HartBeat Ensemble’s new leader unveils online fall schedule
Hartford’s audacious, activist, community-conscious theater troupe HartBeat Ensemble has announced an ambitious fall line-up of online political theater provocations, feminist concerts/conversations, radio dramas about the Mohegan tribe, a Trump-mocking monologue, activist youth theater and more.
The slate is in keeping with “the 19-year-old company’s commitment to telling the stories of marginalized and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities,” according to a press release.
All the shows are found online — as livestreams, podcasts, YouTube videos or something else — and are either free of charge or “Pay What You Can.”
This is the first HartBeat season to be programmed by Godfrey L. Simmons Jr., who was named the company’s new artistic director late last year. Simmons was on the verge of announcing a different season, intended for the ensemble’s Carriage House performance space on Farmington Ave., when the COVID crisis closed theaters in March.
HartBeat has scheduled seven different events between early October and the end of the year. Here they are, in chronological order.
“Kristina Wong for
Public Office,” Oct. 8 at
7:30 p.m., performed by
An image from HartBeat Ensemble’s original musical“Gross Domestic Product”in 2016. HartBeat has announced its 2020 fall season, its first under new artistic director Godfrey Simmons.
the popular performance artist and comedian, about her run for a neighborhood council seat in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles. Wong is performing at another virtual Connecticut venue this fall; she’s in an artistic residency at Wesleyan University. ““Kristina Wong for Public Office” is described as an “interactive” performance originally intended to be performed at political rallies, streamed on YouTube and featuring a live “Meet and Greet” session with Wong.
“Play Like a Girl” comprises three separate “virtual conversations and performances by women musicians who trained in the Nutmeg State.” The series is curated and hosted by Hartford-based singer/ songwriter Charmagne Glass-Trip. On Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. the guest is harpist Brandee Younger (who studiedat the Hartt school),
on Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. it’s percussionist/theater artist/Trinity College grad Julissa Rodriguez and on Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m. it’s Eight to the Bar band founder/ keyboardist/vocalist Cynthia Lyon.
Godfrey Simmons will perform “The Trump Card” Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m. It’s a monologue by Mike Daisey, which Daisey himself performed around the country in 2016. Simmons has adapted the script for the current moment, assisted by director Ron Russell.
“American Dreams,” written by and featuring Leila Buck and directed by Yale School of Drama alum Tamilla Woodard, “imagines a world where the only way to gain U.S. citizenship is by competing in a nationally-televised game show run by the government.” The audience participates by voting for who gets to enter the country.
“Kristina Wong for Public Office”is one of the online shows in Godfrey Simmons’ first season as artistic director of HartBeat Ensemble.
“American Dreams” is presented just days before Election Day, Oct. 26 through Nov. 1. HartBeat Ensemble is part of a consortium of Connecticut theaters (which also includes The Bushnell, University of Connecticut, The Free Center, Hartford Stage, TheaterWorks, and Charter Oak Cultural Center) co-presenting “American Dreams.”
Madeline Sayet, the Uncasville- and Norwichraised theater and opera director who has done shows at Connecticut Repertory Theatre and runs the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, co-wrote (with Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel) and directs the five-part radio drama “Up and Down the River.” The series, to be broadcast in its entirety during the week of Nov. 20,
chronicles “the struggles of Mohegan leaders from the 17th through 20th centuries, along the river we call home.”
December 14 at 7:30 p.m. brings the latest production of the HartBeat Ensemble’s Youth Play Institute, teens who create shows based on current social and political themes and are treated like professionals, getting paid for their dramatic work.
The fall season ends with “Sleepover Stories,” airing the week of Dec.
18. It consists of spooky, socially conscious stage scripts adapted to a podcast format. The tales “explore second-class citizenship set in alternate realities involving werewolves, aliens, ghosts, and zombies.”
In a statement announcing the season, Simmons says, “Exactly 19 years ago, HartBeat Ensemble literally
took theatre to the streets of Hartford to challenge the erosion of human rights in the face of United States imperialism after Now, in the age of COVID-19 and anti-blackness, HartBeat again challenges a sitting presidential administration’s daily dismantling of our democracy in the form of seven virtual theatrical experiences authored or adapted by BIPOC – six of them by women. In some fundamental ways, HartBeat’s fall 2020 is an analogue to the first season.”
Information about HartBeat shows, as well as many of the actual shows, can be found on the company’s website, hartbeatensemble. org.