To all those who did not see me covering parties in the Hamptons last month, please accept my apologies. As some of you may know, I have a crush on another resort area. The Berkshires doesn't have FreshDirect delivery. It does have the Berkshire Co-op Market and Guido's, and — here's where my knees get weak — gems of cultural institutions with gem supporters.

At Shakespeare & Company on Saturday night, I met a donor who has helped fund a clever renovation of an underused building on the company's campus in Lenox, Mass., to add rehearsal rooms and a small theater.

"For years I have told my family, don't give me presents, just give to this place," Elayne Bernstein, after whom the new theater will be named, said.

Ms. Bernstein has introduced hundreds of New Yorkers to Shakespeare & Co. through a program she ran at Queens College. "I think of myself as an audience developer," she said.

The newly installed chairman of Shakespeare & Co., a retired lawyer who practiced in New York, Richard Mescon, said, "Magical things happen here."

The magical things at the gala included the announcement that the capital campaign has met its $7.5 million goal and will now increase to $10 million, with the help of an anonymous donor who will match $1 million of gifts.

The gala featured a performance of "All's Well That Ends Well" in which the Equity actors yielded their parts to members of the company's programs for teenagers, Shakespeare & Young Company, and its program for children, Riotous Youth.

A star of the company, Jason Asprey, was upstaged when a 17-year-old from Chatham, N.Y., Owen Barnett-Mulligan, with whom he shared the role of Bertram, corrected him on a line.

Mr. Asprey will play Hamlet this fall in a national tour of a 2006 production, in which his mother, the founder of the company, Tina Packer, will play Gertrude.

The company produces Shakespeare and other playwrights; trains youth and professional actors, and brings Shakespeare to juvenile delinquents.

"They're not only actors, they care about the people who come here," a retired schoolteacher from Schenectady, N.Y., Gretchen DeKalb, said.

And the people who come here care about the actors: Carole Murko and Jim Finnerty once provided housing for Sarah Rafferty, who was starring in "As You Like It."

"When we brought the kids to see the play, she acted to them, they loved it," Mr. Finnerty said.

The gala drew the director of the Berkshire Museum, Stuart Chase; former Yankee Jim Bouton; an author of books on pigeons and retirement communities, Andrew Blechman; Church Street Art Gallery owner Denise Ulick, and SEVEN salon.spa owner Mark Johnson.

Tomorrow, my Berkshires love affair continues.

agordon@nysun.com