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Known for launching Broadway hits and hosting celebrity casts, the storied Williamstown Theatre Festival is writing its next chapter, both onstage and behind the scenes. With a new creative director, expanded programming, and what it describes as a startup mentality, the festival aims to become the “Coachella of theater,” bringing the legacy institution to newfound cultural relevancy. The festival kicked off its 71st iteration on Thursday, July 17, on the picturesque campus of Williams College in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. While not necessarily a household name to non-theater fans, it has been a major springboard for talent for decades, helping to launch the careers of renowned actors Christopher Walken, Bradley Cooper, and Viola Davis, and playwrights Dominique Morisseau, Terrence McNally, and Michael R. Jackson, among many others. Yet despite its storied legacy, the festival is facing similar struggles as its peers. Nonprofit theaters across the country have been hurting since the pandemic, struggling to regain their pre-COVID audiences, leading to a number of closures, fewer shows, and scaled-back programming. “The traditional nonprofit theater model isn’t sustainable anymore, and our choice in this moment was really innovation over inertia,” Raphael Picciarelli, managing director of strategy and transformation at Williamstown, told Fast Company. While before, programming centered on single theater productions, with around seven plays spread out over 12 weeks, the new model condenses the festival’s timeline, offers experiences beyond sit-down shows, and brings big names like Jeremy O. Harris and Kaia Gerber to the mix. Jeremy O. Harris (left) and Raphael Picciarelli [Photo: Matthew Leifheit/courtesy Williamstown Theatre Festival] “We’re really reimagining our entire operating and business model,” Picciarelli says. With big risk comes big investment: The festival is increasing its budget for this summer to $8 million, up from $4.7 million last year. The increase is made possible with help from a number of large anonymous donors, the festival says, while the organization is actively pursuing new revenue streams. Staging transformation Picciarelli first joined Williamstown at a “point of reflection,” he says, following a series of work culture concerns and rising costs in the industry, and with many live theater organizations still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. With a background in consulting (he advised C-suite executives on how to change organizations from the inside out) in addition to live theater, Picciarelli began consulting for the festival during the summer of 2023. “The leadership and board made a very sound, responsible decision to pull back in terms of programming and to take a second to really think about the future,” he says, referencing a more limited 2023 repertoire. Early on, Picciarelli identified the organization’s strongest traits, its small 14-person full-time team and renowned legacy, which combined with the festival’s yearn for change proved to be a perfect opportunity for transformation. “There was a real desire for innovation, which you don’t always see at legacy institutions,” he says. “Innovation requires the space to try and fail and try again.” For instance, last year the festival held a weekend event with 16 shows to test how many shows could be staged simultaneously. It turns out 16 was too much,” says Antonello Di Benedetto, assistant managing director and a staff member of nine years. “That’s how we settled on eight for this year. We’re going to see if that is the right cadence, or if we need to increase it or decrease it next year. But it’s totally a prototype.” Serving as an experiment for the future of the festival, and theater industry as a whole, Williamstown is spearheading change with cues from the private sector, and startups in particular. “Adopting a startup mindset, as opposed to a more institutional mindset, is about testing new formats, rethinking how people access the work, and creating this more flexible, nimble infrastructure to really support that right,” Picciarelli says. New strategies, big names Operationally, one of the biggest additions to the festival is the creation of its “creative collective,” a group of multidisciplinary guest curators set to rotate every year, led by Harris, who rose to fame as the writer of Broadway’s Tony-nominated Slave Play. “A key part of this innovation in terms of bringing new voices into the artistic process [is] really breaking open the curation model,” Picciarelli says. The collective includes Gerber with Alyssa Reeder; Christopher Rudd; and Alex Stoclet, who are leading the literary, dance, and music curation, respectively. The introduction of musical elements and dance as alternative forms to experience storytelling is also a part of the festival’s transformative push. Additionally, the festival is adopting a multiday ticketing approach. Its like the Coachella or Sundance of theater, where you’re bringing people together over an extended period of time to just immerse themselves,” Di Benedetto says. In terms of onstage programing, organizers are also taking risks and attracting known talentfor instance, by staging the first opera in the festival’s history, or bringing actresses like Pamela Anderson and Amber Heard to this year’s productions. Visitors can also enjoy visual and audio installations, nature walks, comedy shows, and even a show in an ice rink. Building the right guardrails Beyond what visitors can expect to see while at the festival, a lot of the transformation has taken place behind the curtain to build a new work culture. As is common in the theater industry, labor at the festival had been unregulated and oftentimes unpaid. In 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported on a eight-page letter sent to the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s organizers and board of trustees outlining a toxic work culture and pattern of safety hazards in the organization. “People overworked themselves because they were doing it for the love of the art. But we have to be honestit’s also a profession,” Di Benedetto says. “If any other industry behaved in the same way, it would never hold water.” He adds that the theater industry “is now finally catching up to the idea that this is also a job.” Organizers are trying to prove there can be a business model in theater that is not reliant on exploitation. Since 2021, all seasonal workers at the festival are paid regardless of their position, including apprentices and interns. Additionally, while seasonal workers could previously be staffed to do various things, from electrical to costume work, positions are now structured with clear expectations. Written guidelines are also enforced to keep workers and the organization accountable, and to ensure that all team members are treated equitably and respectfully. For instance, daily and weekly hour caps and mandatory breaks throughout the day are now in practice. A list of culture values and statements was also developed ahead of this year’s festival, and will be available on the newly launched “company hub, which centralizes information for staff. “As we are in this startup phase and as much as we’re really pushing forward in inventive ways, we also know where we’ve been,” Picciarelli says. “Part of this work is also continuing to be cognizant and review and be careful with our internal practices to really ensure that this is a healthy, respectful, and sustainable place to beand to work with that, building the right guardrails, investing in our people in the right way.”
