Paris, ACTORS is part of the Main Stage Reading Series this summer.

Occupied Paris. 1944. Real life celebrity Nazi Werner Krauss is between projects. But the Party, desperate for a propaganda extravaganza in the City of Lights, has arranged a remount of his notorious Merchant of Venice produced by a French theater teeming with family secrets. Paris, ACTORS! is “The Last Metro” if Truffaut were unavailable to direct, but the Marx Brothers were.

Saturday, July 22 at 3PM & 7PM
Sunday, July 23 at 3PM

TICKETS
$35 plus a $5 processing fee per ticket

Seating is general admission.

Program, casting, and COVID-19 protocols are subject to change.

Paris, ACTORS! contains loud sound effects of explosions and gun shots.
Williamstown Theatre Festival does not typically offer advisories about subject matter, as sensitivities vary from person to person, but for information about any show, we encourage you to contact the Box Office at (413) 458-3253.

Main Stage Reading Series

Paris, ACTORS! is part of the 2023 Main Stage Reading Series. Get up close and personal with beloved Festival actors performing new and classic plays on our specially created intimate 2023 Festival Stage. Watch as the creative process unfolds before you and experience these works in exhilarating new ways.

2023 Festival Stage

This summer, experience the Festival in a new, uniquely created environment that puts us all—artists and audience—onstage in one intimate setting together. The 2023 Festival Stage, reimagined on the stage of the theater by designers Se Hyun Oh and Emily Schmit, is home to our inimitable WTF Cabaret and a new Main Stage Reading Series featuring popular plays and esteemed Festival artists. Join us onstage for conviviality, fun, and a season of celebration!

“We are placing both the audience and the performers on stage together, making the auditorium the backdrop for this season. This gives everyone a unique opportunity to reflect on inhabiting this space together as creatives and spectators alike – consider the past, contemplate the future. It is also important, of course, to acknowledge that being present in the same space together is always a precious thing. We want to cherish this moment of being together and encourage you to take the joy you experience this season back home with you.” — 2023 Festival Stage Designers Se Hyun Oh and Emily Schmit

Artist bios

Hamish Linklater is a playwright whose credits include The Whirligig (New Group), The Cheats (Steep, Chicago), and The Vandal (the Flea), which has been performed in multiple countries and languages. His film adaptation of Chuck Klosterman’s Downtown Owl, co-directed with Lily Rabe, starring Rabe, Ed Harris, and Henry Golding, will premiere in 2023. As an actor, his theater credits include Shakespeare in the Park’s Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors, Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice opposite Al Pacino, as well as Lily Rabe, with whom he also performed in Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline, & Seminar on Broadway opposite Alan Rickman. Hamish received an Obie Award for his performance in School for Lies (CSC) and has been nominated for Drama Desk, Lortel, Outer Critics, and Drama League Awards. His television credits include a Critics Choice-nominated performance in Midnight Mass, Starz’s Gaslight, FX’s Legion, HBO’s Newsroom. Films include The Big Short, The Future, Magic in the Moonlight, and Dead for a Dollar.

Jack O’Brien directed his first Broadway production (Cock a Doodle Dandy) for APA/PHOENIX in 1969, and he’s still at it. He’s collected three Tonys along the way (Henry IV, Hairspray, and The Coast of Utopia), done operas (Il Trittico, Great Scott, Porgy and Bess, etc.) musicals (The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Carousel, etc.), television (American Playhouse, Great Performances, etc.), run a regional theatre for 25 years (The Old Globe), and written two books published by Farrar Straus & Giroux (Jack Be Nimble and Jack in the Box), as well as two nightclub performances at 54 BELOW. Currently represented by the hit musical Shucked at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway, if he’s slowing down, he hasn’t noticed it yet.

Lily Rabe will soon be seen in David E. Kelley’s Love and Death on HBO MAX alongside Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, and Patrick Fugit. Rabe can currently be seen in the Apple TV+ series Shrinking alongside Harrison Ford. Rabe is currently in production on Apple TV+ Presumed Innocent with Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga. She recently wrapped filming on Downtown Owl, co-directing and producing with her partner Hamish Linklater. She stars in the feature opposite Ed Harris, Vanessa Hudgens, Henry Golding, and Finn Wittrock. Among her many other film credits, Rabe starred in Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens and George Clooney’s The Tender Bar. Onstage, Rabe played Portia opposite Al Pacino in Dan Sullivan’s The Merchant of Venice (Broadway, The Public Theater), for which she received Tony, Drama Desk, and Drama League nominations. Additional Broadway credits include Steel Magnolias, Seminar, The American Plan, and Heartbreak House. She has also starred onstage in Shakespeare in the Park at The Public’s Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Cymbeline, and Off-Broadway in A Doll’s House and Crimes of the Heart.

