The Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) will shift to a “rotating collective artistic leadership model,” the organization announced in a press release on Feb. 8.
Jenny Gersten will conclude her term as the interim artistic director — a position for which the organization did not say it would find a replacement — following the 2024 summer theatre season. WTF has also hired Raphael Picciarelli as the managing director of strategy and transformation. With these changes to leadership, the festival hopes to enter its “next phase of artistic excellence,” the press release said.
The changes to leadership follow three contentious years for the Tony Award-winning festival. During and after the 2021 summer theatre season — which was held entirely outdoors due to COVID-19 precautions — WTF workers alleged unsafe working conditions. Following the 2021 season, Mandy Greenfield stepped down from her role as artistic director, and Gersten assumed the role of interim artistic director in her place, though WTF did not provide a reason for the change in leadership. In a February 2022 progress report, WTF responded to complaints with major updates to festival operations, including free housing and guaranteed time off each week for festival workers.
Though the festival returned to indoor performances for its subsequent seasons, its production schedule has been considerably lighter than the seven original productions per summer typical before the pandemic. In 2022, the festival debuted only three productions, a change it attributed to efforts to reduce the burden on festival workers. In 2023, the festival hosted just one original production — alongside several other special events — as it underwent strategic planning for the coming years, Picciarelli told the Record.
At a town hall meeting hosted by the festival last summer, WTF officials said that it would cost $1.6 million more to produce a festival season similar to its 2019 lineup. This latest set of changes to leadership is intended to prioritize the sustainability of the festival moving forward, Picciarelli said.
“The model of 2019 is not something that we’re rinsing and repeating,” he said. “The organization has moved forward from that.”
In 2024, WTF will return to a “full season” for Gersten’s final year as interim artistic director, Picciarelli said, though he did not specify the exact number of shows in the lineup. In recent years, WTF has announced its lineup in March.
The 2025 season will be the first with the rotating artistic leadership model, Picciarelli added. This change, he said, is intended to allow the organization’s artistic leadership to focus its attention solely on theatrical work, without the burden of administrative and organizational tasks.
“In recent history, the artistic director has primarily served as one of the core executives at the organization,” he said. “The shift to more distributive leadership really allows us to create an infrastructure organizationally [for] artistic leaders to do the work that they do as artistic leaders and not have to be hampered down by the many complications of leading an organization.”
The shift to a rotating artistic model will also expand the network of artists with whom the festival could collaborate, Margaret Gould Stewart, chair of the WTF’s board of trustees, wrote in an email to the Record. “This reinvention is critical to ensuring that WTF can continue to deliver on its mission now and [for] generations to come,” she said in the press release.
In the coming months, WTF plans to release more details about the organization’s new leadership model as well as the slate for its 2024 theatre season, Picciarelli said.
“We look forward to sharing more about our future vision in the coming months as we embark on an exciting next chapter for this cherished institution,” Stewart said in the press release.
