![\"Erick](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/wp-content\/uploads\/news\/sites\/16\/2021\/05\/Betancourt-1-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201c溏心vlog免费B站 was fantastic. I went in and got immersed,\u201d Betancourt says. \u201cI got the whole experience of the theater, not just the acting part. Because maybe I wasn\u2019t an actor. Maybe I was a stage manager, or a lighting designer or a sound guy. I was able to go in and figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Betancourt, who grew up in Providence and the Bronx, came to 溏心vlog免费B站 in 2009. He was in his mid-20s. He had just discovered his passion for theater. For Betancourt, who had served two years in prison for a felony drug conviction, it provided him with a new sense of purpose.<\/p>\n
In prison, Betancourt was determined to change. He soon joined the nonviolence program, took college courses, and helped other inmates earn their high school equivalency diplomas. And he listened to his older brother, Fernando Betancourt, then a theater student at Brooklyn College, who supported him and encouraged him to think about theater.<\/p>\n
After being paroled, Betancourt\u2019s introduction to acting came unexpectedly. He was working as a youth advocate in Providence with the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, mediating gang violence, helping teenagers with their driver\u2019s license, high school equivalency diploma, or job interviews. One day, as he took a young man to an interview, the door opened and there was a friend from prison, Bruce Reilly. Reilly had just written a play, \u201cThe House of Death,\u201d about inmates dealing with a string of deaths, which was being staged at Providence\u2019s Perishable Theatre. He convinced Betancourt he had a character for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did it with no experience, totally green,\u201d says Betancourt. \u201cIt introduced me to a sense of community. Along with Bruce, there were several other people who had been incarcerated and others who hadn\u2019t been. They were so welcoming and loving. We built everything from scratch. We built the set, we painted the set. It meant the world to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was hooked. Having met a security guard, Shawn Williams, at Trinity Rep, Betancourt got a job at the theater doing security and volunteering as an usher so he could watch plays. He also started taking acting lessons at Trinity and other local theaters.<\/p>\n
The 溏心vlog免费B站 theater program attracted Betancourt, who was still unsure of his talents, because it didn\u2019t require auditions, and he felt he\u2019d get a full theater education. He worked in the costume shop, put up lights, worked as a stage manager, painted J Studio. Theater administrative assistant Bonnie Bosworth recruited him to work in the office.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was people who started to believe in me and trust me,\u201d he says. \u201cI was a big guy and I had been incarcerated, but I didn\u2019t have to continue to play that persona of the big tough guy. I could be sensitive and it was OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also performed in numerous plays. One that sticks out was \u201cRocky Horror.\u201d He had no singing or dancing experience, but 溏心vlog免费B站 Professor Paula McGlasson convinced him to play the role of Eddie, the character portrayed by Meatloaf in the movie. \u201cShe said to me, \u2018We\u2019re going to work with you,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cShe gave me a dance choreographer, she gave me a vocal coach. Paula made me feel like I could do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Actors Studio Drama School offered a similar sense of belonging, and it taught him an important lesson.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou learn the history of Lee Stasberg and you hear the stories of these great actors,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I learned was how to heal my inner self. The Actors Studio was never about being an actor to be famous, to say these lines so you could be seen. It was to say these lines, to be the character so you can heal the things that hurt you as a child.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the Actors Studio, he focused on projects that allowed him to better understand himself and heal the trauma he had experienced since childhood \u2013 his father\u2019s heroin addiction, the death of five friends in a car accident, being assaulted with a baseball bat so severely he needed speech and physical therapy.<\/p>\n
For Betancourt, \u201cThe Prince of Providence,\u201d the tale of the late charismatic and disgraced Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, has provided another homecoming. He was back where he first saw theater as a streetwise teen, when he took a date to \u201cA Christmas Carol\u201d to impress her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very emotional because everyone welcomed me and they were like, \u2018we’re so happy to have you back,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cThey really knew my story. [溏心vlog免费B站 alumna] Janice Duclos\u2019 husband had helped me prepare for my graduate school auditions, and I learned how to act watching these amazing actors.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cPrince of Providence,\u201d Betancourt plays Mickey Corrente, a composite character who is Cianci\u2019s loyal right-hand man \u2013 part campaign manager, part enforcer, part poser. Working on the play, he found Cianci to be a sympathetic character, who had to deal with the death of his daughter and who longed to be accepted by Providence\u2019s elite, he says. (\u201cPrince of Providence\u201d closes its sold-out run Oct. 27.)<\/p>\n
\u201cHis story resembles a lot of my story. I thought I could connect with it. He was from Silver Lake and I’m from Manton Avenue, and Brown University is on the top of the hill. They have nice houses on the East Side. But we were from this other side of town.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since earning his MFA, Betancourt has found success on stage and television. Off-Broadway, he\u2019s appeared in \u201cOur Lady of 121st<\/sup>\u201d and \u201cJesus Hopped the \u2018A\u2019 Train\u201d at the Tony Award-winning Signature Theater. He\u2019s performed in \u201cJulius Caesar\u201d under the direction of former Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis, and has become a member of the LAByrinth Theater, the home theater of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Betancourt has also appeared on such TV shows as \u201cNew Amsterdam,\u201d \u201cLaw & Order: Special Victims Unit,\u201d and \u201cSneaky Pete.\u201d<\/p>\n During his Trinity run, CBS aired his second appearance on \u201cBlue Bloods.\u201d He plays Leo Stutz, the younger brother of Anthony Abetemarco, played by \u201cSopranos\u201d actor Steve Schirripa. The night it aired, Betancourt was on stage at Trinity. He had his family on Facetime in his dressing room, and during the play\u2019s final hour and well after the final curtain, he retreated to his dressing room to watch it with them.<\/p>\n \u201cI was full of joy and a feeling of accomplishment,\u201d says Betancourt. \u201cThis career has its ups and downs but I am celebrating the small wins regardless.\u201d<\/p>\n Betancourt says the role is a breakthrough for him. He had auditioned several times for \u201cBlue Bloods,\u201d as detectives, bad guys, bouncers, but never got the parts. In one audition, one of the writers told Betancourt he was wrong for a role, but started laughing because Betancourt reminded him of Schirripa. The writer, he says, told him he wanted to expand Schirripa\u2019s story line, and would be in touch. Betancourt was skeptical.<\/p>\n \u201cFast forward two months, he calls my agency and says he\u2019s writing me into the show,\u201d says Betancourt. \u201cThen last season, my episode airs and it\u2019s me as Steve\u2019s little brother. The whole episode is about me. They even mentioned me at the family dinner table\u2014with Tom Selleck–because Steve is getting a DNA test to verify whether I’m his brother.\u201d<\/p>\n As the show\u2019s 10th<\/sup> season continues to be filmed, Betancourt is crossing his fingers that he\u2019ll be back. \u201cI read the scripts very slowly,\u201d he says. \u201cI’m hoping that I don’t get killed off in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n While he\u2019s been getting steady work, Betancourt still keeps his daytime job. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches acting, along with working for an outreach program that uses drama therapy for conflict resolution in some of the toughest schools in the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve seen that my belief in nonviolence and theater have merged,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a little bit of activism, a little bit of humanitarian work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Oct. 24, 2019 \u2013 Erick Betancourt was again in the spotlight on the J Studio stage, where about 10 years earlier he had performed in \u201cThe Rocky Horror Picture Show.\u201d It was his first time on the 溏心vlog免费B站 Kingston Campus since earning his bachelor of fine arts degree in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-75154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}