Ahamefule J. Oluo

This solo musical and narrative stage show is a collection of seemingly unrelated stories and anecdotes that swirl and dance with a live musical score created through looped trumpet, clarinet, and drums. From acclaimed Seattle musician and writer Ahamefule J. Oluo (

 at On the Boards), this dark and humorous, uplifting and bleak, deep and silly work is about trying and failing to find order in chaos.

"As both a speaker and a musician, Ahamefule J. Oluo specializes in mellow anxiety. It’s a smooth but layered style that makes them highly agreeable to listen to and at the same time unexpectedly moving. The concentrated emotional force lurking in their ease of manner sneaks up on you."

The Things Around Us

Each weekend features a series of late night experiences. Artist line up and more information to be announced.

Late at The Annex

Performances are included as part of all weekend passes

Individual tickets will be available mid-April. Donors get first access.

Tennessee Williams

Dustin Wills

Obie award-winner Dustin Wills brings (what 

 calls) his “mad scientist zeal” back to Williamstown to reimagine this sprawling Tennessee Williams epic written in the lead up to the McCarthy trials. 

, Williams said, is “...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 Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in an imagined Latin-Mediterranean-American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature such as Don Quixote, Casanova, and Camille inhabit this phantasmagoric plaza where corruption and alienation have nearly destroyed the human spirit. Enter Kilroy, a prize-winning boxer and all-American fella with “a heart as big as the head of a baby.” In an ambitious first significant revival since the ‘99 Williamstown production, 

unfolds over a series of sixteen dizzying “blocks” and is a clarion call to the Romantics of the world—drowning in an ocean of cynicism, suspicion, and censorship—to use their indefatigable spirit as a life raft.

Camino Real

Monica Bill Barnes

Robbie Saenz de Viteri

A Monica Bill Barnes & Company Production

It’s a dance version of a memory play. With movement and language, Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri create a shared character, a woman in the middle of her life who moves with total clarity but can’t stop revealing the doubt she’s desperate to dance over. 

 is a hilarious, heartwarming look back at who we thought we were and a communal search for solace in who we’ve become.

Many Happy Returns

Jeremy O. Harris

In “one of the most hotly anticipated events in theatre” (

), visionary playwright Jeremy O. Harris returns with his first world premiere after his record-breaking 

Spirit of the People

Samuel Barber

Gian Carlo Menotti

Jacob Ashworth

Dan Schlosberg

Jacob Ashworth and Dan Schlosberg

The "categorically imaginative and radical" (

) Heartbeat Opera is creating a brand new adaptation of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti's 

 for Williamstown this summer. Samuel Barber is one of the most celebrated American composers of the twentieth century, and 

 was a hit upon arrival at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and won the Pulitzer. It could have remained in the canon as one of the great American operas of all time, but its unique brand of gothic creep and fiercely emotional music did not jive with the overly-academic tastes of the time, and over the following decades the piece receded into near-obscurity. The directors of Heartbeat Opera, "an enterprise that has already contributed more to opera's vitality than most major American opera companies," (

) have planned a reinvention of this classic, stripping away the gewgaws and doilies of its original imaginings, and allowing the riveting extremes of these palpable characters to break through. Heartbeat's version pares the work down to five singers, trapped inside their own circumstances, with a new arrangement by Dan Schlosberg.

This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one's ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living. Like a sullen Greek chorus, a third woman (the old Grandmother) condemns by her very silence the refusal first of Vanessa, then of Erika, to accept the bitter truth that life offers no solution except its own inherent struggle. When Vanessa, in her final eagerness to embrace life, realizes this truth, it is perhaps too late.


This is a Heartbeat Opera Production co-developed with and presented by Williamstown Theatre Festival

Vanessa

Will Davis

Director Will Davis is creating a wholly original, poetic, entertaining, and site-specific performance for W71, inspired by the work of Tennessee Williams, and redefining what we mean when we say theatre and the phrase “skating on thin ice.”

Untitled on Ice

Robert O'Hara

Chris Messina

1938. Hitler is invading Austria, Stalin is putting on show trials, America is lynching Black people, thousands are rotting in state prisons, the world is slowly climbing out of the Great Depression, Hollywood is filming 

, all while a 27 year old Tennessee Williams is pulling all-nighters to finish a blistering homoerotic Prison Drama. He would never live to see a production of this early masterpiece. 

 is a front row seat to America’s prison industrial complex whose atrocities are too often avoided and denied. Director Robert O’Hara (

), will immerse us in this searing testament to what happens when we cage men, remove their humanity, and let them rot while the ‘outside world’ is run by rich, entitled gangsters.