Theater: Summer Camp of the Stage

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The casting would have aroused excitement on Broadway. Joanne Woodward as Amanda Wingfield, the desperate matriarch. Karen Allen, star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman, as the soulful daughter Laura. TV Star James Naughton (Trauma Center, Planet of the Apes) as Laura's "gentleman caller." And John Sayles, filmmaker (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and novelist (Union Dues), making his professional stage debut as Tom, the restless, seething son who narrates Tennessee Williams' doom-struck "memory play" about his family. Add a designer who has won a Tony nomination, a director who has mounted more than 100 productions at venues including the New York City Opera, and even a speech coach who has worked on eleven Broadway shows, and the package was one producers would hasten to sign.

This sold-out Menagerie, however, was staged for just six days, by performers working for about $400 a week, at a 479-seat theater in a woodsy resort nearly five hours by bus from Manhattan. Almost anywhere else, the production would have been an astonishment. At the Williamstown Theater Festival, it was what audiences have come to expect.

Williamstown is the summer camp of the American stage. Since the inaugural in 1955, it has attracted established stars to work with esteemed journeymen and expectant beginners. Everyone in American theater, it seems, has sojourned there, and over the years nearly 200 company members have earned awards for stage, screen or TV work. Among them: 1985 Tony Winner Stockard Channing, Oscar Winners Rita Moreno and Christopher Walken, Emmy Winner Nancy Marchand. What lures them to Williamstown? A casual atmosphere, the chance to experiment without commercial pressures and the sylvan pleasures of the Williams College campus in the Massachusetts Berkshires. This year the company staged 78 events in a variety of spaces, some for just one night. Says Woodward, who made her Williamstown debut last week: "Last year I came up to see a couple of plays and fell in love with the creative environment. You do things you wouldn't otherwise try, and you relax when you come offstage by going to watch something else." Adds Naughton, who first appeared there in 1972: "The real crime is that a place like Williamstown does not exist in the wintertime. Then we could have a true national theater."

This summer's other participants included Richard Thomas, raging through the title role in Howard Fast's bawdy, sermonic adaptation of his novel Citizen Tom Paine; Christopher Reeve, shrewdly underplaying a Barrymore-like matinee idol in a meticulous and uproarious revival of The Royal Family; and Bernadette Peters, trying out portions of Song and Dance, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravaganza that is booked to open in mid-September on Broadway.

Unlike most artistic directors, who announce their seasons long in advance and lure actors with specific roles, Williamstown's fey, mercurial Nikos Psacharopoulos makes up his schedule as he goes along, books performers with last-minute phone calls and rehearses even main-stage productions for as little as eleven days. Psacharopoulos, a Yale drama professor, joined the company as associate director its first season and became artistic director the next year. Glass Menagerie, typically, was slated four weeks before it opened, after Psacharopoulos publicly considered other potential casts.