Williamstown

WILLLIAMSTOWN - We’re not big fans of HGTV, but we confess a weakness for in-person home and garden tours where we can divine how the other half lives. They needn’t be opulent, just interesting. The Berkshires might be best known for its over-the-top “cottages’’ constructed in the boom years before the invention of income tax, but the style clock didn’t stop ticking at Victorian frou-frou. Some of those hill town hideaways are splendid spreads with Modernist sensibilities.

People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive 2011, Bradley Cooper, will be at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer to star in a production of "The Elephant Man" with actress Patricia Clarkson. The show runs from July 25 to Aug. 5. (Cooper appeared in the "The Understudy" in Williamstown in 2008.) The WTF also disclosed Monday that it will workshop "Here Lies Love" - the stage production of a concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim about Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos - from June 21 to 24. The show, which is a collaboration with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, will...

Hyde Park actress Maura Tierney will kick off a stellar summer in Williamstown. The former “ER’’ star will join “Wings’’ and “Brothers and Sisters’’ actor Steven Weber in Jon Robin Baitz ’s “Three Hotels’’ on Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Main Stage from June 29 to July 24. Robert Falls is directing the production, which replaces “You Can’t Take It With You,’’ which was to be the season opener....

WILLIAMSTOWN - Seven months after Tropical Storm Irene punished this pocket of the Berkshires, the view from Roger and Loretta Martin's mobile home remains startling: other mobile homes leveled to their decks, stripped of siding by demolition workers or vandals; wood and glass and misshapen metal tossed about the trailer park. The Martins, both 71, are among the lucky. Their home still stands. Nearly 200 of their former neighbors at The Spruces mobile home park no longer live there.

How to get there Williamstown is about 155 miles or about three hours west of Boston . Take Interstate 90 west to exit 2, and follow Route 7 north to Williamstown. What to do Williams College Museum of Art 15 Lawrence Hall Drive 413-597-2429 wcma.org Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sunday 1-5. Free. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute 225 South St. 413-458-2303 clarkart.edu Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. through June; daily 10-5 July-Labor Day . Free November-May; adults $10 June-October.

WILLIAMSTOWN - Leave the bleak Berkshires winter behind and find your way to when the Tudors ruled, Hamlet trod the stage, and publicans served up tankards of mead. On Friday, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute opens its annual "Clark After Dark" series of unusual parties with "A Renaissance Revelry," designed to hold those seasonal blues at bay. "With the Showtime series 'The Tudors,' there is a renewed interest in this period and the intrigue of life in the castle," said Danielle Steinmann, assistant curator of education at...

WILLIAMSTOWN - Seven months after Tropical Storm Irene punished this pocket of the Berkshires, the view from Roger and Loretta Martin's mobile home remains startling: other mobile homes leveled to their decks, stripped of siding by demolition workers or vandals; wood and glass and misshapen metal tossed about the trailer park. The Martins, both 71, are among the lucky. Their home still stands. Nearly 200 of their former neighbors at The Spruces mobile home park no longer live there.

SPRINGFIELD -- An insurance broker accused of faking insurance claims to get better coverage for the town of Williamstown and six other Western Massachusetts group health plans is being prosecuted for someone else's crimes, his lawyer said during his trial yesterday. But prosecutor Karen Goodwin said David M. Leja is the one who understated claims and faked reports about the self-funded health insurance plans to companies that insure the plans from catastrophic losses. The carriers of the coverage, called stop-loss insurance, rely on a group plan's past claims history in...

The Guest House at Field Farm 554 Sloan Road, Williamstown 413-458-3135 www.guesthouseatfieldfarm.the trustees.org What we liked most: The showcasing of modern American art and furnishings in a bucolic setting. What we liked least: This is tough. Maybe a couple of persistent flies buzzing around the pool? What surprised us: Finding that Lawrence and Eleanor Bloedel are buried just beyond the parking lot. You know you're at The Guest House at Field Farm when . . . innkeeper Bob Chok sets out a plate of delicious...

