WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Actress Kate Burton’s daughter, Charlotte Ritchie, 9, walked down Spring Street Saturday afternoon with an ice cream cone from Lickety Split. Down the block, playwright and librettist Margie Duffield, Williams College Class of ’85, worked on a project for the Williams College Theater Lab at Tunnel City Coffee. A few hours later, Richard Kind took the stage as Walter Burns in “The Front Page,” a Williamstown Theater Festival production.

Such are the well-entrenched rituals of summer in this Northwest Massachusetts town that is surrounded by rolling hills, the mores of an intimate community of artists at work and play.

“Williamstown is a fantastic place to go to further your craft, spend the summer with your kids, and be a part of an artistic community,” the president of the Williamstown Theater Festival, Matthew Harris, said yesterday. “If there’s anything I’d like people to remember my tenure by, it should be creating a place that the artists can’t find anywhere else. The philosophy of the festival needs to be ‘Artists First.'”

Making the artists comfortable in Williamstown also helps develop an audience . “For patrons, what’s memorable is mixing and mingling with the artists,” Mr. Harris, who has homes in Manhattan and Williamstown, said.

Some of that mingling took place at the festival’s first party of the season Thursday, held for the opening night of “The Front Page,” at which Ms. Burton joined her fellow board members and other patrons for cocktails and dinner at the Williams College Faculty House.

This summer Ms. Burton will play an inspiring teacher in “The Corn is Green” by Emlyn Williams, which opens August 1. Her son, Morgan Ritchie, 19, plays her star pupil. Daughter Charlotte also has a part. (Her husband, theatrical manager Michael Ritchie, is not in the play; however, he was the festival’s artistic director from 1996 to 2004, a tenure marked by a 2002 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater.)

The play is the autobiographical story of the playwright’s childhood. “What’s special to me is that it’s also close to the story of my own father’s trajectory from a poor Welsh town to Oxford University,” Ms. Burton, the daughter of legendary actor Richard Burton and his first wife, Sybil, said.

The festival is fortunate to have such an energetic and frankly, young, person in the role of board president. Mr. Harris, a 35-year-old who runs a venture capital firm out of Williamstown, assumed the post in December. He seeks to introduce more people like himself — in their 30s and 40s — to the festival.

“For sure, the base is going to be second-home owners from New York and local folks, and they are definitely late-career and retired folks,” Mr. Harris said. He is not aiming to change the base of support to younger professionals, he said, but rather to increase their number in order to build the next generation of supporters.

Another objective is to increase the festival’s commissions for new work. “It earns you a chance at creating something that’s going to be economically important,” Mr. Harris said.

For this summer, Williamstown’s artistic director, actor Roger Rees, commissioned the playwright of “Darwinin Malibu,” Crispin Whittell, to write “Villa America,” about the lives of expatriate American art patrons Sara and Gerald Murphy, which will open Wednesday. An exhibit about the couple, who were a basis for the characters Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “Tender is the Night,” opened yesterday at the Williams College Museum of Art.

Mr. Harris is also keen on another of Mr. Rees’s projects, Leapfrog, a company that develops one play and one musical over the course of a summer. Last summer’s American history rock musical, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, is scheduled to come to the Roundabout Theatre Company next season.

One thing Mr. Harris doesn’t worry about is space . The festival uses a Williams College facility, completed two years ago, that houses three theaters. However, there is increasing competition from other arts institutions in the Berkshires; many, including the festival, have embarked on endowment and capital campaigns at the same time.

The festival will be going public soon with its endowment campaign, the festival’s general manager, William Darger, said. This year it is mounting 10 productions with a $3 million budget and an expected audience of 35,000.

“Everyone has recognized we’re taking it to the next level. Part of it is competing and part is keeping up with each other. It’s very healthy,” Mr. Harris said.

agordon@nysun.com