A New Journey Awaits this Years Larry Murray Award Winner
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Berkshire Theatre Critics Association awarded director Daniel Elihu Kramer with the Larry Murray Award earlier this month for his work in community outreach as Producing Artistic Director of Chester Theatre Company.
The award was a memorable farewell as Kramer moved on from his position in October to embark on a new journey of teaching, writing, and directing.
Chester Theatre Company has named Tara Franklin and James Barry as their new co-producing artistic directors.
"I think that theatre works because artists trust us and audiences trust us. I think with Tara and James trust is unbelievably important and something that they both will absolutely have," Kramer said. "So I'm really excited, and I'm also excited to see not just how they continue what I've been doing and the things they do differently."
During his time at Chester Theatre Company, Kramer worked to carry out the theatre's focus on audience building, community, and connecting with the audience.
Staying true to a Chester Theatre Company founder Vincent Dowling saying that "every small town needs a theater," Kramer and his team permanently decreased the price of theater tickets to $10 for locals as well as people on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other kinds of food assistant programs
They also decreased ticket amounts for military veterans and their families to $15.
"I think we wanted both to really make sure that folks in that town felt like we were never doing something that wasn't available to them," Kramer said. "We love being there. We're grateful that we operate out of that town hall. We do so much there, and we really wanted to make it feel really available to anybody who lived there and say ‘this is our theater’."
Chester Theatre Company has been a focus of a variety of donation efforts including its first capital campaign, where they raised $300,000. This included a large donation alongside another $100,000 gift from Richard And Carol Seltzer.
Another donation effort that Kramer was able to bring to fruition was creating and producing a play for anyone who donated $100,000.
Fran Henry and Walter Korzec made this donation and requested that the play focus on the organization Stop It Now, an organization Henry founded to prevent child sexual abuse.
Kramer said the company performed the play "To The Moon And Back" based on the Korzec’s wishes. It was actually performed this summer after the pandemic caused its delay.
"It felt very strange idea but, for us, it felt right because of that connection to the audience. A lot of what we did was to really sort of think about who values us and what we value us for," he said.
Kramer said the last few years were rough on many people who felt separated from each other and yearned for connection. He said many organizations and theaters worked to hold onto this in the community.
Through the pandemic, Chester Theatre Company brought people together through conversations online about theatre.
In 2021, they didn't feel ready to go back indoors, so they produced a season under a tent at Hancock Shaker Village
When going to the theater, audiences are sharing the room with the performers engaging in acts of imagination and empathy that draws them into the story of others' lives, he said. Whether it be online, under a tent, in a theater, or anywhere theater binds people together to feel a diverse range of strong emotions.
"We share the feeling of the humanity that binds us together. We feel joy and sorrow together, we hope together and mourn together, and by the very act of assembling we celebrate. We think about our histories–shared and disparate–and our present, and we dream of a future together," he said in his speech.
He said the Chester Theatre Company board knows how important the theatre can be and has been a great partner that helped the organization grow during the seven years he was producing artistic director.
He said although he is going to miss interacting with the audience, choosing a season and bringing it to life with the right artists, directors, designers, actors, and other members of the team at Chester Theatre Company, he is also looking forward to the road ahead.
"I'm excited to have the time to really spend working with the students and my colleagues here to imagine that future. That's exciting, he said. "And last spring, I did actual freelance directing at another theatre for the first time in seven years, and I was reminded how really wonderful it can be to only be thinking about the directing and not all the other things about the theater you're directing at the same time."
Kramer said that he will take the time he spent at Chester Theatre Company with him on his next journey.
"As a teacher, it's so valuable to say, I haven't stopped doing the actual thing I'm teaching and to be able to teach from this place of being deeply involved in the profession, has been really important," he said. "I think also the ways that we were able to really kind of re-envision and think about how we want to get theatre to work has me feeling like I can bring some of that same sense of possibility to the conversations that my colleagues and our students that I will have at Smith, about what we want to do here."
Kramer said he is grateful for his experience at the theatre and if there were two of him he would have had one of them doing each job.
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