic theaters — the one of the county’s oldest continuously running performance companies, the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, and the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, built in 1903 and re-opened in 2006.
READ MOREIn 1978, a company of young actors settled in Lenox in a Gilded Age mansion that had run to seed. They lived and performed there together as a close-knit ensemble under the artistic eye of Tina Packer. In those relaxed times they could perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the […]
READ MOREOn these stages, actors and writers can take risks. A new musical can ache for a Polish woman who escapes Russia, between a World War and a revolution, and comes to Paris with little but a skill with paint and determination to rebuild.
READ MOREThe Foundry in West Stockbridge is a new center for performing and visual arts, with a flexible gallery space and a black box theater for staged readings and open mics.
READ MOREEdith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, wrote many of her best-known novels in this house, in the 10 years she lived in Lenox — from The House of Mirth to Ethan Frome. Her house is now a museum, a center of writing, music and performance, landscape and gardens, dedicated to keeping her spirit alive.
READ MOREContemporary theatre, alternative cabaret and community programs blend in a former grange hall in the Hudson River Valley.
READ MOREMusic and dance, fiction and nonfiction, patterns made of flower petals and colored sand … new work takes shape at the Marble House artist residencies.
READ MOREThe old barn at the Egremont Village Inn gives refuge on a windy night. Tables gather around an informal stage with a piano. And concerts, comedy and karaoke have been drawing a community here at the Egremont Barn for pub comfort food and music.
READ MOREPS21
an international center for music and theater, dance and film.
Chester Theatre Company ‘produces contemporary professional Equity theatre in an intimate setting, creating community,’ in the hilltowns east of the Berkshires.
READ MOREWilliams College renovated a brick-and-column theatre into the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, a 21st-century performance space, with four stages and high-end sound and video. In the fall and spring, national and international performers appear here along with student groups, and in summer it is the home of the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
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