Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris' Spirit of the People will make its world premiere as a mainstage production in this year's Williamstown Theatre Festival season, part of a newly announced spate of programming themed around Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire playwright Tennessee Williams.
Dates for the production are to be announced, along with casting and creative team. The work, according to press notes, "confronts uncomfortable truths about land and what it means to destroy it."
Also newly revealed for the upcoming season are a new production of Williams' Camino Real, to be directed by Dustin Wills on the Festival's mainstage; a Robert O'Hara-directed staging of Williams' Not About Nightingales; a world premiere performance inspired by the work of Williams directed by Will Davis and performed at the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink; and a Heartbeat Opera production of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti's Pulitzer-winning opera Vanessa.
The upcoming season is being led by Creative Collective Creative Director Harris, part of a new leadership structure for the Festival created to ensure boundary-breaking and diverse programming. Also newly announced is the rest of that creative collective, which will include Kaia Gerber and Alyssa Reeder of Library Science, Christopher Rudd, and Alex Stoclet.
"I want to give myself and you, our audience, something unifying to hold onto. A theme. And because I am queer, Southern, and a playwright who enjoys a nice dinner and a better martini, I thought what better theme to unify a season at the historic Williamstown Theatre Festival than Williams, Tennessee," says Harris in a statement. "Throughout the summer of 2025, I invite you to wander through multi-genre theatrical experiences: culinary, musical, choreographic, operatic… in search of the Williams that exists within them. In some cases, as is the case in our mainstage show Camino Real, the connection to Williams will be literal. In other offerings the relation might be further afield, yet the sense that each is asking questions about our canon and what’s been birthed from it should permeate throughout. Because when taking on this role, the only thing I knew to be true of a theatre festival is that it is a site for experimentation and a site to question who tells our stories and why they tell them the way they do.”
Further programming for the season is to be announced.
Tickets are expected to go on sale in March. Visit WTFestival.org.
