A New "Haven" Finds Its Way Home

A still from the series opener, "70 x 7." HAVENTheSeries Photo.

Haven Grace Anthony takes in the laughter-drenched room, a quintet of Uno cards in one hand. Dusk is falling outside, a soft, heavy heat rolling through the city. Across the table, her friend Melody softens, cracks a smile as she charts her path to Uno victory. A voiceover from Haven, summer-warm and smooth as butter, comes over the track. 

“I guess being back isn’t so bad,” she says, and a person can feel the tug of a city that raised her, a laugh at the edge of her voice. There’s a sharp breath; she catches herself. “I’m not back though. It’s just a visit.”

Those questions of rootedness—whether to stay or to go, how and where and when one finds a home—are central to HavenTheSeries, a new, New Haven-focused web series that dropped on YouTube last week. Written, directed and produced by Jacqueline Brown with a dazzling cast and crew, the work fuses faith, family, and storytelling to create a deep and soul-feeding sense of time and place. It is, especially on the cusp of a new year, a spiritual balm the viewer may have not even known they needed. 

The series, the first episode of which is now live on YouTube, is currently fundraising for the three final episodes of its five-episode series. Last month, Brown held two screenings, at the LAB at ConnORP and Bregamos Community Theater. It is now publicly available; donate here. 

“There were a lot of firsts,” said Brown on a recent episode of “Arts Respond” on WNHH Community Radio. “And it just warms my heart to be able to do that. To be able to create opportunities for people to have their firsts, right? And for them to get paid for their talents, for their time, for their artistry.”

Named after its central character, the series follows actress Haven Grace Anthony (Di'Jhon McCoy) as she returns to present-day New Haven for a short trip home. When the audience meets her, she’s living in Atlanta, jumping from audition to audition, and has just landed a film shoot in New York. Back home, it isn’t long before she runs into her former classmates Melody (Fior Rodriguez) and Dylan (Stephen King, who also worked on the music), and later an ex-boyfriend Jonathan (Gian Melendez) with whom it seems she never made a clean break.  

The longer she stays, the fewer reasons she has to go. She and Melody are able to talk through some old wounds, with a kind of grace and tenderness that feels grounded in biography. Dylan is instantly like a brother who has always belonged. Jonathan comes on soft, sweeter than she remembers, and he too gives the writing whole layers of complexity. Throughout, her faith grounds her, with frequent references to scripture that are cited in the voiceovers.  

“Is she going to stay put, and grow where she’s planted, or is she gonna go towards the big city lights and say, ‘forget about this New Haven?’” Brown said of the central question she wanted to ask. “So that’s what we’ll be following on this journey as we look at this series.”

For Brown, who grew up in New Haven, it’s a story that is intimately linked to her own. Raised in the city’s Newhallville neighborhood, “I first caught the theater bug when I was very young,” and she and her mom attended a performance of Annie at the Shubert Theatre. Sitting in the audience, Brown was star-struck. She knew, then and there, that she had found her calling. 

At first, it was only the stage that pulled her in—she never dreamed that she would write or direct. Within a few years, she was in a community production of Godspell, thrilled to look out into the audience and see her family members watching. It led her to Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and then Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), where she deepened her studies in acting and theater performance.   

Brown at a premiere celebration at Bregamos Community Theater last month.

“It started as a way of getting flowers, right, but as I grew, it was a way to actually understand myself and understand life more,” she said. “There’s multiple ways to be a part of theater, there’s multiple ways to be a part of film … there’s room for everyone, and it’s such an inclusive career choice.”

When Brown graduated from CCSU, she worked with Long Wharf Theatre as a teaching artist, education coordinator and house manager, always wearing multiple hats. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, she was part of a round of layoffs that ultimately reduced the staff from 65 to 25 people. For a while, she landed at Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown, where she served as the program director.

But Brown—in a story that so many creatives in New Haven tell some version of—was also restless as she tried to grow her own career. In 2021, she made the decision to leave the Elm City for Atlanta, where she jumped into auditions while hostessing at a restaurant. During her time there, “I was like, ‘I got to have my own relationship with God,’” she said. Her faith became her foundation. 

So when an acting job brought her back to the East Coast, she assumed it would be temporary.  

“I didn’t want to come back,” she remembered during a screening at Bregamos Community Theater last month. But while she was in New York, she got a call for a show happening at the Shubert Theatre. It felt like kismet—the stage that had inspired her so many years ago now wanted her back on it. After going back and forth, she made the decision to stay, ultimately working jobs that ranged from NBCUniversal to the Neighborhood Music School.

