In an out-of-the-box hire to revive one of the nation’s preeminent summer theaters, the playwright, producer and actor Jeremy O. Harris has been tapped to program the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a person familiar with the company said.
The 34-year-old Slave Play playwright will lead a “creative collective” at the 70-year-old Western Massachusetts institution, which in recent years has been a prime tryout venue for Broadway. Acting alumni include Matthew Broderick, Audra McDonald and Bradley Cooper.
With a growing resumé in theater, film and television, plus 185,000 followers on TikTok and 189,000 on Instagram, Harris will aim to attract young and diverse audiences to the Williams College campus. His role isn’t expected to involve line producing. In February, Williamstown posted an opening for a managing director to oversee production, budgeting and fundraising — one of two managing directors with overlapping responsibilities to run the company. A Williamstown spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Williamstown is abandoning the traditional artistic director as CEO model, a position Jenny Gersten has held on an interim basis since November 2021. Gersten, who previously led the festival from 2010 to 2014, most recently replaced Mandy Greenfield, who resigned after reports about dangerous working conditions. For decades, Williamstown relied on unpaid or minimally-paid interns, including apprentices who paid for the privilege of working around the clock.
In 2021, Greenfield suspended the internship and apprenticeship programs. She said upon resigning that she had previously declined to renew a multi-year contract, and as in the U.K., “theatrical institutions must empower new, diverse leaders in regular, shorter intervals than is the custom in the United States.” She now works as an independent producer.
In the summer of 2019, with annual expenses of $4.6 million, Williamstown produced seven full productions, five of them world premieres. (The previous season included Lempicka, a musical that got a more favorable reception in the Berkshires than it did this spring on Broadway.) Going forward as a “more equitable” “anti-oppressive” company, “each summer season will match the capacity of the staff, in order to lessen the intensity and sense of urgency once endemic to WTF’s workplace,” Williamstown said on its website.
Williamstown’s quiet 2024 season includes just one world premiere, Pamela Palmer, a play by David Ives and directed by Walter Bobbie. There are two one-woman shows, both previously presented elsewhere: Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Mama and Rachel Bloom’s Death, Let Me Do My Show. There’s also an art installation and immersive film experience, The Plastic Bag Store, and a cabaret curated by Asmeret Ghebremichael.
As a screenwriter, Harris co-wrote the well-reviewed 2020 movie Zola and worked on the HBO series Euphoria. As a producer, he’s been involved with two Pulitzer Prize finalists — Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning and Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s Circle Jerk. Harris is presenting Maia Novi’s Invasive Species, directed by Breslin, which opens Wednesday at the Vineyard Theatre.
Harris has described Slave Play — which he wrote and developed at Yale University — as about “the sort of original sin of America and the unhealed wound of that sin and how that has permeated how we perform racial entanglement, how we embody racial entanglement and how racial entanglement haunts us.” On Broadway, at the Mark Taper Forum on the West End and this summer on the West End — in a production starring Kit Harington and Olivia Washington — the show set aside performances exclusively for Black audiences, known as Black Out nights.
“People have to be radically invited into a space, to know that they belong there,” Harris recently told the BBC. “In most places in the West, poor people and Black people have been told that they do not belong inside of the theater.”
Harris’ advocacy for theater and theater artists is well-chronicled. On March 8, 2023, Playbill ran a story about a retreat for playwrights he was leading at a hotel in Tuscany in partnership with Gucci. The New York Times followed with an on-the-ground report two weeks later.
“It’s fun to think about theater as that bad musical that your son or daughter was in, that you like suffered through,” Harris told Trevor Noah in 2021. “Theater is what made Fleabag…it’s what helped make the foundational principles all of the shows you watch on Netflix, Hulu, all of these other places.”
