The politically conscious HartBeat Ensemble has a new performance space and home base.
The community-rooted professional theater collective was based at the Carriage House Theater on Farmington Avenue since 2013, but that space was sold last year by the church that owned it. Though it has not been officially announced, HartBeat Ensemble has been installed as the theater-in-residence at Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center. The arrangement will be in place for at least five semesters beginning this month.
HartBeat Ensemble’s artistic director Godfrey L. Simmons, who negotiated the move, has been on the Trinity College faculty since 2022 as a visiting lecture in the college’s theater department.
“It’s hard for artist-run companies right now,” Simmons said. “Being at Trinity helps us in building our capacity.”
The first show HartBeat Ensemble will perform at Trinity College is a remount of the company’s 2025 production of “Citizen James, or The Young Man Without a Country” on Feb. 12-21. The one-man show was part of its “Baldwin Season” of 2024-25, which presented plays based on the life and work of James Baldwin. “Citizen James” was the last HartBeat Ensemble show to be performed at the Carriage House in February 2025. The show is being brought back now by the same director (Joann Yarrow) and actor (James Alton) partly because it has another upcoming booking at the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona on Feb. 6.
Many of HartBeat Ensemble’s sets, props and other items from the Carriage House are in storage, but the company has already brought over lighting equipment which can be used on other Austin Arts Center events.
“We had already had several Trinity students as interns,” said Simmons, who hopes to involve Trinity students in HartBeat Ensemble productions on multiple levels.
HartBeat Ensemble artistic director Godfrey L. Simmons. (Tiana Correa)
The benefit for the Austin Arts Center, according to its executive director Deborah Goffe, is a return to the days when the organization played a much larger part in the cultural life of the area.
“This is a reminder to the Greater Hartford area of what Trinity arts programming once meant to the community.” said Goffe, who is also an artist-in-residence at the college. She taught at Hampshire College in Massachusetts from 2014 to 2023, but much of her career as a dancer, choreographer, educator and curator has been in Connecticut, especially the Scapegoat Garden dance/music ensemble she founded a quarter of a century ago.
“We provide Trinity with a connection to the community,” Simmons said. “We’re also providing things for the students: Working with professional artists, getting to see great theater and getting to participate in it.” Simmons said he foresees using students as assistant directors, performers and part of the process of new play development.
The HartBeat Ensemble has been in a state of flux for the past two years or so. Since 2013, the theater held most of its performances at The Carriage House on Farmington Avenue. It had offices in that building and ran the performance space, bringing in other local arts events such as The Hartford Fringe Festival. But for at least the past three years, Immanuel Congregational Church on Woodland Street, which owned the Carriage House, had been looking to sell it and another building it owned on Farmington Avenue. A sale was completed last year.
“The Carriage House was great. The people at the church were such great hosts,” Simmons said. “They treated us fairly in terms of the rental agreement. But by the time we got to the end of it, we’d been compromised by COVID. There was only so much we could do, and the church was really looking to sell the building.”
Having lost its home space, HartBeat Ensemble began producing shows in other spaces. The theater held a reading of a new play, “Woodhull/Beecher,” at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven this past summer, but its primary space was Trinity College, where the company staged its most recent production, the one-person show “Where We Stand” in October and where it held a 2024 revival of one of its best-known shows “Jimmy and Lorraine” about the friendship of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, which had originally debuted at the Carriage House in 2015.
“When they first put the Carriage House on the market we looked at a couple of spaces downtown and had some conversations with a few entities about collaborating,” Simmons said. But Trinity College quickly asserted itself as the best and likeliest option.
Simmons said Goffe is the one who first proposed that HartBeat Ensemble move its operations to the Austin Arts Center.
“We certainly both had the same thought independently,” Goffe said. “Their production of ‘Jimmy and Lorraine’ had an influence on my own work. It was so well received. When I became aware that HartBeat’s situation was shifting, I thought that this was the kind of thing that Trinity could benefit from and the Austin Arts Center could benefit from. We initiated the conversation on this about a year, worked on it a lot over the summer, and it was approved in December.”
HartBeat Ensemble most celebrated production, “Jimmy and Lorraine,” as it looked in a revival at Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center last year. (Nick Caito)
HartBeat Ensemble was started in 2001 by Gregory Tate, Steven Ginsburg and Hartford native Julia Rosenblatt, all alumni of the famed West Coast political theater company the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Tate died in 2012, Ginsburg moved to Washington State in 2021 to become the executive director and artistic director at Field Arts & Events Hall, and Rosenblatt teaches theater at Connecticut State Community College’s Capital campus on Main Street in Hartford. Ginsburg stays in touch with the company, and Rosenblatt was brought back onto the HartBeat Ensemble board just last month.
Simmons was named artistic director of HartBeat Ensemble in 2019. His first full season at the theater was delayed by the COVID shutdown, but he soon established his vision of a mix of new works based on local social and political issues and established plays about racial identity, civil rights and other topics that have special relevance to Hartford residents. He continued the HartBeat Ensemble tradition of theater to explore Connecticut history and historic civil rights struggles.
In its last years at the Carriage House, HartBeat Ensemble produced such varied shows as the abolition-themed historical drama “Possessing Harriet,” a reading of the new Cin Martinez drama “Moonlighters,” the ensemble piece “The American Dream (or, The Lies of It All)” devised and performed by students in HartBeat’s Youth Play Institute, Saviana Stanescu’s Connecticut-set drama about domestic servitude “Bee Trapped Inside the Window” and Athol Fugard’s South African apartheid play “My Children! My Africa!”
Beyond his activities with HartBeat, Simmons is an accomplished actor and director who has worked off-Broadway and in numerous regional, college-based and small theaters around the country. Since moving to the Hartford area from New York six years ago, he has performed in three shows at Hartford Stage as the diner owner Memphis in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” as George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Radio Play” and as Dr. Jim Bayliss in “All My Sons.”
Simmons even has prior experience with a college-based resident theater, having been part of the Ithaca, New York company Civic Ensemble when it partnered with certain shows and programs at Cornell University.
Simmons said he plans to announce the inaugural Trinity College HartBeat Ensemble season just a few weeks from now. The company’s seasons are likely to have two main shows a year with one in the fall at the Austin Arts Center’s main Goodwin Theater and one in the spring in the center’s smaller Garmany Hall black box space. The company will also stage its Youth Play Institute student shows and other community outreach projects at Trinity and occasional special events.
“We’ll also be doing community-based stuff like the YPI programs. We’ll be trying to do more of our curated story circles and get the community together to tell stories,” Simmons said.
“For us it’s about ‘Where do we make the work?,” Simmons said of the HartBeat/Trinity relationship. “In one sense there’s less pressure. That’s the gift, to be able to think better. We’re also lucky that a whole community at Trinity now sees our work. I’m excited about what it means to be a professional artist-run company working with Trinity students.”