By some measures, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the northern anchor of the Berkshires’ summer arts scene, is twice as big an operation as its sister theaters, Shakespeare & Company, Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Festival. Much of this is due to the 55-year-old company’s expansive on-the-job training and performance programs. In addition to the company’s two signature stages, there’s theater for children, the Greylock Project involving local youth, and two original productions performed by an ensemble of young professionals, plus a constant stream of workshop productions and an informal late-night cabaret series.
These programs and the entry-level positions in the company’s technical and design departments are largely staffed by a cadre of over 100 apprentices, interns and assistants—students and early-career professionals getting hands-on experience doing everything from mainstage supporting roles to lobby concession sales. In the course of the season, the festival hosts a contingent of around 400 in its summer home on the Williams College campus.
My Williamstown visit starts with Amanda Charlton, one of the festival’s two “artistic associates.” In her office, a clutter of desks and paper she shares with five other administrators, she walks me through the organization’s hierarchy of roles and responsibilities. At the entry level are 70 apprentices, most of them in or just out of college. They are, says Charlton, “the lifeblood of the festival. They staff the crews, build the sets, do the poster runs, pick up the cigarette butts. Their manpower makes this place run.” Not simply unpaid labor, they also take acting classes, including master classes with the visiting artists, and perform in workshop productions.
On the next tiers are the interns and assistants in the creative departments, working closely with directors and designers on the major productions and fledging their wings with workshop shows of their own. Then come the “non-Eqs,” young professionals still working toward their Actors Equity union cards, who take supporting roles in the mainstage productions, performing alongside distinguished pros.
Ten non-Eqs make up the Fellowship acting company, which creates two original shows, a musical and a straight play. The Boris Sagal and Bill Foeller Fellowships support two young directors each summer, chosen through a competitive process to develop original projects at the festival. Each show is written and rehearsed in a breakneck six-week period, and performed for two nights in the black-box Directing Studio—one of four venues in Williams College’s state-of-the-art performing arts center.
Several of the Fellowship productions have gone on to bigger things. In fact, one of last season’s shows, After the Revolution, is now playing on the Nikos Stage, the smaller of the company’s two professional stages, named for founding artistic director Nikos Psacharopoulos. I’ll be seeing this summer’s Fellowship musical tonight—a late-night performance after the current mainstage production, Six Degrees of Separation.
Six Degrees
I’m sitting in the mainstage auditorium with two of the non-Eqs. Lauren Blumenfeld and Dominic Spillane were both in the Fellowship company last summer, after also being apprentices for a season. Now they’re playing surly children of the couples who have been scammed by a charismatic con artist in Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s ingenious, troubling study of the class divide. Both performers are dizzy with enthusiasm at the opportunity to share the stage with stars Tim Daly and Margaret Colin, and even more at the surprise of having the playwright participate in the rehearsal process.
“Being with John Guare in the room the first day of rehearsal and being able to ask him, ‘What does this line mean?’—it’s pretty insane,” Blumenfeld grins.
“What makes this so unique an experience,” says Spillane, “is the professional environment where you’re actually encouraged to be a part of [it] as much as you can be. You see what it’s like to work in the professional world and to be among professional artists. It’s like a microcosm of the bigger industry.”
“Six degrees of separation” turns out to be an apt metaphor for the opportunities afforded by the festival’s training and non-Equity programs. Working with established professionals gives up-and-coming young artists priceless contacts in a business where, even more than some other industries, who you know can make all the difference. As Amanda Charlton put it to me, “We get a very high caliber of young actors, who are not getting paid to come up here, because we create these opportunities for them. They’re making relationships and meeting artists that will help them down the road.”
Williamstown has a longstanding reputation for breeding the next generation of stars. A photo exhibit in the lobby includes a shot of Christopher Reeve and Edward Herrmann as eager young men, and another of longtime festival favorite Blythe Danner and her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, who made her stage debut here.
“The theater is a very small world, amazingly small once you get out in it,” observes Wilburn Bonnell as we stand backstage behind the Six Degrees set. He’s the 27-year-old lighting department head, now in his fifth Williamstown season, overseeing a crew of 20. He describes the frenetic but militarily organized changeovers that happen overnight every Sunday/Monday, alternating between the Mainstage and the Nikos Stage.
“Thirty-six hours after one show closes, the set is struck, another is up, the lights are rehung and focused, and another show is in tech rehearsals on the stage. We couldn’t do it without the apprentices and interns—and couldn’t do it this way in New York. We just throw labor at it.”
“It is a zoo in here on changeover,” Production Manager Joel Krause chimes in. “You have 80 different-colored hard hats that hit the stage at the same time. Lighting kids are in yellow hardhats, red for scenic, green for carpenters. If you look at it from the catwalk above the stage, it looks like a bunch of different ant colonies intermingling.”
Sound technician Sean Luckey points out the hidden loudspeakers behind the Six Degrees set, one for a doorbell, another for a telephone ring. Making the audio sources location-specific, he says, not only pinpoints the sounds more accurately for the audience’s ears, but “gives the actors the world they’re in.”
He says he was interested in sound as a young child when he sang in a recording studio and was fascinated, “like a deer in the headlights,” by the microphones and other equipment. “Fifteen years later, I’m the guy who operates all that gear and makes it work.”
What’s going on
The fact that Williamstown Theatre Festival has the same initials as a certain popular acronym is not lost on the company’s marketing team. You can buy a T-shirt in the lobby with the slogan “WTF is going on!”
Before the evening performance of Six Degrees of Separation, Adam Lerman is manning one of the concession stands. He’s one of the non-Eqs, and in addition to this unskilled labor, he’s also acting in two mainstage productions: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which opened the season, and Our Town, now in rehearsal.
He says he’s had a career boost from the “degrees of separation” possibilities here. After apprenticing for a season and then acting in the children’s theater and Greylock Project, he was cast last winter in a regional production staged by WTF’s Artistic Director, Nicholas Martin. Also in the cast was Jessica Stone, who came here this summer to direct Forum. Et voila.
Wilburn Bonnell, Sean Luckey and Ryan Grossheim, the three tech guys I spoke with backstage, are all working on the Fellowship musical Western Country as sound, lighting and set designers, respectively. According to Grossheim, “The process has been really challenging. Usually you’ve got a design up there before rehearsal even starts. But with a new work that’s been redrafted and rewritten while the rehearsal process is going on, things are being added and different demands are being created. You need to make conclusions about certain things, but leave the door open to changes.”
Western Country is a country-western musical fashioned around an archetypal music-biz story with a twist. The cast of characters includes a starry-eyed newcomer, a star in crisis and—here’s where the C&W aesthetic really kicks in—a gray-haired old mother with a terminal disease. The twist is this: the young wannabe is Russian, a girl whose dream is “to be ay waystern cowntry singher.”
There’s a long line of people waiting to get into the 11 o’clock show. As the doors to the 90-seat studio theater open, we’re greeted by one of the performers, in cowboy hat, short skirt and boots, with offerings from a cigarette and candy tray. Grossheim’s honky-tonk set is dominated by a bandstand on which a four-piece country band is tuning up. Neon beer signs (borrowed from Williamstown bars) line the walls. An apprentice is perched atop a scaffold behind a follow spot. Luckey is standing at the sound board setting levels for the opening number.
As I look around the full house, it’s gratifying to see not only the young performers’ peers, but also the stars of the mainstage shows, come to see what’s “going on” with the next generation on their way up.”
Williamstown Theatre Festival, through Aug. 22, Williams College, Williamstown, (413) 597-3400, wtfestival.org.
