A Broken Umbrella Theatre has spent its existence making theater out of places that were not theaters. Now the company is taking over a room-to-room run through the Blake Street Center in Westville for Revolutionary Haven: Myths of America, a new work written for the 250th anniversary of the Revolution and performed on October 24, 2026, from 2 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at 495 Blake St.
The premise is New Haven in 1776, but not the tidy version. The company's own description frames the piece around Patriots, Loyalists, and the people caught between them — the ones whose loyalties did not sort cleanly into a founding story. Its show page widens the frame slightly, from 1775 to 1779, and then pushes past the war entirely, asking what may lie ahead in year 251 and beyond. That is an unusual thing for an anniversary play to do: use the occasion to look forward rather than simply to commemorate.
The historical figures the company has chosen to build scenes around are revealing. Benedict Arnold opens the story, and not as a caricature. On April 22, 1775, Arnold demanded the key to New Haven's powder house so his militia company could march to support the fighting in Massachusetts. In Revolutionary Haven, his urgent calls to act collide with the selectmen's caution — and, the company notes, with stories that refuse to leave him at center stage. Hannah Arnold's work at the family shop is part of the piece, offering another side of the life behind his famous name. The show's framing of him is a question rather than a verdict: "Traitor or trader?"
Set against Arnold is Roger Sherman, the New Havener who signed the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration, and later became mayor of the city. Where Arnold demands action, Sherman does committee work, patiently, and the production uses that contrast to ask what a revolution actually needs from the people who build its government.
The cast of historical figures extends beyond those two. Sybil Ludington, the sixteen-year-old who, in the legend, rode through the night in 1777 to rally her father's militia, is among the people whose lives, work, testimony, and legends shape the piece. The company is explicit that it is working with both history and legend — the show page invites audiences to explore the historical sources behind the stories, and the title itself, Myths of America, signals that the production is as interested in what the country told itself afterward as in what happened.
The geography of the show is local and specific: downtown, Long Wharf, West Rock, Westville, Wooster Square. Those are the neighborhoods the story moves through, and they are the kind of places a New Haven audience walks past without thinking about. That is the company's method in miniature. A Broken Umbrella describes itself as a New Haven-based ensemble that creates original, site-specific theatrical experiences.
The choice of venue fits that history. The Blake Street Center at 495 Blake St. is a commercial building in the Westville section of the city — in 2022 the Friends Center for Children signed a lease there — and it is a short distance from 280 Blake St., the former dry cleaner and mechanic shop that A Broken Umbrella is converting into a permanent home called The Umbrella. After sixteen years as an itinerant, site-specific company performing throughout Greater New Haven, the theater received city approvals to move forward on that project, which is planned as a black box theater, cabaret and event space, gallery, and artist hub at the crossroads of Westville, West Hills, and Beaver Hills. Artistic director Ian Alderman has said the goal is a permanent space for New Haven and all of its small theater companies, and the company intends to offer space there to other troupes in the area. The Umbrella is described by the company as the first space it will own, and the first it can offer permanently to the artists and organizations who need it.
That context makes Revolutionary Haven something more than an anniversary gesture. It is a company that has spent its life borrowing forgotten buildings, staging a show in a room and then moving the audience to the next one, and it is now doing that one lot away from the building it hopes to keep. The production is billed as a special preview of the newest work rather than a full run, and it is being staged in an open, general-admission way in a community venue rather than through a reserved-seat ticketing platform — the kind of one-time, room-to-room performance that cannot be reproduced elsewhere.
The anniversary itself gives the material a charge that the company seems to want to complicate rather than celebrate. A revolution, in this telling, was not a single decision made by a united town. It was Arnold demanding the powder house key while the selectmen counseled patience; it was Sherman in committee; it was a sixteen-year-old on a horse in the dark; it was people whose livelihoods and families made loyalty a live question rather than a slogan. And then it was the stories the country told about all of it afterward — the myths the title names.
Revolutionary Haven: Myths of America runs October 24, 2026, from 2 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Blake Street Center, 495 Blake St., New Haven. More information is available through A Broken Umbrella Theatre and CTvisit.