WTF: Williamstown "W71" Season Without Women
The long-running festival has embraced a new leadership model without artistic staff
The Williamstown Theatre Festival, the storied Berkshires festival known for famous actors taking turns in the canon and for new play and musical development, has announced their 2025 season, themed around Tennessee Williams and headlined by a new Jeremy O. Harris play—programmed by Harris himself. WTF is offering up a curious new curatorial model, one that has resulted in a season of five “full productions” being announced without any women. No women writing, directing, nor attached as actors. None at all until yesterday, when they announced one in this year’s off-site cabaret.1
I think this is a bleak development. A year ago I commented briefly on the leadership changes at Williamstown:
“We are embarking on a journey of transformation. We’re building toward a sustainable future with an equitable model at its core, supporting continued growth for artists and staff, curating dynamic experiences for audiences near and far, and practicing audacious creativity that drives innovation and excellence in its many forms. We look forward to sharing the details of WTF's new vision and 2024 Season in the coming weeks. There’s so much more to come—more clarity, more exploration, more work, more joy, and on and on. We’re so energized and inspired by where we’re heading, and we can’t wait to embark on this journey together with you.”
All well and good, I suppose, even though there’s enough management buzzwords to render the paragraph devoid of meaning. But then you remember these two new managing directors are both white guys. Raphael Picciarelli is a branding consultant with a little theater company and a degree from NYU Tisch. He comes from Wolff Owens where he was recently on the team that rebranded the New York Botanical Garden and helped them get a, uh, new font and color schema that looks extremely 2017 (maybe he’ll try to do something about, uh, “WTF”).
So these aren’t just white guys, they’re white guy business consultants who come out of elite institutions. The very image of “transformation,” surely. It’s all a little bit on the nose, if you ask me.
Indeed, WTF is rolling out a new website, confusing embracing “W71” instead of “2025 season” still-unfinished but teasing an announcement of this year’s season, complete with a new—ugly—font for “Williamstown Theater Festival.” And I think this year’s festival is exactly the kind of program that putting a consultant in charge predicts. Though I missed the opportunity to make such an prediction at the time, not seeing the announcement a few months later that Jeremy O. Harris was joining the festival as “Creative Director” of the Festival’s “Creative Collective,” a “new artistic leadership model that will ensure boundary-breaking and diverse programming, create new opportunities for emerging artists, and foster shared ownership of the creative vision for the Festival.”
The position, for an unspecified term, seems to appoint Harris as a de-facto artistic director of the Festival, which has no artistic or literary staff and does not list Harris as staff on their website.
“The WTF Creative Collective will feature a rotating annual cohort of directors that, in collaboration with Harris, will inform the curation and programming of each season. Working in partnership with Raphael Picciarelli, WTF’s Managing Director, Strategy & Transformation, the Collective will advance the new vision of the organization through annual and seasonal programming, strategic partnerships, and development of new work. Additional members of the first Creative Collective for the 2025 season will be announced later this year.”
No such additional members were announced until this year’s season announcement a few weeks ago: Kaia Gerber, a model/actor and "online book club” founder (i.e.: influencer), and her book club co-founder Alyssa Reeder, who has a digital-media focused PR firm, Alex Stoclet an “entrepreneur and producer” who all the top search results for are just WTF’s press releases, and dancer Christopher Rudd.
This is strange. Nikos Psacharopoulos’s long tenure as co-founder and artistic director of WTF is credited by many, including Harris, as making the festival into the institution that it has been the last few decades. From their press release last May:
The Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Creative Collective, a new artistic leadership model that will ensure boundary-breaking and diverse programming, create new opportunities for emerging artists, and foster shared ownership of the creative vision for the Festival. In his term, Harris will oversee the creative direction of the Festival, programming key events and facilitating exciting and unique collaborations with artists spanning multiple disciplines.
Harris said, “I’ve made it no secret that my idea of being a theatre maker is a holistic one and my passion to write plays is only matched by my passion to see the best ones being conceived. Nikos Psacharopoulos changed the American theatre by making Williamstown not only the equivalent of a teaching hospital for an entire generation of stars, but by also creating a home on the American summer stock stage for international playwrights. It’s my goal to continue this tradition by galvanizing a new generation of nascent talents across disciplines and challenging what theatre is by bringing artists from around the world together for a summer festival that feels more like a happening. What does a theatre festival that has Jaboukie Young-White, Milo Rau, a set by Billie Eilish & Steve Lacy and a new show with Ayo Edebiri and Paul Mescal look like? I’m not sure but I’m excited to go to my little black book and find out.”
It may sound impressive to board members to name drop some famous people, but I hope that you, dear reader, are not fooled. He mentioned only two theater people: a European stage actor who made the leap to Hollywood (Mescal) and one director, the Swiss Rau—an odd choice for such a distinctly American festival. It also suggests an ignorance of the arts ecology in the Berkshires, and the festival’s own history of programming.
The concept of a collective leadership model is no cause for alarm. Other companies have such models, from the former SITI Company to The Wilma. But rather than providing permanent, co-artistic leadership, or even rotating leadership on over-lapping contracts, WTF has moved forward in perhaps the stupidest way possible: emphasizing celebrity and fame, and the network that comes with that, over the broad expertise of the field that artistic leadership traditionally has and the institutional memory that builds with it.
