Pamela Anderson Among Cast of Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Bold 2025 Season
This years festival puts the spotlight on the works of Tennessee Williams.
Pamela Anderson
Actress Pamela Anderson is set to make a dramatic return to the stage this summer, headlining the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s 2025 season in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s surrealist play “Camino Real.” This marks Anderson’s first theatrical appearance since her acclaimed 2022 Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in “Chicago.”
Directed by Obie Award winner Dustin Wills, “Camino Real” features an ensemble cast of 15 actors, including Nicholas Alexander Chavez, known for his performance in “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” and Whitney Peak, recently seen in Hocus Pocus 2. The play follows an American sailor named Kilroy as he wanders through a strange and mythic town populated by literary and historical characters, including Don Quixote and Lord Byron. Anderson will take on the role of Marguerite, a character who embodies the play’s themes of longing, loss, and disillusionment.
Anderson’s return to the stage comes on the heels of her critically lauded turn in Gia Coppola’s film The Last Showgirl, which earned her Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations.
The 2025 Williamstown Theatre Festival season, running from July 17 through August 3, is curated under the unifying theme “Williams, Tennessee,” a tribute to the playwright’s enduring impact on American drama. This season-long homage is guided by the festival’s creative director, Jeremy O. Harris, the playwright best known for the boundary-pushing Slave Play. Harris has described the season as both a celebration and a reinvention of Williams’s work, with productions that honor and challenge the canon.
Among the other major works planned is “Not About Nightingales,” a rarely staged early play by Williams that offers a harrowing look into the American prison system. Directed by Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara, the production features a cast that includes Brian Geraghty, William Jackson Harper, Sydney Lemmon, and Chris Messina. The festival will also debut “The Gig,” an experimental adaptation of Williams’s novel Moise and the World of Reason. Choreographed by Olympic ice dancing champions Alex and Maia Shibutani, the piece will be staged on a local ice rink.
In addition to works rooted in Williams’s legacy, the season will also feature “Vanessa,” a reimagined chamber opera presented by Heartbeat Opera. The original score by Samuel Barber, with libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, has been distilled down to five vocalists, a choice meant to heighten the work’s psychological tension.
The lineup continues with “Many Happy Returns,” a new dance-theater piece created by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri, which probes the fragile dynamics of memory, performance, and personal identity. Also premiering is “The Things Around Us,” a solo musical by composer and performer Ahamefule J. Oluo. Blending storytelling and original music, the piece explores themes of chaos and order in modern life.
Performances will be staged at multiple venues throughout Williamstown, including the MainStage Theatre, Nikos Stage, the Annex, and a specially outfitted ice rink.
Tickets for the 2025 season are now available at Wtfestival.org.
