You weren’t likely to miss Jeremy O. Harris on Sunday in the lobby of the ’62 Center for Theater & Dance. At 6-foot-5, plus hair, he stood a head or more above the babble of the crowd. Dressed as always to delight, this time in bright striped pants and a faux-needlepoint floral top, he looked like a maypole, people swirling around him. Or maybe he was more of a lightning rod; as the creative director for this year’s Williamstown Theater Festival, his brief was to bring the buzz to an institution that needed it, without burning the place down.
But having spent three days racing from one event he had programmed to another, sometimes with barely a half-hour to catch a bite in between, I began to think of Harris, the “Slave Play” playwright and walking Rolodex, as something else, too: a ringmaster, half visionary, half hokum. Come see the what-are-they-doing-here stars! (Pamela Anderson in “Camino Real”? Why not?) Dare to experience the melodrama on ice! (Change out of those open-toe shoes, missy!) Wonder at the endless parades of beefcake! (Harris’s play “Spirit of the People,” one of the centerpiece events, might well have been called “Men in Thongs.”)
In short, the long-hallowed, lately-harrowed festival is nothing this year if not a circus.
Circuses can be fun if you bring few expectations. I tried to lower mine, but it was difficult, given the more traditional theatrical pleasures I’d experienced during visits here over the course of 45 summers. (In 1980, less pleasurably, I was a “general assistant,” staying up all night slinging waffles and getting yelled at.) More recently, complaints of unfair treatment, racial discrimination and unsafe working conditions had made the festival’s operating model untenable, eventually leading to this year’s mad experimentation.
Harris himself seemed to acknowledge the madness, telling my colleague Michael Paulson that the season, loosely based on European models and focused on the world of Tennessee Williams, might produce “jewels” from “raw, weird things” or might be “a colossal failure.”
He was right. On both counts.
I don’t want to ding an idea still aborning, and it’s nice that he’s pitched a very big tent. But “raw” is putting it mildly. Much of what I saw during the first of the festival’s three public weekends was under-rehearsed or overthought. Some of it was merely baffling. The Williams connections sometimes seemed stretched to the vanishing point and other times so tightly wound as to suggest parody. Ticketing, including weekend passes for preset “itineraries,” was bizarrely complicated, with seven core events plus installations, pop-ups and late-night hangs. Few of them started on time, and fewer ended that way.
But chaos is not itself failure, and certainly it did not prevent some of the promised jewels from shining. Top among them was Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa,” presented at the festival in a version vastly reduced from the one audiences saw at its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1958. Some small roles along with the entire chorus were cut, and the original’s large orchestra became a seven-player band. It now tells its story — about a woman who has barely moved for 20 years, hoping to remain beautiful for the return of her lover — in just 100 enthralling minutes.
Unlike many abridged operas, this one lost little in being concentrated, partly because Gian Carlo Menotti’s intense, almost neurotic libretto profits, like a wailing babe, from tight swaddling. At Williamstown, the tight swaddling came in the form of R.B. Schlather’s chic, disciplined, minimalist production, using shadows cast on a long white wall to create a devastating X-ray of the story. A top-notch cast a few feet from my face wailed thrillingly.
Did this have anything to do with Williams? You could perhaps connect the gothic aspects of “Vanessa” to the playwright’s hothouse style, and certainly Vanessa herself belongs in the pantheon of floridly suffering straight women like Blanche DuBois and Alexandra Del Lago created and flayed by gay authors.
I got to see more of those women back at the Center for Theater & Dance, where three plays were running in repertory. In Harris’s “Spirit of the People,” the woman was Genevieve, a brittle yet entitled Canadian in Mexico. Played by Amber Heard in her professional stage debut, she becomes a mezcal impresario and a kind of death doula to a circle of toxic queer tourists in skimpy beachwear. I can’t grade the play itself — critics were asked not to review it — but I can give it five out of five beefcake stars, and five as well for Williams relevance.
