HartBeat Ensemble

HartBeat Ensemble creates 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.

Gregory Tate, Julia Rosenblatt and Steven Ginsburg founded HartBeat Ensemble in September of 2001 after working together at the San Francisco Mime Troupe for a combined total of 22 years. HartBeat was founded to create original plays based on the Greater Hartford community. HartBeat Ensemble members chose to live and work in Hartford because we are passionate about using theater to inspire a struggling city in need of change.

Since our founding in 2001, HartBeat has created six full-length original plays. We began our annual free tour of public theater, Plays in the Parks, in 2006. HartBeat’s flagship education program is the Youth Play Institute. The Youth Play Institute works in partnership with five different school districts to bring urban and suburban youth together for intensive month-long play building residencies in which they create and perform original one-act plays. HartBeat also conducts many workshops for youth and adults with Forum Theater techniques.

One of the central tenets of HartBeat’s mission is to bring theater to underserved populations, in locations where it is most accessible to them. We have focused our efforts on affordability, accessibility and the idea of “comfortability”– that presenting theater in locations and neighborhoods already familiar to audiences helps bridge the differences of an ethnically and economically striated city.

In 2009 HartBeat was recognized by the Theater Communications Group as part of the New Generations Program for our ability to cultivate new audiences for theater. HartBeat regularly appears in the Hartford Advocate’s “Best of” edition as one of the top three professional theaters in the area.