Yale’s Christopher Betts to direct two shows at Hartford Stage
Yale drama student and NYU professor Christopher Betts directed the current show at Yale Rep, “Choir Boy.” Thanks to a new local grant, Betts will be directing shows at Hartford Stage for the next two years as the theater’s first Joyce C. Willis Fellow, which supports the work of Black artists.
“I have so many friends in Connecticut,” says the New York City-based Betts, who’s spent much of the last four years in New Haven as a student at the Geffen School of Drama at Yale, “but I never thought I’d be considering it my second or third home. This has become a pleasant surprise.”
Willis, a former vice president of corporate communications at Hartford Financial Services Group, supported numerous organizations in the Hartford area, either as a board
member, a patron or a longtime subscriber. She died in June of 2020 from COVID19, and the fellowships were created in her honor by the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation later that year.
Betts is the first artist to receive the Hartford Stage fellowship. He will direct the 1955 drama “Trouble in Mind” by Alice Childress in spring of 2023 and a second show during the 2023-24 season.
“Trouble in Mind” is a behind-the-scenes drama about how racial issues affect a Broadway-bound play. It has been embraced in recent years as a prescient debate about diversity, equity and inclusion. In 2021, it was given major productions on both on Broadway and at the National Theatre in London.
In Connecticut, “Trouble in Mind” was done at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2007 and at the Yale School of Drama in 2019. Betts saw the 2019 production, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar, when he was in his first year as a student at the Yale (now Geffen) School of Drama. Betts calls the play “a perfect fit” for Hartford Stage.
Betts is just completing his degree at Yale, having taken the offer to add a fourth year to his studies when the School of Drama’s courses were compromised during the early months of
COVID. During his time at Yale, he has directed five shows at the student-run Yale Cabaret, two at the School of Drama, and was artistic director for a virtual season of the Yale Summer Cabaret. Then he got the nod to direct “Choir Boy” at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
It is unheard of for a current student to be directing at the Yale Rep, the professional theater associated with the school, but Betts says he got the opportunity when Phylicia Rashad, who had initially been asked to stage “Choir Boy,” had to bow out after being appointed head of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University.
Betts was suggested by the play’s author, Tarell Alvin McCraney, a School of Drama alumnus who now heads the school’s playwriting department.
“Tarell said ‘We have the best person right here,’ ” recalls Betts, who had worked with McCraney previously as his assistant when the playwright was writing his Oscar-winning screenplay “Moonlight.” “A student hasn’t directed at the Rep in over 35 years.”
It’s also unusual for a Geffen School of Drama student to be simultaneously teaching at New York University, where Betts is a professor in the Department of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He’s already completed his Yale coursework.
“It’s been a delicate balance,” he says.
He decided to attend Yale and to extend for a fourth year of studies, “because I wanted a Yale degree and I wanted to do big shows with the resources they can bring to them. The other reason I went there was because there has been a big cultural shift there in terms of access, and dismantling problematic systems” at the school.
His experience at Yale bodes well for his Hartford Stage residency. “Choir Boy” has been bringing in enthusiastic Black theatergoers.
“We’ve had some great audiences,” Betts says. “I think the community is just excited to see all those brown faces on the poster.”
Keen to direct both classics and new works, Betts is also a “lover of big, splashy musicals,” he says. “It’s how I came to the theater in the first place.” He will be directing “Dreamgirls” in Illinois this fall.
Betts says he’s choosing his Hartford Stage projects “in concert with the rest of the production team there.” In a statement released by Hartford Stage when announcing his fellowship, Betts mentioned his grandmother who encouraged his creative spirit when he was a child growing up in Chicago.