To attend theater at one of the great summer festivals is to step into a ritual in which the boundaries between art and atmosphere dissolve. Each has its own character: rustic, urban, rusticity-within-urbanity. Some, like Avignon, showcase the international avant-garde—whatever that might mean in these “post-avant” days. Some, like the Shaw Festival, look back and curate, museum exhibition-style. Some are scruffy and charmingly chaotic, like the Edinburgh Fringe, some stately and gemütlich like Canada’s Stratford. Last summer, I stayed within driving distance of New York City and visited three festivals in transition. The venerable Williamstown Theatre Festival has emerged from a difficult period with a radical new identity. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, held for the last time in its makeshift tent, anticipates a significantly reimagined profile when its new permanent theater opens next year. And The Public Theater reopened the beloved Delacorte Theater after a two-year renovation, restoring Shakespeare in the Park to New York City.
The summer festival experience is as much about ambiance as art. When the theater is outdoors, audiences gather on lawns or beneath tents, the hum of insects and the scent of grass mingling with the rustle of programs. Even if the theater is indoors, there’s a summery patina: patrons dress in T-shirts and (gasp) shorts. Intermission means al fresco sparkling wine or, in Europe, the ubiquitous Aperol spritz. If the casting is gala, as is often the case at Shakespeare in the Park, the line for tickets starts at 5:30 a.m. But what distinguishes these performances, especially those outdoors, is not merely repertory variety or marquee casting, but the heightened sense of contingency: the play is reactive to weather, to landscape, to the interruptions of the world beyond the stage. A breeze becomes a commentary; a thunderclap becomes a drumroll. A sighting of one of the famous Delacorte raccoons crossing the stage is as coveted as seeing Kevin Kline or Anne Hathaway declaiming Shakespeare. In such conditions, theater sheds its architectural enclosure and becomes a civic communion. There’s something about seeing theater in summer festivals that feels more closely connected to the art form’s democratic origins, its agency as a necessity of the polis, as opposed to the rest of the year when it’s mainly a commercial enterprise.
Since its modest 1987 debut—A Midsummer Night’s Dream under a borrowed tent at Manitoga—the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival has grown into a beloved if essentially community-based institution. Over the years, the company has earned acclaim for lucid, traditional stagings, mostly Shakespeare, presented without apology. The casting is homespun: local favorites with a sprinkling of conservatory-trained newcomers and the occasional ringer. As with so many summer festivals, the most memorable aspects lie in the margins: in this case, an A+ restaurant on the grounds, where audiences and cast members gather after performances to mingle and enjoy spectacular sunset views of the glorious Hudson Valley scenery. Last summer’s season was the final one performed under the long-standing open-air tent. In 2026, the company will transition to the new Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center. The old tent has been serviceable, but it provides few barriers to those two summer plagues: heat and mosquitos. The new structure promises relief and a visible new chapter for the festival.
One of the final productions in the old tent was Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, directed by the festival’s Artistic Director, Davis McCallum. This play occupies a curious perch in American theater history: a comedy at once derivative and transformative, built upon earlier scaffolds yet stamped indelibly with Wilder’s own amused intelligence. Its lineage begins in Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy’s 1842 farce Einen Jux will er sich machen, which Wilder first adapted as The Merchant of Yonkers in 1938 for the Theatre Guild. Opening on Broadway in the same year as Wilder’s epochal Our Town, the production was a flop, closing after 39 performances. Fifteen years later, at the behest of the great director Tyrone Guthrie, Wilder returned to the material, reimagining it with an expanded role for the meddlesome Dolly Levi and a sharper eye for the absurd yearnings beneath the farce. This revision, rechristened The Matchmaker, premiered in Edinburgh in 1954 before landing on Broadway in 1955, starring Ruth Gordon, where it enjoyed a healthy run and established itself as a comedy of character rather than mere contrivance. A film followed in 1958, starring Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins and Shirley MacLaine.
Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson in Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s The Matchmaker. Photo by Gabe Palacio.
And from there the play’s afterlife proved richer still as it became the foundation for Jerry Herman’s 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!, a cultural juggernaut that eclipsed Wilder’s original. Since then, revivals of The Matchmaker have only rarely surfaced. But when they do, they remind audiences of Wilder’s singular knack for pairing wit with metaphysical undertones. Beneath the play’s comic velocity lies a rueful awareness of the erosions that time and the lack of money make on human dignity. And at the same time, Wilder is always hyperaware of the strange dignity, indeed the transcendence, that lies within human foolishness. In his universe, “fool” is both an insult and a joyful description that binds humanity together in mutual folly.