Gus Birney recently completed a run of The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window, which started at BAM and transferred to Broadway. Off-Broadway: The Rose Tattoo (Williamstown Theater Festival), Connected (59E59). TV: Shining Vale (Saturn Award Nominee), Dickinson, The Mist, Indsatiable, Jessica Jones, The Blacklist, Bull, Blue Bloods, Law and Order. Film: I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix), Rainy Day in New York, Here and Now, Plan B (Hulu). Upcoming: Happiness for Beginners (Netflix), Asleep in My Palm, Three Birthdays.

Noah Robbins has been seen on television most notably in Hulu’s UP HERE, Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and on Amazon’s Forever. His feature credits include The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Week Of, Set It Up, Indignation, and Miss Sloane. He has also appeared in TV Land’s Younger, Showtime’s Masters of Sex, and Fox’s Grease Live. Notable theater credits include his Broadway debut in Brighton Beach Memoirs, the Broadway revival of Arcadia, Secrets of the Trade, The Twenty-Seventh Man, The Vandal, Clarkston, and the title role in the revival of Master Harold… and the Boys. Noah most recently appeared on Broadway in To Kill a Mockingbird opposite Jeff Daniels. He will next be seen on screen in the feature film Project Artemis with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum.

Jordan Tyson’s work can be seen in the Netflix series The Chair and film Vampires vs the Bronx. Recently she performed in the world premiere productions of Lempicka musical at La Jolla Playhouse and The Notebook musical at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. She’s also working on her debut EP. jordantyson.com | @curlybroad

Jay O. Sanders returns to Williamstown for the first time since his summer with the Second Company in 1975. He has just finished the run of Primary Trust at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater. Before that, he played Nick Laine in Girl From The North Country on Broadway, the title roles in Uncle Vanya at Hunter Theater Project (2019 Drama Desk Award) and Cyrano de Bergerac at the Guthrie, and all 12 plays of Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama, (Hunter, Public, European and World Tours), and Kent in King Lear at the Delacorte. Playwright; Unexplored Interior: This Is Rwanda. Film; Day After Tomorrow, JFK, Angels in the Outfield, Tumbleweeds, Bardo, When You Finish Saving The World. TV; True Detective, Sneaky Pete, The Sinner, Roseanne. Sanders has also narrated many PBS documentaries.

Michael Stuhlbarg. Film credits include: A Serious Man (Golden Globe Nomination), The Shape of Water, Call Me by Your Name, The Post, Men in Black 3, Shirley, Arrival, Hugo, Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Trumbo, Miles Ahead, Miss Sloane, Pawn Sacrifice, Blue Jasmine, Cut Bank, Bones and All, Hitchcock, Seven Psychopaths, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange. TV credits include: Your Honor, Dopesick (Emmy Nomination), The Staircase, Traitors, The Looming Tower (Emmy Nomination), Fargo, Boardwalk Empire. Broadway credits include: The Pillowman (Tony Nomination, Drama Desk Award), The Invention of Love, Cabaret, Taking Sides, Saint Joan, Timon of Athens, The Government Inspector. Off-Broadway credits include: title roles in Socrates, Hamlet, Richard II; Measure for Pleasure, Twelfth Night, A Dybbuk, The Winter’s Tale (all with the Public Theater); The Voysey Inheritance (Atlantic Theater Company—Obie, Callaway Awards). Travesties (Williamstown), Long Day’s Journey into Night (American Repertory Theater). BFA—The Juilliard School. Upcoming film: The Instigators.

Jeremiah Maestas recently a proud Production Assistant at Shucked on Broadway! Some favorite credits: Macbeth (Lincoln Center Theater); The Refugees (ART / NY); Asylum Song (HERE ARTS), The Beyoncé (ART / NY), Chickens in the Yard (JACK Brooklyn), Gluten! (59E59); Pterodactyls (Teatro Circulo); Earthquake Sun (San Diego Rep.); Long Day’s Journey into Night (The Warner CT); The Elephant Man, Suddenly Last Summer, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, The Shape of Things (TheatreWorks NMCT); Love! Valour! Compassion! (Diversionary); Jesus Hopped the “A” Train (LPT); In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play (Whitman BC). Associate Director for The Hard Problem (Lincoln Center Theater). Adjunct Theater Faculty, Quinnipiac University. MFA, Brooklyn College / BA, University of San Diego. Proud Actors’ Equity Member.