People don't usually go to the Berkshires for the movies, but the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown aims to change that this fall, with its "Moving Pictures" exhibition running through December 11. With its 150 paintings, photos, and posters from 50 films produced between 1880 and 1910, the show explores how the development of filmmaking technology influenced American artists Thomas Eakins and George Bellows. Hang your hat in nearby West Stockbridge at the Williamsville Inn (413-274-6118, www.williamsvilleinn.com , from $165)

David Hyde Pierce, who spent 11 seasons playing Niles Crane on NBC's "Frasier," then starred on Broadway in Monty Python's "Spamalot," will turn his hand to directing this summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Hyde Pierce is slated to take the helmof Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," which will run on the festival's main stage June 26-July 14. WTF's summer season, announced yesterday by artistic director Jenny Gersten, will also include the world premiere of Katori Hall's strikingly named "WHADDABLOODCLOT!

all it the Mohawk art trail. Every two or three months, as part of my job as the Globe's art critic, I drive out Route 2 headed for North Adams and Williamstown, two towns that, although just five minutes apart, couldn't be more different in character but share a role as cornerstones in a part of the state rich with cultural treasures. My destination in the former industrial center of North Adams is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which occupies a campus that used to be Sprague Electric Co. headquarters, and before that, the Arnold Print Works...

A DOLL'S HOUSE Play by Henrik Ibsen Translated by Paul Walsh Directed by: Sam Gold Sets, David Korins. Lights, Ben Stanton. Costumes, Kaye Voyce. Sound, Jane Shaw. At: Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Stage, Williamstown. Through July 31. Tickets $50-$54, 413-597- 3400, www.wtfestival.org WILLIAMSTOWN - Most actresses who tackle the role of Nora Helmer in "A Doll's House" frame the character's arc as a journey from coquettish submission to decisive action, culminating in that famous slam of the door as Nora walks out on her...

PISSARRO’S PEOPLE At: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. Through Oct. 2. 413-458-2303. www.clarkart.edu. WILLIAMSTOWN — Of all the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was the most sympathetic. His name has never attained the luster of Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, or Seurat. And yet if you plotted all these Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on a Venn diagram, Pissarro would be the most frequent point of overlap. Not only was he one of the prime movers in the formation of the breakaway Impressionist group (he...

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE THREE HOTELS At: Williamstown Theatre Festival, ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williamstown, Wednesday through July 3 (“Streetcar’’) and June 29-July 24 (“Hotels’’). Tickets: 413-597-3400, www.wtfestival.org WILLIAMSTOWN — A lot of the bodies are different, and a gleaming, glass-front performing arts center has replaced the old stages that Jenny Gersten knew. But at the nerve center of Williamstown Theatre Festival, in the Williams College classrooms that are converted each summer into the...

Hyde Park actress Maura Tierney will kick off a stellar summer in Williamstown. The former “ER’’ star will join “Wings’’ and “Brothers and Sisters’’ actor Steven Weber in Jon Robin Baitz ’s “Three Hotels’’ on Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Main Stage from June 29 to July 24. Robert Falls is directing the production, which replaces “You Can’t Take It With You,’’ which was to be the season opener....

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Whatever else can be said of Mezze, the most important is: When in Williamstown, eat here. Co-owner Nancy Thomas provides the vision behind the dining experience. She attributes her eclectic approach, which creates an exotic whole from down-to-earth parts, to her upbringing by a Moroccan mother and an Oklahoman father. Executive chef James Tracey was formerly the founding sous chef at the tony New York restaurant Craft. But Thomas and her partner, Bo Peabody -- who also own Eleven, the bistro at MASS MoCA in North Adams -- recognize that restaurants are about more than food.

The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune; Their Great and Influential Art Collections; Their Forty-Year Feud , By Nicholas Fox Weber, Knopf, 420 pp., illustrated, $35 The Clark Brothers Collect Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings , By Michael Conforti, James A. Ganz, Neil Harris, Sarah Lees, and Gilbert T. Vincent, Yale University Press for Clark Art Institute, 369 pp., illustrated, $65 Sterling Clark spent...

WILLIAMSTOWN - The surprising thing about the Stone Hill Center at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is not that it keeps a humble profile to blend in with the fields and forest around it, but that it puts those natural surroundings on display. In another time, this site, on a north-facing hillside squeezed among the Hoosac Mountains, the Taconic Range, the Berkshire Hills, and the Green Mountains, might have been chosen for a monastery. The gray wood-and-concrete building focuses on its northern panorama, where a sloping meadow, planted with scattered trees (by local landscape...

WILLLIAMSTOWN - We’re not big fans of HGTV, but we confess a weakness for in-person home and garden tours where we can divine how the other half lives. They needn’t be opulent, just interesting. The Berkshires might be best known for its over-the-top “cottages’’ constructed in the boom years before the invention of income tax, but the style clock didn’t stop ticking at Victorian frou-frou. Some of those hill town hideaways are splendid spreads with Modernist sensibilities.