The plot, on its face, moves briskly through comic archetypes that date back through commedia dell’arte to the Roman comedies. Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy, old, irascible businessman, resolves to take a young wife and engages the services of Dolly, a widow of inexhaustible resourcefulness. Dolly, however, has her own designs: she intends to ensnare Horace for herself, while simultaneously orchestrating a skein of romantic entanglements involving his naïve clerks, Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker, and the two women, Irene Molloy and Minnie Fay, who spark their rebellion against drudgery. The action spirals across mistaken appointments, concealed identities, and sudden revelations, culminating in a finale in which Dolly secures Horace’s fortune and arranges multiple marriages based not on fiscal policy but on love, a novel concept in the play’s nineteenth-century setting. If the machinery is familiar, Wilder infuses it with affectionate irony and suggests that the pragmatic human desire for connection, driven by the need for financial and emotional security, remains the truest matchmaker of all.
The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s Matchmaker unfolded with a buoyant clarity. Local favorite Nance Williamson commanded the stage as Dolly, her sly asides and telling monologues delivered with kinetic warmth and moral gravity. She wasn’t as eccentric as many of the famous inhabitors of this great role, like Booth, Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand or Bette Midler, nor would one ever describe her as electrifying. But there was a gratifying decency about her portrayal in this unpretentious production. Williamson’s real-life husband, Kurt Rhoads, was a straightforward Horace, the Yonkers “half-a-millionaire,” embodying curmudgeonly stinginess with confidence. Around them moved a nimble comic ensemble: Carl Howell was irrepressibly charming as Cornelius, bringing earnest longing to the young clerk’s quest for adventure. Tyler Bey, too old for Barnaby, gamely but not convincingly played the wide-eyed clerk. Helen Cespedes, the spitting image of Winona Ryder, blossomed as Irene Molloy, her initially cautious demeanor giving way to a sincere awakening of freedom and desire. Hello, Dolly! fans enjoyed getting to know Flora Van Huysen (Katie Hartke) and Malachi Stack (Sean McNall), two characters cut from the musical. The former is funny but expendable; the latter, a jack-of-all-trades who attaches himself to Horace, deeply embodies Wilder’s wry moral architecture.
A little over two hours’ drive north, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, conceived amid the manicured calm of Williams College in 1954, was shepherded for decades by the charismatic Nikos Psacharopoulos, who turned it into the premier summer destination for celebrities dipping their toes into Chekhov and Brecht. His blend of refinement and adventure attracted everyone from Blythe Danner to Christopher Reeve, establishing the era’s closest thing to a national repertory theater. Countless soon-to-be-famous apprentices gained experience via unpaid labor, a system that worked until it didn’t. As the culture and the business evolved, Williamstown imploded in scandal. A 2021 walkout and simultaneous revelations of unsafe working conditions exposed a deeply entrenched, problematic labor ethos that could no longer be ignored. In response, and spurred by the pandemic shutdown, the festival resolved to dismantle its operating structure. Last summer, a collective under the creative directorship of Jeremy O. Harris took over the 71st season. Scheduling focused on spotlight weekends, with attendees encouraged to come and see multiple shows and auxiliary events over a 2–3 day period, an endeavor that proved problematic, due to poor logistical planning. Programming was streamlined and (somewhat) radicalized: the season was devoted to Tennessee Williams, but without any of his most famous plays. Unlikely celebrity casting—Amber Heard! Pamela Anderson?—set the tone. One of the productions was performed on ice.
A lavish revival of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real was the centerpiece of last summer’s Williamstown programming. First staged on Broadway in 1953, it is a quintessential play maudit. Emerging from his earlier one-act Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, Williams expanded the work into a lyrical fugue of sixteen disjointed “blocks,” set in a mythical, dead-end plaza—part Latin American nowhere, part Beckettian dreamscape—where literary wanderers from Don Quixote to Casanova to Hugo’s Esmeralda to Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier drift in slow motion despair alongside a contemporary American transient, Kilroy, named for the famous World War II-era graffiti character. When it premiered in the middle of Williams’ most productive and successful period, most critics recoiled, although Brooks Atkinson grudgingly admired it. The play closed swiftly, but rare revivals, including a 1970 Lincoln Center staging with Al Pacino, revealed poetic depths. The most recent major production, also at Williamstown, was in 1999 with Ethan Hawke in a highly praised turn as Kilroy.
The cast of Camino Real. Photo by Maria Baranova.
