Audra McDonald & Will Swenson Set for Williamstown Theatre Festival; Cynthia Nixon & More Also On Board

Broadway power couple Audra McDonald and Will Swenson will leave the Big Apple and Eggfartopia to spend a summer in the Berkshires. The six-time Tony winner and Les Miserables star will headline a Main Stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in July helmed by Gordon Edelstein. Also tapped for the summer 2015 season are Cynthia Nixon, Kyra Sedgwick, Jessica Hecht and more.

The Main Stage season kicks off on June 30 with the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner William Inge’s Off the Main Road. Sedgwick, an Emmy and Golden Globe winner for The Closer, stars as a woman who seeks refuge from her husband, a former baseball player, by checking into a run-down resort outside of St. Louis with her teenage daughter. Evan Cabnet will direct.

Beginning July 22, WTF will present the world premiere of Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau and helmed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The play follows Blue, a gifted trumpeter who contemplates selling his Detroit jazz club to better his life.

McDonald and Swenson will appear in A Moon for the Misbegotten beginning August 5. The play tells the story of Josie (McDonald), who seduces her family’s landlord (Swenson) out of fear that she and her father will lose their property.

The Nikos Stage lineup begins on July 1 with the world premiere of Legacy, a new play by Daniel Goldfarb and directed by Oliver Butler. The cast includes Eric Bogosian and Hecht as a renowned novelist and his wife who revisit the idea of starting a family after getting panned by The New York Times. Halley Feiffer and Greg Keller will also appear in the new play.

Nixon will lead the American premiere of Kinship beginning July 15. The drama by Carey Perloff puts a fiery newspaper editor (Nixon), a reporter and an overly protective mother in a power struggle following a passionate entanglement. Jo Bonney will direct.

The Nikos Stage season will also include the world premiere of Unknown Soldier, a new musical featuring music and lyrics by Michael Friedman and a book and lyrics by Daniel Goldstein. The Trip Cullman-helmed production will begin on July 30. Lila Neugebauer will also direct a double header of Mike Bartlett’s An Intervention alongside Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams beginning August 12.