Burning Coal Artistic Director to Receive Raleigh Medal of Arts Award

Burning Coal Theatre Company is proud to announce that its Artistic Director, Jerome Merritt Davis, will receive the 2018 Raleigh Medal of Arts Award.

Other recipients will be jazz musician Gregg Gelb, advocate and educator; Freddie Lee Heath, dancer, choreographer and arts educator; Martha Needels Keravuori, arts leader, non-profit arts executive and volunteer; Dr. Jonathan Kramer, classical cellist, music scholar and teacher, and Dr. Fran Page, Meredith College professor emerita and the founder and conductor of the Capital City Girls' Choir.

The Raleigh Medal of Arts is presented annually as part of the City of Raleigh Arts Commission's programming and is open to the public. The awards ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Fletcher Opera Theater of the Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, 2 E. South St.

ABOUT JEROME MERRITT DAVIS

Davis was born in Nashville, TN, with his twin brother, Anthony Joe Davis (Tony) on Christmas Day 1959. His parents, Joe Roma Davis and Joan Harriett Henry Davis, moved the family to Murfreesboro, TN, in 1969. Davis graduated from Riverdale High School in Murfreesboro in 1978 and from Middle Tennessee State University with a bachelor of science in Speech & Theatre in 1983. He moved to New York City shortly afterward and lived there for almost 12 years. He worked "day jobs" on Wall Street at Moore & Schley and with the accounting firm Wolfson, Farkas & Garvey while studying acting with legendary acting teacher and actress Uta Hagen at HB Studios. He also studied with playwright and actor Julie Bovasso, with Nikos Psacharapolous, who founded the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival, and briefly at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. As an actor, he worked regionally with Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, the People's Light & Theatre Company in Malvern, PA, and the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival.

In New York, Davis worked as an actor at Columbia University, Soho Rep, the Barrow Group and Avalon Repertory Theatre, The Phoenix Theatre at SUNY/Purchase, TheatreFest in New Jersey and the Smoky Mountain Passion Play. He has worked with Ellen Burstyn, Ralph Waite, Richard Jenkins, Steve Harris, Adrian Hall and Peter Gerety. In 1996, he and his wife, Simmie Kastner, moved from Manhattan to Raleigh to found Burning Coal Theatre Company. The theatre opened in 1997 with a production of Ron Hutchinson's Rat in the Skull, which drama critic Byron Woods described as "produced at a level rarely seen in this area." Burning Coal's first-season budget was $30,000, including a $5,000 grant from the City of Raleigh Arts Commission. In 21 years, the theatre's budget has grown to more than $500,000. In 2008 it opened the historic Murphey School Auditorium at 224 Polk Street in Raleigh, where it has been in residence since. That renovation required Burning Coal to raise more than $1.5 million in cash and approximately that much again in in-kind contributions. The project was led by contractor Greg Paul, architects Louis Cherry and Mary Hart-Paul, and consultant Curtis Kasefang, along with Davis and Kastner. Since then, the Murphey School Auditorium, which seats up to 175 with a beautifully designed thrust stage, has been used by more than 150 different schools, churches, theatres, dance companies, musical groups and other organizations.

Burning Coal was the first theatre in the world to present British playwright David Edgar's Iron Curtain Trilogy, three full-length plays on the fall of the Iron Curtain and subsequent reshaping of eastern Europe. The Trilogy was produced in Raleigh and at London's Cockpit Theatre in 2014, the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The production, which brought a company of 38 mostly North Carolinian actors to London for a month, garnered four-star reviews from six London publications, including from the dean of London theatre critics, Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian. Davis also fondly points to Burning Coal's presentation of the Shakespeare Marathon, back-to-back staged readings of all 38 plays of William Shakespeare at the Museum of History on April 23, 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Thirty-eight theatre companies from across the state participated in the marathon.

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