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E-Commerce
Big changes are coming to the web in the days ahead. On July 25, the U.K.s Online Safety Act will take effect, bringing sweeping changes to how users experience the internet. Within the next week, websites like Reddit and Bluesky will begin asking users to verify their ageeither by providing official ID, bank details that prove their age, or a selfie analyzed by age-estimation software. The act mandates that platforms implement highly effective age verification measures to prevent underage users from accessing inappropriate contentwhether thats pornography, violent material, or other age-inappropriate content. This follows a Supreme Court decision in June requiring users in Texas to provide personal information to access pornographic websites. There are growing concerns that what began with adult sites could soon expand to more general platforms. We can expect trickle-down verification creep, warns social media expert Matt Navarra. First porn, then gambling, then AI content tools, and eventually even comment sections. Some observers argue that a new era of internet regulation is beginning. Theyre calling it the “hall pass era”: To go anywhere or do anything online, users will have to hand over personal information to a range of providers. This shift towards a more ID-locked web is one of the biggest, messiest evolutions weve seen online in years, says Navarra. The era of the anonymous internet died a long time ago, but pseudonymity remains, and we are watching the death flows of the free internet, says Myles Jackman, a U.K. obscenity lawyer opposed to the upcoming changes. Carolina Are, a fellow at Northumbria Universitys Center for Digital Citizens, acknowledges the intent behind age checks but warns that ID-based systems could backfire. She argues they risk exposing usersespecially marginalized groupsto privacy violations, given how much data platforms already collect. Just look at people being refused entry into the U.S. due to social media posts, she says. David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees that the motivationsstopping bots and protecting kidsare understandable. But he calls the proposed age restrictions overly broad and rights-infringing. He notes they could harm adults who depend on anonymity, such as whistleblowers, sex workers, or domestic abuse survivors. Navarra expresses frustration at how open platforms are being forced to bend to a conservative worldview. Bluesky requiring official ID is the ultimate irony, he says. This platform literally was born out of Twitter’s decentralization dream [of] open, federated, anti-censorship idealsand now you need a passport to post. According to Greene, the issue reflects not a lot of deep thinking about the nature of the problem. Are agrees, suggesting the shift favors corporate interests over the public good. While [ID tech] has potential, its being adopted like every other technology: creating a gold rush climate for ID checkprivatecompanies that will expand like tech start ups and with a move fast and break things approach rather than a public sector, do no harm approach, she says.
