Williamstown Theatre Festival is navigating a summer of substantial change, and interns and staff share their view behind the scenes as the theater works to transform its own culture.
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Alien/Nation brings the 1960s into the future
In the dark on an early spring morning, students walked into a college building. They wanted places to live and eat and study where they could feel safe. … They wanted to be heard. And they were willing to risk their lives.
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Nine playwrights celebrate Black Radical Imagination
Eartha Kitt is singing in the year 2043, and the future is a complex and raw and beautiful place … In nine new plays, actors are traveling in space and time, from a moon of Mars to Haiti, to Brooklyn on a summer night.
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Come out and play? (June 30 newsletter)
Salsa and King Lear, live music and new work … We’re coming to the part of the summer when the music and the photos and the movement can tell the story themselves.
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Berkshire creative places are adapting to a virtual world
I’ve been talking with Berkshire creative places as they try to navigate in the physically distanced world coronavirus has created and reconnect online.
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Łempicka new musical brings Parisian art to Williamstown Theatre Festival
In a studio at night, two women are holding each other. The room smells of paint and turpentine and smoke and sweat. An artist trying to build a career and raise a daughter comes to a bar after her first big opening and meets a woman who has always lived on […]
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‘The Clean House’ cracks open love, illness and joy at Williamstown Theater Festival
A woman with a spreading illness sits on a balcony, tasting apples by the sea. A younger friend sits with her, warm and afraid at the same time. The younger woman has recently lost her parents, and she remembers them alive and in love. “They laugh until laughing makes them […]
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Where Storms Are Born electrifies the Williamstown Theatre Festival
Two boys sit on a fire escape together, tracing the stars in the city sky. They are brothers, and they have lost their father. Now the older brother is a memory, and the younger brother and his mother are facing his loss, in the world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’ Where […]
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Williamstown Theatre Festival actors invoke Frederick Douglass on July 4 — BTW column
A young man looks out from the brick balcony across the crowd. When he speaks, his voice carries clearly. ‘The distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable.’ I didn’t know this was coming, and it eases my heart. I’m sitting with a group […]
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Summer theater in the Berkshires asks the nature of an American
A young man from Colombia sees New York for the first time. A pianist from Harlem sees his son for the first time. A woman speaking in sign insists on the beauty of her language. What is American? Berkshire theaters are taking on this question with a tough and broad-minded […]
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