The unifying theme of these three weekends is the lifework of Tennessee Williams. He’s one of America’s great playwrights—one of the three greatest in my personal pantheon, along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. He is the most poetic and lyrical of that trio, the one most preoccupied with sex as a determinant of human behavior and destiny, and the one who was gay. His work has always been in the forefront at Williamstown, and its presence as a “unifying theme,” if one is needed, is perfectly appropriate. On what grounds, though? From Harris’s observation that both he and Tennessee are/were queer and southern, and that this is the significant connection between them;^(I) to the notes in the festival’s program booklet, which contain nothing substantive on the works being performed, but all you’d need to know about the authors’ queer lives and relationships; to the many references to “beefcake” and Harris’s sartorial flamboyance in the extensive NYT coverage by Jesse Green (presumably now in his “cultural correspondent” mode—see my Midsummer Minipost, 7/25/25); to the brief piece in the Washington Post aptly headed Queer Fantasia in the Berkshires, by Naveen Kumar—quite agog—everything’s out front. This isn’t just an appeal for a sympathetic indulgence for queer art, which has been granted a thousand times over, or even for the outing of gay subtext in performance, also granted though a really bad idea—there goes the tension that keeps the works in suspense. It is a centering of queerness, the installation of the queer as normative and the rest of us as the marginalized Other, to resort for a moment to academic cliché. It makes queerness itself, rather than any artistic consideration, the qualification for inclusion.^(II)

There is nothing wrong with establishing a gay theatre company, just as there is nothing wrong with founding a black, Latino, Asian-American, working peoples,’ or vegetarian theatre company, though for gays to plead that they are an excluded or suppressed minority in any of the performing arts would be ludicrous—that can’t be the reason. Whether the community of Williamstown, with its long theatrical tradition in a region almost uniquely rich in the arts, wants that as its entry in the field is another matter, and one for the town—or, rather, the portion of it that makes up the festival’s board, its donors and civic support, and most of its audience—to decide. God and Mammon know there’s plenty of local money to dispense. In that regard, Steve Barnes, a Senior Writer for the Albany Times Union, raised a valid point in his coverage of the season. He olé’d the queerness aspect and applied no great critical rigor to the performances, but he did raise the uncomfortable matter of the allocation of resources. “Is it justifiable,” he asked, “to spend what the festival says is this year’s budget, $8 million, on less than a month of performances and a total potential audience of about 20,000—if every single event is full?” He goes on to compare this with the budgets, lengths of season, and total audience served by a couple of other theatres in the region (and he could have added more), which did far more with lots less than the WTF. It’s the sort of question, along with that of the earned income-to-budget ratio, that was asked by public and private funding sources when those sources were still paying attention to the performing arts. These are all publicly accountable monies, after all, the non-profit recipients being exempt from taxation. Yet artistic quality, or more precisely the artistic impact provided by the experience, must somehow also edge into the discussion. Sometimes it is more important to contact 20,000 people with something that leaves a lasting artistic imprint than 100,000 with another brush-by bit of cultural veneer. But that is an impossible point to make these days with all but high-art purists, involving as it does the exercise of critical judgment, of opinion and taste that cannot be shored up with stats. So the question posed by Barnes stands as part of the decision “the town” must make.