If our theater community was as diverse and representative as humankind, what remarkable things could then be born?
In the summer and fall, Williamstown Theater Festival has opened a conversation — you could call it a survey, but it’s larger, not a check-box multiple choice — it’s an invitation to dream, and they have asked questions that still pull at me now, while I’m waiting for them to tell the world their 2024 season plans.
As theaters begin to reveal their summers, as WAM welcomes a new artistic director, the Globe is exploring the state of live theater in Boston, and they see some stiff challenges today. WTF is facing their share. They have uncovered well-documented challenges in their structure and culture, and as they wrestle with possible futures, have invited the community into conversation.
Cindy De La Cruz performs as a young woman returning to the Dominican Republic in Border of Lights by Guadalís Del Carmen in summer 2021. Photo courtesy of Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Last season they held talks with the community, and like many of my neighbors, I acknowledge the extent of the work they need to do. From my point of view, WTF has also shown some of the most beautifully written and diverse contemporary work I have seen in the Berkshires — Selling Kabul, Dangerous House, Cost of Living, Nine Solo Plays, Poster Boy …
So imagine all the brilliant possible answers to their first question, if they can genuinely create a place where everyone all come — and where everyone can feel respected.
Imagine Larissa Fasthorse coming to work with the Stockbridge Munsee community. WAM has brought her Thanksgiving Play here — and she works much more often within Indigenous communities, growing relationships as they weave stories together from their lived experiences.
Imagine the stories the Mohican nation might weave in all the ways they choose — oral histories, poems, flute music, dance — their lives in Wisconsin and their lives here, their language and their words for these hills.
And what if a group like the Front Porch Arts Collective could sit down with the writers and actors and directors for the nine solo plays to create new work and give them time to expand and be in community with each other — and feel genuinely comfortable and at home.
If they want local stories, they have many to tap into, past and present, back to W.E.B. DuBois and Elizabeth Freeman, and Luce Bijah and the poems she spoke aloud and the songs she sang with friends her own songs in her kitchen in Deerfield …
The Berkshires can give theater makers time to deepen their work — and space. I can dream of Double Edge Theater artists outdoors along the Hoosic River, playing hand drums and climbing trees, singing spirituals in the water, and collaborating with contemporary writers and theater makers …
We could see work like Professor Shanti Pillai’s Shakuntala re-imagined, stories that wrap around us warmly on a summer night, tapping human love and the strength of a woman and the living soul of the natural world …
Shirley Chen and Emma Galbraith share a moment of care and sadness in Man of God by Anna Ouyang Moench. Press photo courtesy of Williamstown Theatre Festival
Imagine all the people …
Brian D. Coats performs as Michel, recalling his childhood in Haiti, in Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination, and Babak Tafti appears as Taroon in ‘Selling Kabul’ at Williamstown Theatre Festival (photo by Joseph O’Malle).
May Calamawy appears as Leila in 'Selling Kabul' at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Photo by Joseph O'Malley.
