Star power drives both current offerings at Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is nothing new. The festival has always attracted big names, many of whom served their apprenticeships here. But the new artistic director, Jenny Gerston, who also came of age at WTF, told me recently that the mainstage season opener wasn’t originally intended to be the star vehicle that’s now playing.
Jon Robin Baitz’ Three Hotels, starring Maura Tierney (of ER fame) and Steven Weber (Wings et al.), was a last-minute replacement, and a complete gear-change from the Broadway-bound blockbuster first scheduled. It’s an understated two-hander, unfolding in a trio of sustained monologues that recount the private and professional lives of a couple whose Peace Corps ideals have been whittled away by time and moral compromises.
Spare but engrossing, acted with sensitivity and depth, it’s a play whose dramatic action occurs offstage and in word-conjured memories. The only significant onstage movement comes during the scene changes, when the title’s hotel rooms—in Morocco, the Caribbean and Mexico—are successively conjured in a choreography of large sliding wall panels.
The ability to mount a complex physical production like this is due to the ’62 Center at Williams College, a state-of-the-art facility which was under construction when Gerston left her previous WTF post in 2004 and opened the following year. She thinks the festival’s recent leadership turmoil—she’s the third AD in seven years—is partially down to the demands of this more sophisticated—and costly—creative platform.
“The building changed the whole ecosystem. It hasn’t been a seamless transition. It’s been a little bit of a square peg in a round hole. The facility is different, the economics are different, and we have to learn to adapt to that.”
One of the ways she’s adapting is by stirring things up a bit on the programming side. She’s put a couple of established classics onto the Nikos Stage, traditionally the festival’s alternative and experimental venue. The current show, however, is the debut of a new work.
The star attraction here is the playwright: caustic comedian Lewis Black. One Slight Hitch is perhaps the season’s most eagerly anticipated show, and certainly the fastest selling. But for me, it’s the most disappointing so far.
Though the play is apparently based on a true incident from Black’s younger days, any stranger-than-fiction originality has been squeezed out of this limp farce in favor of formulaic sitcom predictability. The “slight hitch” that propels the plot is a former boyfriend turning up by accident on the bride’s wedding day and creating a cascade of comic snags. A likely enough premise that’s burdened with a parade of facile stock characters: the ambivalent bride, the frantic mom and sardonic dad, the smart-ass kid sister and the horny older one, and the slacker ex-boyfriend who’s more likeable than the preppy fianc?. The script lurches through its plot points aboard a string of one-liners, some of which are pretty good but don’t hold the thing together.
The play that was supposed to open the mainstage season was You Can’t Take It With You, a masterpiece of comic clockwork and original characters, from which playwright Black could learn a thing or two.
One Slight Hitch: through July 17; Three Hotels: through July 24. Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williams College, Williamstown. (413) 597-3400, wtfestival.org.