Camino Real (pronounced, as we learn early in the play, not as one would expect in Spanish, but rather CA-mi-no REEL) is a poetic meditation on alienation, aging, and illusions—all standard Williams concerns. Kilroy, a former prize fighter with a weak heart and battered body, arrives in what seems to be a border city in an authoritarian country. “Street cleaners” periodically sweep through, picking up victims of state violence. The stage dissects the plaza into a rundown warren of residences for locals on one side and the Siete Mares hotel on the other. Gutman, the hotel’s proprietor, is part impresario, part mock philosopher. As in the film Casablanca, the hotel is filled with refugees desperate to escape to an unidentified promised land. Kilroy drifts from one surreal encounter to another, most tellingly with Esmeralda, whose virginity is mysteriously lost and ritualistically restored each day. The doomed Marguerite and Casanova try to find a connection. A large supporting cast inhabits a wide variety of eccentrics searching for meaning amid the general madness.
This search mirrors the audience’s experience: Camino Real is the very definition of a hot mess. Unlike the contemporaneous triumphant mergers of poetic language and naturalistic narrative and psychology that made Williams’ name (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, and so forth), there is little plot and even less coherent characterization to grab onto in Camino Real. It’s tough to parse, although I imagine that multiple viewings would provide some clarity. Williamstown’s production, directed by Dustin Wills, emphasized the work’s mythic delirium. The cast was impressively large, a frequent benefit of summer festivals, and the design and music conjured a surreal atmosphere. As Kilroy, the excellent Nicholas Alexander Chavez occupied the play’s bruised moral center with affecting sincerity. Whitney Peak was a strong Esmeralda, and smaller roles were taken by talented stage veterans like Henry Stram, Vin Knight, and Ato Blankson-Wood as Lord Byron, wandering in at the close of the first act to deliver a bravura monologue. In the cameo role of La Madrecita, Socorro Santiago galvanized with her three-minute scene as she keened over the possibly dead body of Kilroy.
On the debit side, Bruce McKenzie was a charisma-free Casanova. And Pamela Anderson—yes, the actress from Baywatch—was simply dreadful as Marguerite. In her defense, she had apparently been directed to act the role at a high pitch of stylization, a mode she was completely unable to sustain. She instead seemed like one of Catherine O’Hara’s delicious parodies of terrible acting. And was, in any case, virtually inaudible. Credit to the new Williamstown management for taking bold swings with programming and casting, swings which will inevitably lead to a few misses. In comments to the press, the festival’s leaders acknowledged that this had been a “soft launch” season, cobbled together quickly, and promised to build on their experience.
Also rebirthed, in a different way, was The Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare in the Park. Is there any theatrical institution in New York City more beloved? Since it’s part of The Public’s broader programming, it’s perhaps not exactly a summer festival in the sense of a discrete entity that only comes to life in the warm months. But in its atmosphere and ambiance, it is quintessentially festive, a seasonal ritual that generations of New Yorkers (and not a few tourists) have grown up with. From its audacious inception in 1954, the great Joe Papp envisioned something simple and radical: Shakespeare’s plays as public property, as communal inheritance, spoken in the open air and free to all. Starting with impromptu performances on the Lower East Side, Papp eventually carried this insurgent ideal into New York’s magnificent Central Park, planting Shakespeare amid the trees on makeshift stages. That populist gesture soon collided with the iron will of Robert Moses, then unofficial czar of all the City’s public spaces, who demanded that admission be charged in order to keep out “undesirables.” What followed was more than a bureaucratic skirmish. It ultimately defined what “public” would mean in New York. Papp prevailed, a victory that marked the end of Moses’ unshakable authority. As a result, the company gained a permanent open-air location. The Delacorte Theater opened in 1962 with The Merchant of Venice starring James Earl Jones and George C. Scott.
It’s hard to overestimate what New York City, and what the art form of theater, owes to Papp. In a song praising the impresario, the late composer and lyricist William Finn summed up his achievement:
Joe Papp never took crap
Even from Robert Moses
Joe saw a theater in Central Park
And Moses built what Joe proposed
Yes, Moses built an outdoor theater
Moses thinks it’s pork
But it lights up New York
It lights up New York!
Over six decades later, Shakespeare in the Park remains a crown jewel of New York culture, despite the increasing heat and increasing noise from the helicopters that plague the city’s skies. The productions often draw major talent thanks to the prestige and the relatively short time requirement: Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, Colleen Dewhurst, Patrick Stewart, John Lithgow, Annette Bening, and the list goes on and on. I have countless treasured memories: Raul Julia and a chilling Christopher Walken in Othello; Jeff Goldblum and a ravishing Michelle Pfeiffer in Twelfth Night; Liev Schreiber as a rousing Henry V. Occasionally, a non-Shakespeare play has made a guest appearance (Chekhov once, Brecht twice), and a few musicals have slipped in, most famously the re-imagined Pirates of Penzance in 1980.
