Curtain Rises on Williamstown Theatre Festival
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Williamstown Theatre Festival kicks off another season this week. |
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Regional theater companies are always a good place to discover new work.
Usually, those works do not come from one of America's best known playwrights, much less one who has been dead for more than 40 years.
But this week the Williamstown Theatre Festival offers the world premiere of "Off the Main Road," a previously lost play by Pulitzer Prize winner William Inge.
Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actress Kyra Sedgwick headlines Director Evan Cabnet's production, with previews Tuesday and Wednesday leading to Thursday's opening night on the Main Stage of Williams College's '62 Center.
"Off the Main Road" was found in 2008 in the playwright's papers, and it is one of seven world or American premieres on the schedule for a season that runs through Aug. 23.
"My background is new work," first-year WTF Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield said this spring. "Although I think the revivals can be as new as their first-born counterparts. And the season is an amalgam of that thinking."
In fact, two of three shows not making their world premieres in Williamstown feature unconventional casting sure to make them feel newborn.
At May's second annual preview of North County's cultural institutions, Greenfield was enthusiastic when talking about the choices she made with the work of another giant of the American stage, Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten."
" 'A Moon for the Misbegotten' is obviously not a new work, but it is a deeply important American play," Greenfield said. "And in putting it into the season and approaching making it, we've decide to cast the entire Hogan family with African-American actors. And the idea is to take the text and see what happens when you do that and find it anew in 2015.
"We've heard the play read, and it's no surprise the work is startlingly still relevant and compelling and moving and difficult and funny. It is surprising it can still surprise us and open up in new ways and really look at a different piece of the American experience in rural Connecticut in the '20s that we didn't anticipate.
"I'm really excited to see how it connects with audiences."
The contemporary work "An Intervention" helps close the '62 Center's Nikos Stage from Aug. 12 to 23 as part of a twinbill with "Chewing Gum Dreams."
Both British imports will make their American debut at WTF. The two-character drama "An Intervention" will be staged with four performers rotating through the two roles in different combinations.
"It's a very interesting piece with characters named A and B," Greenfield said. "The relationship between these two characters is unclear, purposefully so, for some time in the writing.
"So we're going to use the apparatus of casting to test what happens when certain assumptions are made at lights up and you see two men, a man and a woman, different combinations of ethnicities and races and types and look at what the text can do to an audience's experience when we change the casting from performance to performance."
More information about the season and tickets can be found on the festival's website, wtfestival.org.
Tags: local theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival,
