Director, writer and producer Jacqueline Brown and Trey Moore (a.k.a. Orion Solo) at the Flint Street Theater last Sunday. Abiba Biao Photo.
On screen, aspiring actress Haven Grace Anthony can’t seem to catch a break. Her funds are dwindling. Her rejections are piling up. Mid-pity party in the front seat of her car, she hits the horn in a fit of rage. It’s then that a driver parked beside her rises from her seat and offers her a Snickers bar.
The offering is a playful jab at the candy’s slogan "You're not you when you’re hungry.” She takes it, sparking a laugh line off screen.
This playful jab is one of many in Haven The Series, the first two episodes of which screened last Sunday at the new Flint Street Theater. The brainchild of actor, director and educator Jacqueline Brown, who teaches film and drama at Neighborhood Music School, the series follows Haven (Di'Jhon McCoy) as she makes her way to New Haven after a series of failed attempts breaking into acting. As she returns, she’s faced with not only trying to find her role in the spotlight, but also within her interpersonal relationships and in life.
The screening marked the third installment of “Elm City Reels,” a four-part series hosted by the Flint Street Theater celebrating New Haven directors. After starting with Stephen Dest’s My Brother Jack, Travis Carbonella’s Stop Solitary CT: The Fight for Oversight and Haven, the series will conclude Oct. 26 with Cheated, a film by filmmaker and educator Isaiah Providence.
Followed by each screening is a Q&A session with the directors of each film. Learn more about Elm City Reels, which takes place on Sundays at 3 p.m. at 25 Flint St., here.
“We created this series to showcase and highlight, spotlight, independent films and TV as well,” said Flint Street Theater manager Trey Moore (a.k.a. curator and musician Orion Solo) to the audience before starting the film. “Just trying to create a space for our local, regional work to be shown independently.”
Haven has been years in the making. In 2023, Brown landed a grant from the New Haven Artist Corps, which tasked artists to create art that was free, accessible, and inviting to the public. Brown, who had only acted and directed in the theater, saw it as a creative opportunity. With her budget up by $20,000, she knew she had to bring her idea to life and explore film as a medium.
The plot, which is written by Brown and filmed in New Haven, reflects that sense of taking a leap, all while telling a story of coming home. Downtrodden from her failed acting attempts, Haven begrudgingly returns home and reconnects with her former classmates Dylan (Stephen “Gritz” King, who also worked on the music) and Melody (Fior Rodriguez), with whom there’s clearly been a falling out. Through a series of flashbacks, viewers see a former romantic relationship that also fell apart, giving them the understanding that there was a lot to flee from.
In the series, the magic is that Brown tells the story through scenes packed with feeling, where every detail is lovingly thought out and the writing brings friends back together in a way that feels kind and joyful. In one vignette, for instance, Melody arrives to return Dylan’s tupperware and encounters Haven, who has been hanging out at the house.
The tension between Haven and Melody is palpable, and Dylan (a sweet, funny King who understands comedic timing) quickly makes his exodus, suddenly consumed with the need to put away the tupperware. It’s then Haven hands herself face-to-face with her frenemy and the two hash things out. The audience sees how Haven, in leaving, has hurt her once-best friend, who had a baby after high school, and felt largely alone as she settled into motherhood.
It’s a sweet, realistic back-and-forth, in which they remember not just how angry they were, but also how much they love each other. In the end, the two seal a new chapter of friendship with a signature handshakes—a pinky promise followed by an air kiss. When the three friends sit down to continue talking over Uno, it feels like the world is returning to an equilibrium. That’s true even when Haven receives the devastating news that she didn’t advance in a casting call. She's sad, but there's the sense that she's going to be ok.
Behind the scenes, that scene is also a testament to the team’s flexibility, and Brown’s ability to lean on a creative network in New Haven. After a sudden, unexpected downpour canceled the scene’s outdoor shoot, Brown reached out to her old high school theater teacher Robert Esposito, who still teaches drama at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. Sure enough, Esposito was down to help the cause, giving the cast refuge in his living and dining room.
A still from the series opener, "70 x 7." HAVEN The Series Photo.
The situations Anthony encounters aren’t foreign to Brown, who has fashioned some of the protagonist’s plight after her own. Brown, for instance, has also faced unemployment, rejection, and bills that pile up, all making it hard to believe that the arts is a viable career path. She, too, has struggled with whether New Haven is the place where she wants to build her career. And she, like many in the audience, has also navigated complicated friendships.
Several of the artistic decisions also come from what Brown would like to see, or feels is missing, on mainstream television. Haven doesn’t curse, for instance, a decision that Brown called intentional and meticulously crafted. Haven also continually leans on her faith, referencing passages in the scripture with cutaways and voiceovers.