The issues with developing a long-term donor base seem obvious, as the institution will lack even the semblance of a long-term artistic vision, not to mention the lack of relationship building with donors that is such a key part of non-profit life. It may shock existing audiences, who have a relationship with the festival and know what to expect. Radical changes in the temperature of programming are typically built up over time, you can’t let that frog know it’s boiling or it’s going to jump out. A donor and a subscriber base is an asset, but it has expectations of what they’re supporting. I don’t think you can develop an audience out of thin air, but you can drive one away, and Williamstown is wagering that, actually, with a famous enough person, maybe you can.
But these, too, are exactly the kinds you should expect from a (re)branding consultant. At least the permanent managing director of operations and advancement seems to have been a shrewd hire: Kit Ingui, formerly of Long Wharf, started at WTF in November.
Harris is also specifically a bad choice (as his celebrity-salad quote suggests), for leading a rotating collective team, for several reasons, not the least of which being same reason I would be—I am not exactly widely-loved. Slave Play has very serious critics, and rather than representing the best of the American theater’s playwriting artistry, it represents a specifically commercial strain. I get it. Harris looks good on paper with his Yale credentials and record on Broadway, checking some key boxes for WTF, a long-time development ground for shows with Broadway potential. But Harris has also yet to show that he can repeat the success of Slave Play, which seems to owe much of its success to its controversies and provocations. Perhaps I’m wrong, and donors will be chuffed to be asked for money by a rotating platter of name theatricals, though I think the focus on spectacle poses a certain challenge to WTF’s tradition of bringing in big name actors to make more serious theater in the quietude of the Berkshires. Billing the top of your festival as a buzz-worthy play by an exciting writer to attract new audiences seems to be close to the opposite of the normal purpose of doing out-of-town tryouts and development. But I digress: it is downright bizarre to conduct a major national search for your managing director while gutting the artistic staff, in effect leaving the steering of the organization to a “managing director of strategy and transformation.” In a healthy industry, this would all be scandalous.
About this new structure, Picciarelli, said "When we were conceiving of our new artistic leadership model that will enable our vision for the future of the Festival, Jeremy was one of the first artists that came to my mind. Not only is he one of the most ambitious, bold, and talented artists working today, he also has a gift for curating and generating groundbreaking ideas. Sit with him for 10 minutes and you'll learn about an emerging avant-garde director in Berlin, the historical evolution of Jacobean tragedy, a fashion trend coming out of Paris, and an unknown writer trending on TikTok, and he'll connect all of them in fascinating and unexpected ways. I'm so thrilled to be collaborating with Jeremy and his partners in the Creative Collective to lead Williamstown Theatre Festival into its next chapter.”
Actors and playwrights can be brilliant artistic leaders, but especially without having an artistic department, WTF has chosen chaos. Picciarelli is happy to mention curation, but seems to not know any curators. And this is the bottomline—and the metanarrative in the American theater—that by not investing in artistic staff and their development, the industry is cutting off its own future. It is a bitter irony that this is also what the protests by exploited apprentices and seasonal staff at the Festival, the very inciting events in its quest for transformation, were about: not investing enough in the fundamentals of running a theater company. The appropriate answer to this would have been the same as it is to the exploitation of apprentices: scaling up and fully staffing an artistic and literary department.
WTF shows us a future of the American theater, but not because of its “expansive expression of theater where audiences will be able to engage within a concentrated experience of a full calendar of events that range from traditional theater to fully immersive experiences, and everything in between.” Williamstown is the future in that there’s not even a pretense of artistic staff jobs, and its decisions are now driven by branding and celebrity, with flourishes like “immersive experiences,” pop-ups and off-season work-in-progress showings. And rather than artistic leadership, with the premiere of a new Harris play, WTF promises self-dealing.
Proof of this, uh, bold strategy will be not just in the success of one season, but in successive seasons, and the ability to build and retain an audience as well as a donor base. It’s unclear how this will play out for Williamstown, but Harris is getting a great deal: a cool consulting gig and a world premier, and he’s using the rest of the festival to claim a lineage to, and heritage from, Tennessee Williams (the upshot for WTF management is that, should this prove a disaster, they can attempt to deflect significant blame onto Harris). This would seem to be a legitimating thing for Harris, something he hardly needs given his Yale, Broadway, and even N+1 pedigree. Yet it reveals his lack of vision, looking only backwards, ignoring contemporary writers, not even uplifting a single one of his peers.
Harris, Picciarelli, and the influencers are offering up a solipsistic season seemingly unaware of its lack of the most basic diversity: here’s a season with gay people, with black people, with a trans artist—and not a single woman. Williamstown, from 2010, was led by women, and championed women playwrights and directors. Perhaps this thoughtless misogyny mirrors the reactionary tide in American culture, where even lean-in feminism has become too much as diversity initiatives are being purged in every sector of American life. Or perhaps it’s just ego, mismanagement and bad art.
I will be reading March 12—tomorrow—at Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom St at 7 pm, alongside catch breath and Amanda Giordano Herrera in the Moonstone Arts Poetry series, hosted by Amy Saul-Zerby.
WTF announced on Monday that Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s Many Happy Returns, not a new production but a dance theater piece most recently seen at Playwrights Horizons in January, would be programmed in an off-site venue in North Adams they’re calling “The Annex,” alongside a comedian’s solo show and a rebranding of the festival cabaret to “Late at the Annex.”