Williamstown director search nears end

Producers and players have packed up and left the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which closed up shop on the Williams College campus shortly after its final act of the season, a weekend-long celebration of the fest's 50th anniversary.

Williamstown board members, though, are busy. They are eagerly, if not anxiously, seeking a replacement for the producing director, Michael Ritchie, who announced last October that he would leave his full-time festival duties at the end of this summer, and would take over the top job at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in January 2005.

Despite Ritchie's ample notice and a search that began last winter, Williamstown is still without a director.

Ira Lapidus, president of the Williamstown Theatre Festival Board of Trustees, said he expects to announce a director this month -- months later than many festival sources had hoped. "We had 85 applicants, our search committee interviewed 15, and reinterviewed about half of them," said Lapidus, defending the length and scope of the search. "We're probably down to the finalists."

The board president declined to name the candidates, or to say how many are being considered.

According to three festival sources, the competition is down to four: Michael Morris, a British director married to actress Mary McCormack and closely associated with London's Old Vic theater; Jenny Gersten, a longtime Williamstown administrator who was Ritchie's "number two" in recent years; Daniel Swee, casting director of Lincoln Center Theater in New York; and actor and director Roger Rees.

Getting an encore Meanwhile, in the theater world at the other end of the Commonwealth, Evans Haile, artistic director of the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, has signed a three-year renewal contract with the theater board.

Stage for `Olly's Prison' The American Repertory Theatre artistic director, Robert Woodruff, will direct the American premiere of Edward Bond's "Olly's Prison" at Zero Arrow Street, the ART's new flexible performance space in Harvard Square, in April.

The British playwright and screenwriter, a provocative figure on the London stage for 40 years, may be best known on this side of the Atlantic for his breakout work during the 1960s: "Saved," a play in which an infant in a carriage is stoned to death, and the screenplay for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film "Blow-up."

Woodruff has directed several Bond plays, including "Saved."

The ART, whose 2004-2005 season opens Nov. 27 with "The Provok'd Wife," directed by Mark Wing -Davey, has moved its production of "Three Sisters," scheduled to wrap up the company lineup late next spring, to the 2005-2006 season.

Instead of "Three Sisters," the ART will mount "Amerika," associate artistic director Gideon Lester's translation and adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel, in association with Théâtre de la Jeune Lune, the Minneapolis-based physical theater company that co-produced "The Miser" with the ART last season.

Maureen Dezell can be reached at dezell@globe.com