“I miss the TV where I could just watch it with my parents and not worry about, like, some random explicit scene coming up …or the cursing out of nowhere,” Brown said. “I miss TV where you can watch it and get a lesson from it because of what you saw, right?”
The series is also very much a love letter to New Haven. In the second episode, Haven is feeling defeated, still on a job search and plagued by the memories of her ex-boyfriend Jonathan (Gian Melendez). When she wants to stay inside and watch the High School Musical movies, Melody forces her to come out to the premiere party for the real-life music festival Seeing Sounds. It’s there that she delivers a heartfelt monologue to the crowd about her passion for acting.
Celebrating her success, Haven moves to the dance floor when she bumps into Jonathan. Declining his advances for a date, she attempts to put up boundaries, cautiously opting for a rekindled friendship when his invitation to a movie becomes too much to turn down. The viewer can only speculate where their relationship will end up, but it’s clear that the chemistry between the two never dissipated despite the heated arguments that led to their break up, shown in a series of flashbacks.
Blink and you’ll miss the many hyper-local Easter eggs, which make the series delightful and heartfelt. Every shot includes allusions to New Haven artists, cultural cornerstones, and the city’s natural beauty, from drone footage of West Rock to cameos from Madeleine’s Empanaderia and Bregamos Community Theater, both used as filming locations. Even the clothes the actors wear hail from New Haven, with the most prominent being from the streetwear brand PU$H, founded by Shannon Harrell, Jr., Johnathan Mitchell, and Jamon Rouse.
Esposito in the audience. Abiba Biao Photo.
This theme of New Haven pride extends to the team behind the camera; Providence teaches at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, and Moore served on the production team as sound producer and even makes a cameo at the end of episode two, as an extra in the crowd of party guests, dancing under the strobing lights. In his wider New Haven life, he is the founder and creative mind behind Seeing Sounds, which made the journey from Edgewood Park to downtown New Haven this year.
“It was really New Haven, top to bottom,” Brown said of the production and creative direction of the series. “That was important for me because I wanted to not only showcase for people who watch this, that New Haven has talent, but even for Haven herself to really see, ‘Oh, wow, New Haven has more to offer than what I thought.’”
After the screening, attendees jumped in to praise the film. Esposito, who first met Brown as a student at Co-Op in 2010, happily took the mic from Moore to sing his former student’s praises.
“I just wanted to say how impressive it was to see you work,” he said, noting how proud he’s been to watch the evolution of Brown’s work. “The incredible amount of collaboration you had, without ego … Looking at this today, it was like the amount of internal truth that we saw coming out of the mouths and the souls of the characters is even more present than I remember the first time I saw it.”
Esposito’s involvement in the series goes deep; his daughter, Gabriela “Gaby” Sofia Esposito, served as the associate production assistant. On the day they were filming the Uno scene, the cast couldn’t leave the set without singing happy birthday to her, a sign of how life and art so often bled into each other on this project.
“She was all excited about it,” Esposito remembered. “She’s like ‘Dad, this is exactly what I went to school for. This is exactly what I wanted to do.’”
Also in the audience was Lauren Tucker, an associate professor of special education Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). Months ago, Tucker had Brown in her summer class, and clicked with her immediately. While Tucker has her doctorate in education, she relates to Brown's interest in theater and film because she was a theater major in undergrad.
“Being able to see her creativity shine and New Haven though that, like, was just amazing,” she said. The series dovetailed with her own love for "accessibility in the arts,” which is a primary research interest, she said. “Just seeing the dimension of her in this was also, like, great.”
Brown is currently a graduate student at SCSU studying special education teaching, and is putting Haven on the back burner for the moment, but hopes to explore the accessibility in theater and art. She posited ideas such as working with special needs kids in regards to filming and framing future characters she writes through an inclusionary lens.
“Career wise, I'm going into teaching officially in that realm, which I'm really excited about because I know all things work together,” she said. “So I'm looking forward to seeing how God allows me to connect what I'm learning in school, about special education, and connects it to what I know or already in regard to writing and directing.”
While Haven casts New Haven as an unspoken main character, the series also reaches well beyond the city. Earlier this year, the series won in the “Outstanding Short Film” category at the 5th annual Greenwood Film Festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood is significant in America’s history of Black commerce, development, arts and culture: it was once known as a twentieth-century “Black Wall Street.”
“We all have that mindset of ‘There’s some type of cap on our potential if we stay here in New Haven,’ and I feel like that’s a relatable story because… wherever you grew up you always feel like success means branching out,” Brown said.