Hello, I’m Jeremy O. Harris. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to Williamstown for my inaugural year as Creative Director.
A “theatre festival” in 2025 is a curious proposition for a litany of reasons. First of all, what is theatre? And who is it for? A theatre festival in the Berkshires is an entirely different proposition altogether because it brings to mind a history of summer stock and communities that are quite foreign to those that I was raised within.
These thoughts and queries, to me, provide a very generative sort of tension that in my inaugural year I plan to exploit and explore by simply inviting the “theatre” I most want to see to happen around me for 3 weeks. Yet, I wanted to give myself and you, our audience, something unifying to hold onto. A theme. And because I am queer, southern and a playwright who enjoys a nice dinner and a better martini, I thought what better theme to unify a season at the historic Williamstown Theatre Festival than Williams, Tennessee.
Throughout the summer of 2025, I invite you to wander through multi-genre theatrical experiences: culinary, musical, choreographic, operatic… in search of the Williams that exists within them. As is the case in one of our MainStage shows, Camino Real, our NikosStage show Not About Nightingales, and an ice-dancing piece based on his work, the connection to Williams will be literal. In offerings like the world premiere of my new play Spirit of the People on the MainStage and our shows in The Annex, Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri’s Many Happy Returns, Ahamefule J. Oluo’s The Things Around Us, and Heartbeat Opera’s Vanessa , the relation might be further afield, yet the sense that each are asking questions about our canon and what’s been birthed from it should permeate throughout the grounds. Because when taking on this role, the only thing I knew to be true of a theatre festival is that it is a site for experimentation and a site to question who tells our stories and why they tell them the way they do.
I’m excited to ask that question this season with each of you.
– Jeremy O. Harris, Creative Director, Creative Collective