HartBeat Ensemble Artistic Director Godfrey Simmons is interviewed about HartBeat Ensemble and Citizen James in this...

Trinity College and HartBeat Ensemble—the Hartford-based professional theater company—have formed a partnership that will bring HartBeat to Trinity’s Austin Arts Center as its resident theater company through at least 2028.

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.

The University of Connecticut celebrated faculty, staff, students, and community partners whose achievements embody the University’s academic excellence and public service mission at the 2025 Provost’s Awards Celebration, held Tuesday, October 14, at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts Art Gallery.

Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center and the HartBeat Ensemble will present Where We Stand—a long-form poem with humor, heart, and music—from October 9 to 17, 2025, in the Goodwin Theater.

Laugh Sanchez lives and breathes Connecticut theater. He studied theater performance at Central Connecticut State University, has taught at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, had an Artists of Color Accelerate fellowship at TheaterWorks Hartford, did workshops at the Hartt School and is a member of the core collective at HartBeat Ensemble.

In a sweeping move to strengthen Greater Hartford’s arts and culture community, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving has announced a $6 million investment that will support nearly 50 organizations and several new initiatives over the next two years.

In August 2025, Godfrey Simmons, Artistic Director of HartBeat Ensemble, starred in the one-man show “Mr. Joy” put on by the Chester Theater Company.

Jon-Michael Reese, Vanessa R. Butler, and Godfrey Simmons all receive nominations for their performances in the 2024-25 season.

The Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship (PAECES) recognize scholarly activities that integrate community engagement with research, creative work, and teaching

Kyle Bass’ short intense play “Citizen James, or the Young Man Without a Country” brings James Baldwin to vivid life, not by chronicling his long list of achievements in the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, but by letting him be himself, sharing his struggles, goals and principles from when his life had barely started.

“Jimmy and Lorraine,” a play centering the friendship between James Baldwin (Jon-Michael Reese) and Lorraine Hansberry (Vanessa R. Butler), explores the lives of two Black American writers and activists who are central to the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s through early 1960s.