Indeed, “Spirit of the People” (a pun, in part, on the mezcal) is in some ways a Williams collage, drawing heavily on all his plays — Heard ends up on a hot tin roof — but especially “Camino Real,” a surrealistic hodgepodge from 1953. The festival’s big, handsome production of that experimental work, directed by Dustin Wills, did not alas justify its revival, except as an object of historical interest for Williams completists. Also, admittedly, for beefcake completists: In the central role of Kilroy, Nicholas Alexander Chavez channeled Marlon Brando in a white T-shirt about 10 sizes too small and distressed to the point of transparency.
I’m hardly objecting to sexy men — or women, for that matter. (Anderson, as the tragic if often inaudible Camille figure, was a knockout in strapless black velvet.) But when buried sexuality is unburied, other considerations get shoved aside. That was the case with Williams’s “Not About Nightingales,” a 1938 drama not produced in his lifetime — with good cause in two senses. (It’s an impassioned but sloppy cry for prison reform.) In exploring the familiar trope of jailhouse homoeroticism even where Williams took care to suppress it, Robert O’Hara’s otherwise sturdy production did the playwright’s plea no favors.
It’s disappointing that the three big plays at the Center for Theater & Dance were the new offerings least reminiscent of the old festival’s excellence, despite its intention to honor a connection to Williams going back to 1956. But you can’t really honor what you don’t quite trust. The names of the sandwiches at Pappa Charlie’s Deli on Spring Street, where playgoers dashed for quick bites between shows, may still honor beloved Williamstown stars — the Blythe Danner (tuna and sprouts); the Olympia Dukakis (feta and avocado) — but the archival production photos that used to line the halls of the main stage were gone.
If the past seemed to require re-education or even redaction, perhaps that’s why the three shows at the so-called Annex, four miles east on Route 2, felt freer and more satisfying than the ones in Williamstown proper. The Annex has no theatrical history, having until recently been a Rent-A-Center and before that a Price Chopper.
Along with “Vanessa,” the Annex offered two fine shows. On Friday afternoon, “The Things Around Us,” an hourlong solo by the droll multi-instrumentalist Ahamefule J. Oluo, was a promising start to the weekend, exploring through melancholy stories interspersed with hypnotic music the interpenetration of opposites: past and future, nothing and everything, order and chaos. And then, on Sunday morning, came the joyful bookend: “Many Happy Returns,” a dance piece by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri. Sprightly, humorous, with a motif of finger snaps to go with oldies like “Take Good Care of My Baby,” it told as lightly as possible the tale of four inseparable high school friends now separated except in memory.
None of the Annex shows, it bears noting, were plays, and all were jobbed in. “Vanessa” was created for the festival by the New York City-based Heartbeat Opera; “The Things Around Us” has been on tour for a while; “Many Happy Returns” ran for a few weeks in January at Playwrights Horizons.
Also not a play was the seventh core offering, the one on ice. At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.
That one of the characters in the source material is in fact a skater seemed a very thin thread to hang the concept on. But the ideas binding the other offerings were hardly more robust. That Williams celebrated “the outcast and derelict and the desperate” (as he wrote in a letter quoted in the festival program) is a lovely notion, but not much of an organizing principle. It would exclude almost nothing ever written, sung, danced or skated.
Perhaps the more salient connection was Harris; it seemed that his imagination was the main thing being celebrated and the only glue holding the weekend together. (He narrated “The Gig”; his niece and nephew performed in “Camino Real.”) Fair enough; Nikos Psacharopoulos, a festival founder, ran the place for decades as a cult of personality despite having one of the worst personalities I’ve ever encountered. Harris at least is charming.
And if his primary goal was to use his cultural currency to serve artists while secondarily challenging audiences who don’t mind spending money on duds in the hope of the occasional jewel, perhaps he succeeded. The big tent of creativity he designed was mostly sideshows, but it wasn’t entirely empty.
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