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. From Oct. 9-17, he will stars in HartBeat’s production of Donnetta Lavinia Grays’ one-person story-driven longform poem “Where We Stand” at Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center.
The play concerns a person who has done something potentially in the name of a community he wants to be a big part of. It is delivered as a story of revelation, remorse and possible redemption, building on the fabled “crossroads” legend of meeting the devil and gaining magical power and influence.
In “Where We Stand,” the audience represents the community that the protagonist has hurt and is confessing to. The performance involves direct interaction with the audience, and the crowd also gets to determine the fate of the narrator.
“Where We Stand” had its world premiere in 2020 off-Broadway at the WP Theater in New York. Then COVID happened and a production at the famed Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago was filmed for streaming in 2021. Both those productions starred Grays herself and were directed by Tamilla Woodard, who now heads the acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
This new production is directed by Vernice Miller, a fellow HartBeat Ensemble member who directed the company’s 2022 production of Saviana Stanescu’s “Bee Trapped Inside the Window.”
Laugh Sanchez brings a Hartford community perspective to HartBeat Ensemble’s “Where We Stand” Oct. 9-17 at Trinity College’s Austin Arts Center. (Jasmine Holmes)
For Sanchez, “Where We Stand” speaks to his belief in theater as a community-building, community-driven art form where big ideas can be explored together in a welcoming space. The actor — a skilled poet, performance artist, rapper and storyteller who founded the group Rooftop Poets — talked enthusiastically about the intimacy and social awareness of many of the shows he’s been a part of, especially at HartBeat. He called this one “another chance for me to meet people in the community, to talk to people I walk past every day.”
“I’ve been involved with HartBeat since I was 14,” Sanchez said, first as a student in the company’s Youth Play Institute program, then as a teacher, then as a performer in one of HartBeat’s investigative Neighborhood Project shows (the Frog Hollow one in 2016) and now as an ensemble member.
How did he get this gig, which kicks off a transitional season for HartBeat after having left its longtime home in the Carriage House Theater on Farmington Avenue? “Godfrey hit me up,” Sanchez said, referring to HartBeat’s artistic director Godfrey L. Simmons. “He asked me an interesting question: ‘Do you consider yourself African?’ I said ‘as a Puerto Rican I could not say no.’”
He was pleased to be able to bring his own heritage, interests and experiences to the role, which Grays wrote to be undefined by gender and open to be played by “anyone with a body.”
“I represent some of the qualities the person has in this show,” Sanchez said. “What this show asks for is not getting it down word-perfect but learning different parts of the character and adding to it. Me onstage, I’m ‘center of the town.’ My job is to create that center.”
The HartBeat Ensemble production of “Where We Stand” by Donnetta Lavinia Grays, directed by Vernice Miller and starring Laugh Sanchez, runs Oct. 9-17 at Austin Arts Center’s Goodwin Theater on the Trinity College campus, 300 Summit St., Hartford. Performances are Oct. 9-11 and Oct. 14-17 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 11 at both 2 and 7:30 p.m. trincoll.edu.
