Brooklyn goes to Williamstown
An Interview with Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Longtime Brooklyn Heights Resident
For the past 60 years, devoted theatre-goers have been making the hajj to the Mecca of summer theatre, the Williamstown Theatre Festival. The festival is located in Williamstown in the Berkshires on the stunning campus of Williams College. Each season, the Festival assembles actors, playwrights, designers and directors for productions of classic works and new plays.
In 2013, Mandy Greenfield, formerly the artistic producer of the Manhattan Theatre Club (and longtime Brooklyn Heights resident), was hired to become artistic director at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF). Greenfield, who has lived in the Heights since 2004, oversees the selection of plays and musicals for the two performance spaces at WTF: the Main Stage and the Nikos Stage, named in honor of the co-founder of WTF, Yale Drama School Professor Nikos Psacharopoulos. It was his decision to make sure that WTF wouldn’t be a typical summer stock theatre, but rather a festival unafraid to mount serious and challenging plays by Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Schiller, Arthur Miller, Tenessee Williams and Tom Stoppard, in addition to offering a welcome mat to new playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein, John Guare, Marcia Norman, Christopher Durang, A.R. Gurney and Richard Nelson.
Among the notable actors who have traveled to Williamstown to act in the works on the two stages are Blythe Danner, Frank Langella, Sigourney Weaver, Bradley Cooper, Christopher Walken, Gwyneth Paltrow, Calista Flockhart, Nathan Lane, Richard Chamberlain and Brooklyn’s own Marisa Tomei and Paul Giamatti.