Sunday, Jul 27, 2025 at 2:00pm
An experience that will rock you, nourish you, move you, and take your breath away.
Schedule of Events:
2pm - Camino Real
Obie award-winner Dustin Wills brings (what New York Magazine calls) his “mad scientist zeal” back to Williamstown to reimagine this sprawling Tennessee Williams epic written in the lead up to the McCarthy trials. Camino Real, Williams said, is “...a play that is less written than painted. A play that is painted? Why not! At least I could try. I did. And here it is.”
The Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in an imagined Latin-Mediterranean-American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature such as Don Quixote, Casanova, and Camille inhabit this phantasmagoric plaza where corruption and alienation have nearly destroyed the human spirit. Enter Kilroy, a prize-winning boxer and all-American fella with “a heart as big as the head of a baby.” In an ambitious first significant revival since the ‘99 Williamstown production, Camino Real unfolds over a series of sixteen dizzying “blocks” and is a clarion call to the Romantics of the world—drowning in an ocean of cynicism, suspicion, and censorship—to use their indefatigable spirit as a life raft.
Location: MainStage Theatre – 1000 Main Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
2pm - Not About Nightingales
1938. Hitler is invading Austria, Stalin is putting on show trials, America is lynching Black people, thousands are rotting in state prisons, the world is slowly climbing out of the Great Depression, Hollywood is filming The Wizard of Oz and auditioning for Gone with the Wind, all while a 27 year old Tennessee Williams is pulling all-nighters to finish a blistering homoerotic Prison Drama. He would never live to see a production of this early masterpiece. Not About Nightingales is a front row seat to America’s prison industrial complex whose atrocities are too often avoided and denied. Director Robert O’Hara (A Raisin in the Sun and Slave Play), will immerse us in this searing testament to what happens when we cage men, remove their humanity, and let them rot while the ‘outside world’ is run by rich, entitled gangsters.
Location: NikosStage Theater – 1000 Main Street, Williamstown, MA 01267
6:30pm - Vanessa
The "categorically imaginative and radical" (New Yorker) Heartbeat Opera is creating a brand new adaptation of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti's Vanessa for Williamstown this summer. Samuel Barber is one of the most celebrated American composers of the twentieth century, and Vanessa was a hit upon arrival at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 and won the Pulitzer. It could have remained in the canon as one of the great American operas of all time, but its unique brand of gothic creep and fiercely emotional music did not jive with the overly-academic tastes of the time, and over the following decades the piece receded into near-obscurity. The directors of Heartbeat Opera, "an enterprise that has already contributed more to opera's vitality than most major American opera companies," (New York Times) have planned a reinvention of this classic, stripping away the gewgaws and doilies of its original imaginings, and allowing the riveting extremes of these palpable characters to break through. Heartbeat's version pares the work down to five singers, trapped inside their own circumstances, with a new arrangement by Dan Schlosberg.
Additional Dates:
