HartBeat Ensemble Presents Award-winning Playwright And Actor Jesús I. Valles In (UN)DOCUMENTS

HartBeat Ensemble presents 2023 Yale Drama Prize-winning playwright and actor Jesús I. Valles (they/them) in their one-person tour de force play (Un)Documents. Chronicling their Mexican family's experience of undocumented immigration into the United States, Jesús details how citizenship bureaucracy can define an identity and tear apart a family.

 

(Un)Documents will be performed Friday, August 18 and Saturday, August 19 at 8pm at the Carriage House Theatre, 360 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, CT. General Admission tickets are $25; Student and Seniors are $20. No one turned away for lack of funds. Tickets and information can be found at HartBeatEnsemble.org. 

 

With a single phrase, you can give up your country. With a single signature, you can tear a family apart. With a single word, you can learn to transform. In their first full-length solo show, (Un)Documents, award-winning actor and poet Jesús I. Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find their place as a child, a lover, a teacher, and a sibling in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship. In doing so, they create a new kind of documentation written with anger, fierce love, and the knowledge that what makes us human can never be captured on a government questionnaire. 

 

(Un)Documents is an autobiographical play that charts Valles' childhood in Mexico, their eventual migration to the United States, their early life as an undocumented person and eventual naturalization, the sudden deportation of their older brother, and the aftermath of this devastating event. In addition to the performance, HartBeat will also offer rehearsal time in the theater for Valle to work with his New England collaborators: director Ruby Rameriz (MA) and projection designer Elizabeth Barrett (CT). 

 

(Un)Documents is part of HartBeat Ensemble's (im)Migration 360, a series of convenings, workshops, discussions, and performances interrogating the crises and joys and culture-building around the migration of people within the Americas and from other continents to Connecticut. In light of Connecticut's self-proclaimed status as a “sanctuary state,” as well as HartBeat's reputation as a community-based professional theatre, HartBeat is developing an ever-evolving series of events that seeks to stimulate learning, promote healing and build stronger cross-cultural communities that have landed here on Turtle Island.

 

Artistic Director Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. states, "The series' name is telling -- (im)Migration 360– problematizes the word 'immigration.' Technically, migration means a temporary relocation to another region or country and immigration means a permanent relocation. But what do we really mean when we say 'immigrant?' If we're citizens of the world, aren't we all 'migrating?' Or is the word immigration just code for illegally migrating?"

 

Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, writer-performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is the winner of the 2023 Yale Drama Series (Bathhouse.pptx), selected by Jeremy O. Harris, the winner of the 2022 Kernodle Playwriting Prize (a river, its mouths), and was named the 2022 Emerging Theatre Professional by The National Theatre Conference. Their playwriting work has received awards and support from OUTSider festival, Teatro Vivo, The VORTEX, The Kennedy Center, New York Theatre Workshop, The Latino Theatre Co. at the LATC, and The Flea.

 

They are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama ((Un)Documents, 2018), and Outstanding Original Script ((Un)Documents, 2018) and were nominated for the 2019 Mark David Cohen New Play Award ((Un)Documents, 2019). They starred as (not) Penny Marshall in New York Theatre Workshop's Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall: Death Rituals for Penny Marshall, written by Victor I. Cazares. Jesús is the 2021 CantoMundo fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2021 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers' Poetry Workshop, and a 2019 poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week.

 

Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, and a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator. Their work has been published in Shade Literary, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR's Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets' LatiNext Anthology, the Best New Poets 2020 anthology, and the anthology, Somewhere We Are Human. 

 

(Un)Documents is funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies. Additional support is provided by the J. Bissell Foundation, CT Humanities, CT Office of the Arts, Department of Economic and Community Development, National Endowment for the Arts and Travelers.

 

Founded in 2001, HartBeat Ensemble's mission is to create provocative theater that connects our community beyond traditional barriers of race, gender, class and geography. HartBeat Ensemble is the only institution in Hartford that consistently uses theater to speak powerfully across different generations, races, populations and interest groups. As an ensemble of Citizen Artists, we create as well as present innovative productions based on critical civic issues. HartBeat continues to inspire the next generation of leaders to create change for a better world through its Youth Play Institute. To learn more, please visit HartBeatEnsemble.org.

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