Creating theater in the shadow of decades-old institutions like Hartford Stage and TheaterWorks can be a formidable challenge for a theater company, but Hartford’s HartBeat Ensemble — the relative new kid on the block at 14 years old — has found its niche by focusing on community and creating works that resonate with the people who live here.
It might not garner the awards or even the spotlight, but its connection and commitment to Hartford neighborhoods are heroic, not only in the stories it tells but the lives it affects.
Two years ago it took over the Carriage House Theater on Farmington Avenue (across from the Mark Twain House & Museum), allowing the company of roving players to forgo its nomadic ways. It became an artistic home not only for its nine company members and resident designers, but for its extended family of far-flung artists and devoted followers.
With the new theater, (the site of the former Hartford’s Children’s Theatre), HartBeat has expanded its loyal “tribe,” says co-founding ensemble member Steven Raider-Ginsburg, who follow the work it presents, in readings, workshops and productions as well as the works it presents by others in spoken word shows and concerts.
But its identity is based not just on a building but its community-centric work such as “Graves,” “News to Me,” “Ebeneeza — A Hartford Holiday Carol,” “The Pueblo,” “Rich Clown, Poor Clown, Beggar Clown, Thief,” “Flipside” and “Riding the Turnpike.” Many of its theater projects are created in alliance with other cultural and social groups.
It just completed a four-day workshop of public performances of a new musical, “Gross Domestic Product.” The show, which will have a full production next spring, “looks at motherhood as unpaid work.”
The musical about the value of motherhood is by co-founding ensemble member Julia B. Rosenblatt in collaboration with New Haven-based director Rachel Alderman of A Broken Umbrella Theatre and Los Angeles-based sound designer Martin Carrillo.
In creating the work Rosenblatt interviewed more than 50 Connecticut mothers as well as collaborated with MomsRising.org, the Crossroads Women’s Center and the Connecticut Permanent Commission on the Status of Women.
Last month it also created a free public forum entitled “The Absurdity of Race: A Conversation about Implicit Bias And Police Relations,” in association with Everyday Democracy and Charter Oak Cultural Center, where the event was held. Ensemble actors Chinaza Uchee, Brian Jennings and Vanessa Butler performed unfiltered experiences of implicit bias, racism and policing in communities of color.
The next show will be in June with the workshop of “Jimmy and Lorraine,” which is described as “a meditation of the American political climate of the late ’50s and early ’60s” centering on author James Baldwin (“Another Country”) and playwright Lorraine Hansberry (“A Raisin in the Sun”). The show is in partnership with the Amistad Center for Art and Culture. A full production is slated for the fall.
Regrouping After Loss
Rosenblatt, Raider-Ginsburg and the third founding ensemble member, Gregory Tate, worked together at the San Francisco Mime Troupe before relocating to Hartford in 2001. It was with the California activist theater that they found their roots in community engagement and socially-connected work on stage.
The company faced a devastating loss in 2012 when Tate, at the age of 60, died from lung cancer. But the resilient company regrouped, established its new permanent home and became busier than ever and now boasts a long list of readings, workshops, productions and outside bookings.
“To me it’s combining all my loves,” says Rosenblatt. “I love to do theater and I love this city and have a real passion for both.”
Says Raider-Ginsburg: “For me I had no perception of any difference between community and theater. It’s about people and the way we live.”
He compared a recent show that New Haven’s Tony Award-winning Long Wharf Theatre presented — Kimber Lee’s “brownsville song (b-side for tray)” as an example of the socially connected stories and themes that HartBeat Ensemble does all the time.
“And what we do really connects to young people,” says Rosenblatt. “We see a lot of people who are coming here from different perspectives and for various reasons.” Recent presentations included a hip-hop show “How to Break,” by Aaron Jafferis and “Sugar,” Obie Award-winner Robbie McCauley’s autobiographical solo show about living with diabetes.
Because of its easy-to-travel shows with a social or political punch, its works find welcoming homes to tour, especially at schools such as Capital Community College, Manchester Community College, Housatonic Community College and Yale University.
And because it has its own theater, it can make it a kind of social center, too. It presents “HartBeat Healthy Happy Hour,” a play-reading series and competition designed to tell stories of those living with mental health concerns.
“The social engagement is very important,” says Rosenblatt. “And here we created a place where that can happen, in and around the art.”
“There aren’t many places where people can go and hang out with the artists afterwards,” says Rosenblatt, and that might explain the group’s high social media profile.
The series is especially attractive to younger, nontraditional audiences because of the social aspect of the event with light food and drink available preceding the reading, says Raider-Ginsburg. “We get a lot of likes and shares and retweets, and that validates us, too,” he says. The next “Happy Hour” will be May 21.
HartBeat does not look at its Greater Hartford community as potential audience members but rather as an important part of the play-making. Ensemble members regularly spend months researching a subject by interviewing people from whatever the community or neighborhood the subject is about as it develops its works.
“We create a conversation, and a relevance,” says Raider-Ginsburg. “We invite them to help us curate the works and be in the room with us with their great ideas. And they come back again and again. We create a kind of tribe and I think that’s what younger folks are looking for too, finding that tribe, that community, to connect multiple times — and not just to be entertained.”
The workshop of “Gross Domestic Product” at Carriage House Theater, 360 Farmington Ave., in Hartford through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, April 26 at 2 p.m. (A full production is slated next spring.) http://www.hartbeatensemble.org.
