The spit-and-plywood sets we built when I was a general assistant at the Williamstown Theater Festival were designed to last only as long as the two-week productions.

Doing Tennessee Williams wasn’t, in those days, an opportunity to show off world-class décor or prepare for a splashy New York transfer; at most it was an acting exercise for B-list movie stars nostalgic for the stage. If the festival was a brainy step above what remained of the summer-stock circuit, offering the Greeks and Chekhov instead of “Arsenic and Old Lace” and “Mame,” it was hardly a theatrical hotbed except in the sense of older celebrities seeking humid flings with young wannabes.

In fact, from the time of its founding in 1954 through 1980, when I made my glorious debut flipping French toast for all-night crews turning over the stage from one show to another, the festival never sent a full production to Broadway. (Its first would be A.R. Gurney’s “Sweet Sue,” in 1987 .) Not many wound up Off Broadway, either. The ethos in that tucked-away corner of northwestern Massachusetts was less about success than safety; it was a place to experiment fearlessly, ringed by mountains 160 miles from Times Square.