At Co-Op, A Young Playwright Takes Flight

Lucy Gellman Photos.

Principal Thomas Moore is at a loss for words. Just feet away from him, members of the city’s board of education grimace and glower, mapping out a future for his school that has completely removed the arts from the equation. Gone are theater classes, replaced with technology seminars and engineering focus groups. Where there was dance, there is now a football team. The soul of the school, once bright and vibrant, feels robotic. Or at least, it’s about to, without a major intervention from the artists and students at its core.

That universe isn’t New Haven, where a bustling arts school buzzes in the heart of the city’s downtown. But for 90 minutes this week in a black box theater off College Street, it feels like it could be.

So unfolds Starlet, the sharp, cheeky, and exuberant senior production from Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School (Co-Op) that kicks off students’ winter performances this week. Written by 2021 Co-Op graduate Keona Marie Gomes and directed by senior Lauriann Burt, it is both a rite of passage and a reclamation, giving the class of 2024 the ensemble production it never got to have freshman year.

Advising directors on the show include teachers Robert Esposito and Christi Sargent, both veteran educators at the school. Performances run Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. at Co-Op’s 177 College St. black box theater. Tickets and more information are available here.

Gomes: "I wanted this to be a piece crafted and shaped around its actors."

"I wanted this to be a piece crafted and shaped around its actors," said Gomes, who is now studying cybersecurity at Western Connecticut State University. "I remember times being a theater student here and doing a piece that I just couldn't feel myself in, and just being like, 'Please get me off the stage, I cannot take my bow any faster.' That’s not what I wanted this to be.”

Both the playwright and the senior ensemble capture that spirit, making the fictitious Elkins High School completely their own for the entire 90-minute run of the show. As the lights come up, the audience meets Principal Moore (Adrian Jason-Solocio), who is in a squirm-worthy morning meeting with Superintendent Owens (Max Mendieta, who is way more severe than New Haven's Dr. Madeline Negrón) and the town’s board of education. The board has bad news: the district is broke, and the first thing on the chopping block is Elkins’ arts-based curriculum.

It doesn’t matter that Caroline Young (a winning Toni Odom-Kelly) teaches at the school, with an air of stardom that might follow Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep if they walked into a classroom. Or that newbie Evelyn Thomas (Jayden Rzasa) has enough drive to marshal a small army of students, with a color-splattered wardrobe and penchant for frills that matches her enthusiasm. Or that Ms. Bessie (Janiya Burton) has stayed at the school for decades, because she’s so dedicated to the work. The board wants a more financially attractive school, and to them that means a STEM approach with a robust sports program. If kids want to continue in the arts, the board figures, they can just go to the private school one town over.        

There’s a familiar echo here, particularly in a school that has in recent years had to fight to keep its creative writing department and many of its teachers, and a district where art teachers have paid for student plays out of pocket and through popcorn sales. In between, Co-Op has become the place for the quirky kids, the weird kids, the artsy kids, the kids who can rock superhero capes, ear gauges and purple lipstick all at once (“People think it’s like Glee,” Adrian Jason-Solocio joked before a full run-through on Monday afternoon). It’s become an artistic home.

Adrian Jason-Solocio as Principal Moore. 

In Starlet, Gomes both acknowledges and plays with the artsy stereotype, making the school into a crime scene, a comedy of errors, a haven for kids who are finding themselves, and ultimately a tight-knit and idiosyncratic community that thrives on its scrappiness. In this world, there’s no mention of arts teachers who have paid for their supplies out of pocket, driven to students’ homes for instrument repairs, stayed late too many times to count.

There doesn’t need to be, either. It’s in the already-weathered milk crate that Eve carries in with her, a miniature pride flag sprouting from the top. It’s in the choreography that dancer Marcoh Brown teaches students so they won’t have to muddle through bows like the novices they are. It’s in Young’s spectral presence as she sticks around to keep watch over Eve even after dying mysteriously on school grounds.     

And of course, it’s in the students, who play both themselves and their teachers. When Jaxxon (Klever Torres) responds “they/them!” cheerily to Eve’s first time taking attendance, it’s a laugh line and a reminder that Co-Op has worked to become a safe place for many of its LGBTQ+ students. When Mr. Moore stutters “but Cherry Hill is a private school and we can’t possibly compete with them!” audience members may recall that it was Co-Op, and not a whiter, wealthier school, that sent a student on to Broadway last summer. When Ashanti (Carmen Smokes) mentions that Mercury is in retrograde, it seems like it could be a replay of a conversation that just recently happened in a classroom or school hallway.  

And in turn, the play feels like it belongs to Co-Op. Gomes—and by extension, the students who bring her words to life—may poke gentle fun at Elkins’ cosmology of characters, but the play is very much a love letter to her alma mater. Yes, the dance teacher (a side-splitting Khalil Antoine) may have gotten his training by sliding on salsa packets at Taco Bell—but there’s also something serious and loveable about him, like he’s secretly going to bust out some Ailey choreography when people least expect it.

