Bringing One of Summer’s Premiere Theatres to Play in Your Ears

In the headline photo for The New York Times article “Depending on the Kindness of Sound Engineers,” actors Carla Gugino and Audra McDonald sit in their walk-in closets, a microphone and laptop propped in front of them, the clothes hanging around them helping to dampen the sound. It’s not how Williamstown Theatre Festival’s productions usually come into being, but thanks to the bold vision of the festival’s artistic director Mandy Greenfield and Audible Theatre’s artistic producer Kate Navin, the show was able to go on despite the pandemic shuttering the festival’s doors this year.

“Together they dreamed up a grand plan which they announced in early April,” The New York Times reports of Greenfield and Navin. “They would create an acoustic record of a summer that wasn’t, producing deluxe recordings of each show that the festival had announced for 2020 and releasing all of them on Audible.”

Four of the seven Williamstown Theatre Festival 2020 season’s plays are available now—A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gugino and McDonald, Photograph 51, Animals, and Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club. The other three titles’ release dates will be announced later this year.

Collaborations like this are core to Audible Theater’s mission of unleashing the artistic creativity of playwrights worldwide to deliver language-driven storytelling and inspire captivating performances on stage and in audio. To learn more about this collaboration, read The New York Times article.