It’s not perfect. Over the years, rising costs led to the inevitable solution of offering “free” tickets to big-money individual and corporate donors, essentially letting the rich buy their way into the theater without having to queue with the hoi polloi and reducing the number of actual free tickets. Artistically, the productions can be uneven. Famous movie stars aren’t always great at Elizabethan verse. And a certain house style has arisen in the last few decades which prioritizes facile effect over content. Many actors declaim in a generalized way in order to clarify motivation for an audience that might otherwise have trouble following the text. So we get a lot of blunt “angry” and “joyful” and “dastardly” and “angelic” sentiments pasted onto the text, instead of engaging Shakespeare’s complex web of emotions. The result can feel pandering, but only a pedant would therefore dismiss the entire enterprise. Textual and directorial virtuosity, such as one might see at the great British theaters, is beside the point. To see Shakespeare in the Park is not simply to watch a play; it is to participate in an urban rite of endurance and reward and to belong, however briefly, to a commons that cuts across class and borough lines. Kenneth Turan’s excellent book, Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told provides a gripping history of Papp’s achievement.
Yet aging infrastructure and accessibility limitations made the beloved amphitheater feel increasingly fragile. Between 2023 and 2025, the Delacorte underwent not so much a rebuilding as an overhaul: expanded backstage facilities, modernized tech, a beautiful new façade of reclaimed redwood harvested from decommissioned water towers, and, thankfully, improved and enlarged bathrooms. The grand reopening production last summer was, inevitably, Twelfth Night, in its seventh Delacorte outing. Perhaps forgivably, since many audience members are experiencing Shakespeare for the first time, the Public has become rather unadventurous when programming the summer season. Several decades ago, one could see full-scale stagings of Timon of Athens and King John. Now, repertory tends to lean toward “greatest hits,” meaning the major comedies and tragedies.
Lupita Nyong’o in the Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, directed by Saheem Ali, which reopened the revitalized Delacorte Theater and ran through September 14. Photo credit: Joan Marcus.
This Twelfth Night was directed by Saheem Ali with an emphasis on speed and clarity. The first two scenes of the play were reversed, in order to give Viola the first big entrance, and prudent cuts were made throughout, allowing for a two-hour running time with no intermission. One of the key improvements to the Delacorte stage is the introduction of trapdoors and elevators, and Ali made constant and effective use of them throughout. In general, he did not delve into the work’s darker corners, nor its subtle play with gender and sexual desire. But those elements are there in the text and don’t necessarily require underlining. They are available even in a production such as this that emphasized humor and basic emotions.
The cast was typically eclectic. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o starred as Viola, opposite her brother Junior Nyong’o, a novice actor, as her twin Sebastian—a familial pairing that paid off both in terms of their remarkably identical looks and in his delightful performance. Lupita herself held the show together with a radiant openness. The siblings occasionally spoke in their native Swahili, a charming touch that emphasized both their bond and their outsider status. Sandra Oh nicely underplayed Olivia, finding laughs not from big outbursts but from small asides. The conniving team of Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek were here portrayed as bong-inhaling, cocaine-snorting reprobates, hilariously embodied by John Ellison Conlee and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. They were joined in their scheming by Daphne Rubin-Vega as Maria and the scene-stealing Kapil Talwalkar, a comic powder keg in the small role of Fabian. Strong support also came from the excellent actor named b as Antonio, whose heartbreaking erasure at the end of the show was nicely emphasized in the staging. The ultra-ripped Khris Davis was a perhaps too modern-sounding Orsino. Moses Sumney was an unusual and compelling Feste, although I didn’t much care for the music he sang, which felt wrong for both play and production. On the other hand, I loved the string quartet which entertained the audience before the start of the play and then made pop-up appearances throughout the narrative. The audience favorite was clearly Peter Dinklage as Malvolio. His physical portrayal of the hapless steward was amusingly inventive. But for me, his furiously rapid, almost monotone approach to the text was less successful.
But details of performance and production were ultimately secondary. What mattered here was the reaffirmation of the original premise. Sixty-plus years after Papp first smuggled Shakespeare into the park, the Delacorte emerged from its renovation as a theater simultaneously new and timeless, ready once again to deliver blank verse to the open air. In that sense, Shakespeare in the Park remains what it always was: not an embalmed tradition, but a civic commitment renewed each summer, a wager that art—shared, elemental—can still summon a city to gather under the trees. As the lights dimmed before the performance, someone in the audience called out “Thank you, Joe Papp!”