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Summer in the Berkshires
Fresh air, fresh food, fine wine, and theater galore
The facilities at Williams College house the Williamstown Theater Festival
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It’s going to be a great summer for a visit to the Berkshires. View the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the Clark Museum. Hike the Appalachian Trail at Mt. Greylock. Attend a tasting at local Furnace Brook or Les Trois Emme wineries. Get a treat from the Berkshire Mountain Bakery, a local institution, and dine at John Andrew’s.
Last month, we recommended attending the Berkshire Theater Festival. Another must-see is the continuing resurrection of one of the Berkshire area’s theater institutions, The Williamstown Theater Festival. For more than 50 summers, the WTF has performed on the stages at Williams College in Williamstown, MA to great acclaim. Until last year, the theater’s productions had been falling out of favor. Last season, Williamstown made a comeback with newly appointed artistic director Nicholas Martin.
At the beginning of his tenure, Martin told the New York Times that, while being excited to continue in the tradition of WTF’s venerable history, he wants to produce more new work on the smaller and experimental Nikos Stage. But due to the economy in this, Martin’s second season, the Nikos will have three productions compared to last year’s five. The number of productions on the larger Main Stage will remain at four.
In choosing not to scale back the budget on productions but instead to scale back the number of plays and the season’s length, Martin is going with the old dictum of quality not quantity. This means that the WTF’s considerable resources will not be overtaxed, but well focused. See the full schedule below:
On The Main Stage
Children (July 1–12): WTF’s Main Stage season begins with a play by A.R. Gurney, an alum of Williams College. There are no children here, just upper class adult siblings struggling with maturity.
True West (July 15–26): Continuing on the theme of family strife, this time brotherly rivalry, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play concerns two very different men coming together in their mother’s desert abode for a weekend of drinking in which the wild west encroaches on the suburban west.
The Torch-Bearers (July 29 – August 9): The WTF professionals put on that they are amateurs in this play about aspiring theatrics in a small town. A 1920s-era forerunner in the tradition of self-effacing comedies, George Kelly’s script turns its characters’ bumbling commitment to the art of theater into mayhem and madcap laughs.
Quartermaine’s Terms (August 12–23): Quartermaine is an incompetent English teacher, and none of his Cambridge colleagues know what to do about it. In Simon Grey’s 1960s play, everyone defers to the English tradition of just getting by, with sad and sometimes comedic results.
On the Nikos Stage
Knickerbocker (July 8–19): The first of three world-premieres, Knickerbocker by Jonathan Marc Sherman explores a man’s attempt to ready himself for the birth of his first child, posing the question of whether anyone is ever truly prepared for parenthood.
What Is The Cause Of Thunder? (July 22 – August 2): In writer Noah Haidle’s new play, a veteran soap star begins to confuse her character with her self. And in contrasting her two lives, the real one always deals the harsher blows.
Caroline In Jersey (August 5–16): Melinda Lopez’s latest play concerns an actress with a fading career who has a nervous breakdown in New Jersey. She reckons with some of the inevitable yet devastating changes in life.