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E-Commerce
The already complicated process of paying back student loans just got even more complicated. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision to let President Donald Trump resume hollowing out the Department of Education, lifting the lower court injunction that halted his efforts back in May. (SCOTUS provided no rationale for the decision, other than the lack of any law expressly prohibiting itnot unlike Air Bud rules.) The decision allowed Trump to continue laying off Education employees by the hundreds, and to offload some of the departments key programs to other agencies. The potential disruption in loan servicing systems and processes that may follow, however, is just the latest financial challenge student loan borrowers are now up against. Student borrowers have walked an uncertain path out of the pandemic. In August 2022, during a years-long federal pause on payments that would ultimately end one year later, President Joe Biden attempted to issue a sweeping tide of debt cancellation. He invoked the HEROES Act, a 9/11-era law that lets the Department of Education augment student loans during a national crisis, but the move was quickly challenged by Republican senators and blocked by lower courts. SCOTUS eventually struck down the mass loan forgiveness effort in June 2023, ruling that the president lacked statutory authority. In response, the administration pivoted to selective work-arounds, ultimately approving more than $180 billion in student-debt relief for more than 5 million borrowers by January 2025. A lot has changed in the months since, including the May introduction of involuntary debt collection for some of the 5.3 million student borrowers in default, after years of pandemic-era leniency. Many of the changes, however, have arrived in just the past two weeks, and they’re going to have long-lasting consequences. One big beautiful debacle Considering all the competing concerns around Trumps puerilely titled Big Beautiful Bill, some of its myriad provisions have received less attention than others. Among them are a flurry of changes to the way student borrowers repay loansboth future borrowers and current ones. At the moment, borrowers have the ability to pause student-loan payments if they lose their job or earn less than the minimum wage. The passage of the tax bill, however, completely eliminates those unemployment and economic hardship deferment options for students taking out federal loans after July 2027. Rather than encourage more responsible borrowing, this move seems likely to result in far more defaulting on loans. The biggest change from the tax bill for student borrowers, however, is that the existing slate of at least six repayment plans will be streamlined into just two options as of next summer. Trumps bill terminates current plans such as the Income-Contingent Repayment plan, PAYE plan, and Bidens much-challenged SAVE plan (more on that one momentarily) in favor of either a fixed repayment option or the income-fueled Repayment Assistance Program, which allows borrowers to apply part of their monthly income to loan repayment for up to 30 years. Student borrowers using any current plans have until July 2028 to pick one of the new ones. Of those affected, though, current SAVE plan borrowers may have the most to sweat over. Interest payments return soon for millions When student loan payments resumed in August 2023, after a three-and-a-half-year pause, borrowers had to navigate making them against the rising cost of living and stagnant wages that drove economic panic throughout the 2024 election. No wonder only about half of the nearly 43 million borrowers who collectively owed $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans as of January 2024 remained up to date on their payments. Easing some of their burden, Bidens SAVE, or Saving on a Valuable Education plan, sought to make student loan payments more affordable by scaling them according to income and family sizeand in some cases erasing them altogether. Last July, though, amid multiple lawsuits alleging Biden lacked the authority to enact the SAVE plan, federal judges in two district courts put SAVE on ice while weighing the legal merit of those suits. As a result, borrowers enrolled in SAVE fell into administrative forbearance, with a pause on monthly payments and interest accrual. But back in February, an appeals court sided with the lawsuits, sending the SAVE plan into further legal limbo. Now the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes text that eliminates the SAVE plan entirely starting next year. Within days of the tax bills passage, the Department of Education deemed the Biden administrations deployment of the SAVE plan illegal and announced that loan payments and interest fees for 8 million student loan borrowers would resume on August 1. It was the last major announcement from the department before SCOTUS ruled on Monday that the president could continue gutting it, further obscuring the path ahead for borrowers. More administrative chaos on the way Not only was shutting down the Department of Education one of the objectives listed in Project 2025, its been a goal of the conservative movemnt since at least 1980, when then-candidate Ronald Reagan campaigned for president in part on a promise to abolish the then-newly opened department. (Since Democrats controlled congress at the time, they later blocked the Reagan administrations efforts to abolish it.) Now that this mission to leave education up to individual states is on the verge of total success, the process for repaying loans is potentially headed for total chaos. Trump previously announced plans to move management of the entire $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio from the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration, but conducting a migration of that magnitude without an airtight strategy in place will almost certainly lead to untold disruption in services. “It takes resources to manage that asset, including trained staff to make sure borrowers have good information and colleges can administer loan programs properly,” Peter Granville, a higher education finance expert, told CBS News back in March, when Trump began dismantling the department. “It takes technical expertise that only Education Department officials have.” The sloppy rollout of cuts by Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency this year does not exactly instill confidence that this administration will implement any changes to loan servicing systems with care and finesse. Indeed, when the administration initially laid off half the staff from the Department of Education in Marcha move officially allowed by this weeks SCOTUS rulingan hours-long outage at StudentAid.gov followed the next day, along with other FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) outages. Who knows how much further deterioration will ensue when even more institutional knowledge is lost? The legality of the plan to shut down the Department of Education will almost certainly face other challenges in the months and years ahead, leaving borrowers exposed to potential back-and-forth shifts that could cause billing confusion, lost payment data, or worse. One things for sure, though: Whatever Biden-era student borrowers have learned while in college, when the bill comes due, they may never know exactly how much they owe and to whom they owe it.
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E-Commerce
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