The choir teacher (an ethereal Puma Haug as Ms. Leah) is no Harriett Alfred, except in the way she cheers both students and fellow teachers on like it’s nobody’s business. Even the security guard Officer Travers (Burt, who nimbly balances the role with her job directing her peers) is a gruff punch line, until his soft side is suddenly revealed. In the ever-enthusiastic Eve, Gomes has even written some of herself into the show, giving herself a world in which her love of theater becomes a whole career.     

"I've had my fair share of times where it feels like everything is crumbling around us, [and] we will never make art again,” Gomes said. “And times that we really had to fight for it!"

That care has been part of the playwright’s process for over a year. When Gomes graduated from Co-Op in June 2021, she hadn’t been inside the school for over a year, and missed seeing her classmates and teachers. She never met the class of 2024: their freshmen started online, and they only had the option of returning back in April. Both groups had their classes’ big ensemble shows taken away from them, as teachers tried to innovate with theater by mail, online musicals with hours of Zoom rehearsal, and remote departmental collaborations.

So last year, Gomes was thrilled when Esposito asked if she would be interested in writing an original work for the class of 2024. Before the end of the spring semester, she had met with the then-juniors several times, getting a sense of the personalities embedded in the class. As she navigated her own freshman year of college, she also started to write, cranking out a draft in which she could see the best of her high school years coming to life.

It’s no coincidence that the pandemic doesn’t appear in the work, she said: she wanted a universe without the pandemic, just for a little while.

"This play in a way is offering me a sort of closure that I never got before, and that's a really beautiful thing," she said. "That [Covid] was a giant trauma that I lived through, these students lived through, we all lived through, and it's just a little bit too soon ... There's nothing that we can say onstage about Covid that you haven't heard before. It's too soon to make fun of it. It's too late to be sad and just dwell." 

At an all-day tech rehearsal Monday, students bounced around the stage, practicing bows in a mix of sweats, pencil skirts and Elizabethan garb that is part of a play-within-a-play structure that saves the drama department.

In billowing black tulle, Odom-Kelly stood behind Rzasa, a ghost of her former self with all the glitz and glam intact. To their left and right, students huddled on setpieces, forming a drama class that was running a cliff-notes-eque version of Romeo & Juliet. Every so often, a student would look back to the tech table, squinting, and request a line.

“Keep going!” Sargent said, urging students to improvise if they needed to. “Just remember the story you are telling.”

Adrian Jason-Solocio and Toni Odom-Kelly. 

And at her command, they did. As Elkins High sprang into its school day, doe-eyed students-turned-arts educators filled the stage, making an argument for why things like theater classes and dance workshops matter at all. Eve watched, helpless and covered in motor oil, as her car broke down on the side of the road, only to receive unexpected assistance from Mr. Brown. Students filled the hallways with their cacophonous laughter, adding TikTok videos and witty retorts and the occasional girl fight to the mix.

Odom-Kelly fainted dramatically onstage, setting into motion a chain of events that would end, somehow, in victory and baby-faced smiles from seniors who are still very much just growing up. Through all of it, the low glow of lamps appeared from a tecching table in the back of the room, ready to spotlight the way for anyone who got lost. Over a color-coded script, senior Zoe Stowe whispered sound and lighting cues to her peers.

That sense of the work as a guiding light is true for both the faculty and the students involved. For many of the seniors in the show, it’s a chance to have the ensemble performance they never got their freshman year, and have wanted since logging on to high school that first day in fall 2020. Last year, they performed Arthur Miller’s more intimate The Crucible, for which many of them doubled up on roles. Starlet is both a template for life after high school and a chance to shine before they graduate.

“I definitely like stepping back from acting,” Burt said as she walked her peers through final bows set to Queen’s “We Are The Champions.” “It gives you a bigger picture … it’s kind of like putting together a puzzle.”

Just half an hour before in the cafeteria, fellow seniors Amanda Sykes-Quirk and Rzasa had also pointed to the role theater plays in their lives, both onstage and off. Sykes-Quirk, who plays the bright-eyed drama dork Cassidy, said that the show has helped her work on her communication skills with both teachers and fellow students, particularly when there are several people onstage at the same time. At the same time, “these characters are easy to play because they are us,” she said.

“For me, theater is my safe space,” Rzasa chimed in. ”It’s this place to express yourself.”

Onstage during warmups, that was true for Montez Respers, whose cape-wearing character Tobias is pushed around in a grocery cart by his own personal minion (Laylani Mora as Martina). A lifelong fan of the stage, Respers praised the work as a modern play with enough comedy and intrigue—and similarities with Co-Op—to keep the audience guessing, belly laughs and all, through the end.

“I think it’ll open a lot of peoples’ eyes to the specificity of being at an arts school,” Jason-Solocio said. As she slipped into the black box, the sentiment struck a chord with Gomes.

“Go forth! Make art! Make beautiful things in this world,” she said. “And no more Covid, please. Even though I’ve written pieces before and had them performed, I think that this is opening up a new avenue in my life.”