company history

HartBeat is dedicated to creating new works that challenge the status quo. We create original, professional theater based on stories from our community. Through Mainstage plays, Open-Air performances and Education programs, we make theater accessible beyond the barriers of class, race or gender.

Our mainstage plays tell extraordinary stories of ordinary people.  Our first mainstage play, Graves, inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, used realism and hip-hop stylization to tell the story of a Hartford family reeling from the effects of corporate globalization.  Graves toured throughout New England and in California. Our second mainstage play, News To Me, about the No Child Left Behind Act, enjoyed a five-week run at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in downtown Hartford.  In December of 2006, HartBeat debuted its smash hit Ebeneeza – A Hartford Holiday Carol, which has become an annual holiday event.  In June of 2007, HartBeat workshopped The Pueblo; a dual language play that explores the changing politics in Latin America. In October 2008, HartBeat opened Rich Clown, Poor Clown, Beggar Clown, Thief at the newly anointed City Arts on Pearl.  Rich Clown is an adult clown cabaret that takes an outrageous looks at The War On Poverty. The show will tour New England in the spring of 2010. HartBeat is currently working with the Institute For Municipal and Regional Policy and collaborating with Portland, Oregon’s Sojourn Theatre to create our next play about today’s drug economy and policy.

HartBeat’s Open Air performances bring free theater to public parks, streets and marches because we believe that theater can be an everyday part of everyone’s life regardless of economic status. In the summer of 2006, HartBeat expanded our Open Air Theater Program to include our annual Plays In The Parks (PIP) series, which tours through Hartford city parks, bringing our theater into the neighborhoods. PIP is made up of a series of 10-minute plays derived from interviews on a particular theme.  In 2006, each play was about a different work sector in Greater Hartford and displayed the extraordinary lives of ordinary people who work in our city.  For PIP 2007, HartBeat partnered with CT Coalition to End Homeless to interview and create plays about people who are homeless in our area.  In 2008, we partnered with Universal Health Care Foundation of CT to create plays about the uninsured and underinsured people in our state.  PIP 2009 will focus on “the economic crisis hitting home.”

Our educational programs teach both youth and adults to use theater as a tool for personal and social change.  Through work inspired by Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, we help participants explore ways to alter current situations, external or internal, which adversely affect their lives.  HartBeat has lead educational workshops at over 40 institutions including public schools, universities, unions, shelters, and treatment centers.   HartBeat’s Youth Play Institute, works in partnership with four different school districts to bring urban and suburban youth together for an intensive process in which they create and perform an original one-act play.  HartBeat received a Best Of Hartford Award in the 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008 Hartford Advocate Readers Poll.