Williamstown Theatre Festival 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival Brochure | Page 3

A NOTE FROM THE
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Recently, a playwright and I planned to catch up over coffee. The meeting began
by me asking him what he was working on and then a long, nearly eternal silence.
He closed his eyes and seemed to travel far away. Awkward, as the kids say.
I stirred my coffee…I checked my phone...stirred
again. The epic silence was broken when he
launched into a seemingly spontaneous, almost
hysterical monologue about the difficulty of writing,
right now… “How can anyone write anything?
How do you write in response to this political
moment? Do you attack it, dead-on? Do you write
in allegory? Do you avoid it and hope that what
comes out deals with the political landscape in
some accidental way? Or, do you just leave it to
audiences to make sense of what you’ve written?
And, regardless of what you write, how do you even
think about an audience? Do they want to confront
what is happening around them? Do they want to
run from it? Do they want to laugh? Would it just be
better to give them permission to cry? Can a play
mean anything right now? Can it reach audiences?
Can it transform them? Are we having any impact
by making theatre? Does any of this even matter?”
Feiffer and Anna Ziegler are the living playwrights
and composers who answer these questions with
the work on our stages.
Through humor and song, conflict and language,
style and substance, nuance and theatricality,
these artists bravely dramatize a diverse range
of the human experience right now. And, as
they probe and explore, craft and create, they
lay bare who we are and who we might become
as people, as families, as citizens, as a society.
Before, during and after times of political
upheaval, the theatre has been a place that
brings people together to listen, to feel, to think
and to be changed.
Ok, not the relaxing, casual coffee date I’d hoped
for, certainly. My response was simple: come to
Williamstown Theatre Festival. Whether you come to make sense of the moment
we are living in, to confront it, to escape from
it, to laugh or to cry, together — alongside
our directors, actors, designers, technicians,
craftspeople, interns, Non-Equity actors and
apprentices — we have the power to transform
and shape the world ahead of us.
Jen Silverman, Sarah Ruhl, Timothy Prager, Geoff
Morrow, Jason Kim, Harrison David Rivers, Halley Thank you for making Williamstown Theatre
Festival vital, right now. It’s what we all need.
SINCERELY,
MANDY GREENFIELD
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
WTFESTIVAL.ORG 
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