Chester Theatre Company recently announced its new co-artistic directors, Christopher Baker and Michelle Ong-Hendrick.

The two are both college educators who bring a wealth of theater experience to their new positions.

Baker worked with Hartford Stage for 15 years, where his roles included associate artistic director, associate producer and senior dramaturg. He’s also worked with Primary Stages in New York City, the Alley Theatre in Houston, the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and a host of other professional theater companies.

Ong-Hendrick, a Pioneer Valley native, was the founding artistic director of Hartford Opera Theater from 2008 to 2012. She’s directed shows there and for Trinity College, the University of Connecticut, the Intermezzo Opera Festival and other professional and academic theaters.

As an actress, she’s been in shows at Hartford Stage, TheaterWorks Hartford, Playmakers Repertory Company and more.

Baker and Ong-Hendrick, who live in Florence, also know a thing or two about working together — they’re a married couple. It makes having meetings easier, Baker said, but they’ve had to set a rule: their dinner table is “a no-university, no-Chester zone.”

The two are succeeding the outgoing co-directors, James Barry and Tara Franklin, who are also husband and wife.

Chester Theatre Company is uniquely situated, literally and figuratively, in that it’s an Equity theater in rural Hampden County. Equity theaters belong to the union for stage professionals, the Actors’ Equity Association, and are more common in the Berkshires than in the Pioneer Valley. (In fact, Baker’s done the math: the theater sits halfway between Barrington Stage Company, an acclaimed theater in Pittsfield, and Miss Florence Diner.)

This is a boon, on some levels: every summer, a swell of moneyed theatergoers fills the Berkshires, so having another professional theater in western Mass means that the local creative economy reaps the benefit. On the other hand, Chester Theatre Company is out of the way of the larger theater community in the area, and it’s newer than some of the more established performing arts companies. Even as Baker and Ong-Hendrick appreciate the loyal audience (of locals and non-locals) that the company already has, they’re looking to build it up even further.

“We’re really thinking, ‘Who’s not ​​​​​coming?’” said Baker. “How can we get the people who maybe think it’s too long of a drive or don’t know about it, how can we get them to come out and say, ‘Hey, look what’s going on here, this magical thing that happens every summer in Chester’?”

Along with the standard challenges of artistic directorship, Baker and Ong-Hendrick also have to contend with the particular challenges of the moment: a federal pushback against diversity and inclusion, the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center, and changes to National Endowment for the Arts grants, among others, have raised anxiety within the American theater community.

As they see it, challenges like those only prove that theater is a necessity.

“The urgency is very real,” said Ong-Hendrick. “This invitation to continue to be a space of intimacy and belonging is not luxurious. We need this, and we need it now.”

“A story is armor. If you are actually seeing yourself represented, and you’re given the opportunity, in a space that is playful and unexpected and inviting, to look at a new perspective, that is emotional armor,” she added. “We need that more than ever now. We need to be connected. We need collaboration.”

Baker, likewise, compared high-quality theater to “the suit that’s going to help me through the day and days ahead.” Even when it’s not a response to political stress, theater is still transformative and powerful — something that makes an audience member “able to negotiate tomorrow a little bit better, to maybe understand tomorrow a little bit better.”

“When you come out of a really great piece of theater, you’re changed,” he said. “You think about it the next day and the next day and the next day, and you feel better, even if it makes you feel terrible because it’s sad, you feel better.”

As of this writing, the theater hasn’t yet announced the four plays it’ll be producing this summer, but, Ong-Hendrick said, “I think it’s going to be a really gorgeous season. Each play in isolation is just beautiful, and the four of them together as this quartet is, I think, going to be a really, really wonderful span of the summer. I think it’s really going to be very, very special.”

Baker agreed: though all of the plays are “gems” individually, they work together to create a cohesive “journey” that “feels like it has a beginning and a middle and an end.”

When asked to pitch Chester Theatre Company to readers in 20 words or fewer, Baker said: “Great actors, great plays, great audience, great community, great laughter, and surprises.”

Ong-Hendrick’s reply: “Be challenged. Be regulated. Be provoked. Be inspired. Be loved. Be held. Belonging.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.