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Williamstown Theatre Festival announces shortened indoor summer season as internal improvement measures continue

Williamstown Theatre Festival
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The Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced its first summer season back inside its home on the Williams College campus since 2019. After a scuttled 2020 season and an outdoor 2021 version, the six-week, three show schedule that begins in July is shorter than usual. On the slate are comedic thriller “Man of God,” musical “Most Happy in Concert,” and the world premiere of WTF-commissioned drama “We Are Continuous.”

It’s also the first season since a damning September Los Angeles Times exposé brought to light a litany of concerns about dangerous working conditions and systemic racism at the festival. Interim Artistic Director Jenny Gersten, who returned to WTF after Mandy Greenfield’s abrupt departure in October, spoke with WAMC today about how WTF is working to change its internal culture.

GERSTEN: Williamstown Theatre Festival was created in an era when summer stock theatre was starting to burgeon in this country. And so there was a real sort of desire to bring people up to the campus at Williams College and bring up a company of actors and other theater makers who made theater as well as they could in the period of time when the theater was available when the college wasn't in session. And that summer stock mentality, or that summer stock way of making theater, was all hands on deck and everybody do all the different things. So I think in 1955, when the Board of Trade and other members of the community formed what was then called the Williamstown Summer Theatre, I think, the actors were there to be in the plays, but also to build the sets and they worked, you know, wild numbers of hours, and it sort of grew from there. And we, of course, over many, many, many decades, Williamstown gained an incredible professional reputation for building extraordinary sets and having so many young actors and professional actors sharing the stage to do these grand productions. But it was with the cost of asking people to do a lot of additional labor that was often unpaid. So I think in this moment when the theatre industry, and many other industries, frankly, are looking at, you know, equity and fair labor practices, we're trying to address that in our own model. And so we have now a season where everyone will be compensated for their labor, and we're trying to implement a training program as part of that. But it means that there are fewer people to do the same amount of work, right? So I think this season of three plays, as compared to previous Williamstown Theatre Festival seasons back before the pandemic, which were comprised of 10 productions or seven productions more recently, it's smaller this year, because we didn't want to bite off more than we could chew. We want it to be excellent in what we did, and make sure that everyone, both audiences and the people who are making these shows, had a fantastic experience back at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. So that's our goal this summer.

WAMC: What do you see as the metrics of success for this effort to try out a new approach to the festival? How are you going to sort of gather feedback from people inside the program and outside the program to gauge how successful this new effort’s going to be?

Well, outside the program, I think we can gauge it mostly by the usual metrics we use, which is critical response, popular response, are people buying tickets, do they laugh and cry and applaud when the show is happening or when it's over, do they tell their friends about it- Those are the metrics we tend to use to know that we've been successful. Personally, Josh, the thing I really want, my sort of two basic goals that I think we talked about a couple of months ago. One is I really hope people experience joy inside our theaters this summer, however that is expressed. And I really want to make sure that we, you know, take care of people. I mean, I'm really hoping for excellence and care. And then I think broadly, in terms of the inside community, the people who work with us, I think we’ll engage an outside consultant to gather feedback so that it's a third party who's gathering the information and then telling us their findings.

Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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