Then last year, she was working on a play and started thinking about the potential that film had to tell a story in a way she’d never tried before. Already, she’d played with the idea of telling a version of her own story—of wanting to “get out of New Haven”—because she knew it would resonate with other artists in the Elm City. So when she spotted a grant alert for the New Haven Artist Corps, it felt like a sign. A three-minute trailer, written and filmed in a whirlwind few days, led her to a successful grant application.

“It’s just been a community effort,” she said. After landing the grant, Brown wrote furiously, pulling heavily from her own lived experiences in and beyond New Haven. She and a team dove into auditions, ultimately reopening the casting process to find the right Haven (Brown said she is extremely grateful for McCoy, who fit Haven from the moment she walked into auditions). She also leaned on a powerhouse creative team, with associate producer Kendall Driffin, videographer and photographer Isaiah Providence, composer and musician Orion Solo, camera operator Quentin Jean and associate production assistant Gaby Sofia Esposito. 

That team is a testament to New Haven itself: many of the members are New Haven Public Schools grads, and Providence now teaches film and video production at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. 

While working behind the camera feels different, Brown added that she’s grateful for the opportunity. When she began writing the series, she had to make a decision not to cast herself in the titular role. In the moment, she said, it was hard—and felt like a learning experience that needed to happen. Months of writing and filming later, she thinks of it as one of the best and most stress relieving decisions she could have made. 

“Overall, it’s not about me,” she said. “It’s about the project. And I knew, because I was wearing so many hats … that I wouldn’t have been able to give the role what it needed if I was also in front of the camera.”  

The result is a deep, extremely loving and sometimes tough homage to the Elm City and the people who call it home. As the first episode rolls, long, breezy shots of Grand Avenue and State Street fly past the car window, their landmarks whizzing by like an invitation. A camera pans over I-95, and suddenly a viewer feels as though they are watching New Haven from up above. It’s a chance to dig in, and one would be wise to take it.  

As characters populate Haven’s world, they feel fully of New Haven, from impassioned mentions of the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade and Seeing Sounds Festival to cameos from musicians Lovelind Richards, Nehway, and Dash Watts. Like Brown, Haven searches for God not in a house of worship, so much as in small signs from the world around her (a nod to even bit part actors like Julian Awudu, who help her build this world). Everything is undergirded with scripture, a kind of container that gives Haven a sense of order even in the chaos. 

“It’s a totally genuine, conflicted love letter to New Haven,” Brown said to an intimate audience on a recent Saturday night, as attendees filled Bregamos Community Theater for a screening. 

And it is. Filming locations like Madeleine’s Empanaderia and Bregamos Community Theater feel like visual Easter eggs when they pop up on screen, repurposed as coffee shops, restaurants, summertime stoops and open mic stages. Drama teacher Robert Esposito’s cozy home gets some love, thanks to a day of outdoor shooting that got rained out. Shots by the water bring a viewer into the stillness and beauty that can live in the city, and for which it is seldom known by outsiders.

Meanwhile, the cast shines. As Haven, McCoy is an anchor, calm in a growing storm until she suddenly isn't, and she reveals how deeply human and vulnerable a person can be. She’s far from alone: Rodriguez brings fiery, sometimes sharp emotion and humor to her role, entirely believable as that best friend who won’t let you off the hook. King becomes the glue that holds his friends together, and when he smiles, a viewer can nearly feel the warmth come right off the screen. Melendez, whose eager-eyed youth works for a character who is as curious as he is hard-edged, shines. 

And Brown’s writing is the through line for it all. At turns warm, funny, sharp and compassionate, she builds a world that is not just Haven’s, but very well might be our own. 

As the series comes into the world, Brown sees it as part of a much larger cultural Renaissance that is taking place across the city, and particularly among creatives of color. When Brown moved back to New Haven two years ago——she was delighted to find a city more vibrant than the one she left, from Kulturally LIT to BLOOM in Westville to Black Haven and Creative U. She had high praise for Kulturally LIT’s “Year of Baldwin,” through which she discovered “Blues for Mister Charlie” for the first time.     

"The arts are here,” she said. “New Haven is under a new Renaissance period, I believe. Everywhere you look, someone's making something, a business has grown, you're going to a film festival, things of that nature. So I'm really happy to even be amongst the people that are creating right now. I believe this is something we'll be talking about for years to come."