Rising Stars
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Summer L . Williams
Summer L. Williams has arrived. In 2003, she snagged a Norton Award (Boston’s version of a Tony) for the first play she directed, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train. Not bad for someone who says she found herself in the director’s chair by a fluke. Since then, she’s been praised for her graceful direction and sense of community spirit; with personality and passion, she’s changing the face of Boston’s theater scene.
Williams, 30, serves as the Marketing Director of Company One, a company in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. She’s been with the group almost from the very beginning, joining fellow Clark University alums Mason Sand, Mark VanDerzee, Shawn LaCount, and Sarah Shampnois just after the collective became incorporated in 1999. Since those undergrad days, the company has pushed the limits of drama, producing edgy theater that speaks to young, urban audiences.
They’ve mounted poetry slams and mini theater marathons, but Williams is particularly interested in staging plays by women set in sociologically explosive times. “I want to make sure my work makes people think about something they may not have reconciled with before,” she says. In particular, directing Spell #7, Ntozake Shange’s choreo-poem about struggling black New York artists trying to establish themselves, was “a dream come true.”
When she’s not directing, Williams teaches theater at Brookline High, where she inspires budding drama-lovers. “I want to make sure they know theater is for them as much as it’s for anyone else, if not more,” she says. To that end, she helped spearhead Company One’s Stage One, a summer program for teenagers. Most of all, she teaches her students that “it’s real” to yearn to be a director or a practicing artist. After all, she’s proof.
