Co-Op High School | Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Arts & Culture | Theater
Top: Emely Lebron as Monet. Bottom: Ka’Meya Ingram and Lia Abdus-Salaam. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Monet sits on her bed, knees pulled to her chest, face bathed in that sickly blue light of a computer screen. Beneath her fingertips, there are dozens of classmates’ secrets: friends talking behind each other’s backs, hook ups swept under the rug, popular kids who feel so alone they could scream. She goes to open a text, then hesitates. Does she really want to pry into someone’s private life?
As if to answer, a cloud of unread messages appear behind her, glowing green and white as they float in the darkness. She clicks, then clicks again. Her eyes go wide. But is she really any closer to her classmates than she was a moment ago?
Those questions propel Keona Marie Gomes’ timely Proof Of Life, which this week premieres as the senior show at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. Written to reflect an increasingly tech-dominated present—and the social isolation that it breeds—the play lands exactly where it’s supposed to, giving actors and audience alike a chance to talk about the intrusion of social media on their daily lives.
It is in many ways also a homecoming: Gomes is a 2021 alum of Co-Op, who has now worked with three senior classes to devise original plays. Performances run Nov. 18 at 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. in the school’s black box theater. The show is directed by teachers Rob Esposito and Sumiah Gay; more information is available here.
“The further we move in time, the farther we get away from kids who had some semblance of a childhood,” Gomes said in a phone call Sunday morning. “I had the CDs. I had an iPod. And then I was blasted in the face with TikTok. I’m seeing that with kids, they’re on social media earlier and earlier … people are starting to see it as a first resort of escaping.”
Proof Of Life, which was written with input from the Co-Op theater Class of 2026, takes that issue on directly, from a screen that projects text messages to threats of doxxing and sizzling gossip that spreads online before it also makes waves in school. In the play, Monet (Emely Lebron) is a repeat senior, on the brink of failing high school for the second time. Across from her, Principal Debra Whittaker (Kayla Pressey) wants to see her succeed before she ages out of the system, even if it means tough love.
If Monet wants to pass, the stakes are high: she must connect with the members of the now-senior class, who were juniors the first time she tried to graduate, to prove that she exists. She has her work cut out for her: there are the cool kids, the popular girls (Savannah Miller, Lia Abdus-Salaam, and Ka’Meya Ingram as Nova, Jelani and Lana, respectively), the literary nerds (Layla Travers and JoJo DeScheen as Cleo and Sage), and the peers who already seem to have mastered the TikTok marketplace (Helsuz Camejo, Jayla Bosley and Tarena Brunson as Case, Joselyn and Nessa).
There are the zipped-up members of student government (Jeniya Henry and Myriam Ayala as Sierra and Devina), an exercise in petty tyranny that feels a little close to home (just imagine Kristi Noem, but if she were a high schooler). There’s her best friend Robbie (Haelynne Diaz), a port in a storm who has plenty of his own issues to unpack.
The title, of course, isn’t just a nod to Monet’s assignment, but a prescient reference to the addiction-addled, zoned-out half-zombies that technology has made us all, quite by design. It’s particularly interesting at Co-Op, where students are three months into a new cell phone policy that uses locked, magnetized Yondr pouches to dramatically cut down on phone use during the school day. Monet’s task isn’t just to prove that she exists: it’s to wake people up, and remind them that they do too. We, whether on the stage or in the audience, would be wise to listen.
Over the course of about two hours, Gomes builds on that warning with some very realistic world-building. With the exception of Robbie, most everyone is glued to a screen, too absorbed in the digital world to fully know what’s happening in the real one. Cleo and Sage talk past each other, as if they’ve forgotten how to have a conversation. Abdus-Salam is so boy crazy she forgets to listen to her friends when they may need her most. Camejo doesn’t seem to remember that his physical body even exists half the time.
So when Monet—who doesn’t love school, but does love computers and coding—dreams up a website where students can connect with each other, we in the audience have a creeping sense that nothing good is going to come of this. Especially if she keeps a journal chronicling all the hot goss. After all, weren’t The Social Network and Mean Girls supposed to be cautionary tales?
What makes the play magical, and also a little devastating, is how closely Gomes has worked with these students to make sure they are seen and heard in all of their real-life complexity. Prior to writing the show, the young playwright (who, fittingly, is studying cybersecurity) sat with the group, listening to what different actors wanted to see and feel during their time in the spotlight.
Diaz, who has spoken candidly about how distracting phones can be, asked her to write something where students would feel seen. Other students blasted current media depictions of high school like “Ginny & Georgia,” a Netflix series about a mother and daughter in which they didn't see themselves at all. Mostly, they were interested in sharing their own experiences of social media and online entanglement, with the hope that the message might resonate with their peers.
“I feel like it’s [social media] a negative,” Diaz said at the end of Friday’s rehearsal, adding that she sees a lot of herself, and her own personal growth, in Robbie. Now school isn’t over at the end of the school day: the drama of petty fights, snarky gossip, and embarrassing personal details follow a student out of school, into the city, and onto social media. From there, those tidbits have a life of their own. “That’s one of the things I hate about it.”
When Gomes sat down to write, she tried to capture all of that. She thought about her friendship with fellow Co-Op alum Bayu Adji, with whom she would “sit around and scheme all day,” sometimes in matching hoodies. She thought about the Monets she knew in her own life, students who were “so smart,” but didn’t get anything from school, and sometimes stopped attending. She thought about how much high school has changed since her own graduation, at a pace that seems dizzying.
As she wrote, she folded in turns of phrase that still felt emergent, like “my twin” and “nice try Diddy.” She doesn’t usually do that, she said: it puts a timestamp on the work. But as she watched online bullying, TikTok capitalism and AI take over the day-to-day mechanics of high school, it seemed too urgent not to.
“I don't care if it's dated in five months,” she said (there are also nods to canonical works like Mean Girls, Heathers, and Wicked that age themselves alongside mentions of ChatGPT and generative AI). “I don't care if it sounds cringe. I want people right now to be seen.”
She has succeeded wildly, devising a show that is made for the moment, set in a place that feels like it could be New Haven. From the minute lights come up on Monet and Robbie texting, students are tethered to their phones, as if these devices have become extra and often unwieldy appendages. Around the stage-turned-school, characters bloom into more than stereotypes of themselves, a stark reminder to the audience that everyone has a story.
Nova, for instance, whose cold, hard edge feels as manufactured as her pink tracksuit, has lost a sibling, a truth that makes its way out in the real world after gossipy explosions online. Malik (De’Andre Reid) is deeper than the fleeting hook ups and college sports tryouts he’s known for, it’s just that no one thinks to ask. Abdus-Salam seems like she is crushing hard on a new boyfriend, but reveals the stress she is under when she learns that her boyfriend is undocumented.
In this way, Gomes has conjured a place that isn’t Co-Op, but has many of the district’s same issues. Travers and DeScheen are endlessly interesting, two neurodivergent students who have been dumped into the ocean that is public high school and learned to swim toward each other. Diaz-as-Robbie has layers of trauma that he needs to unpack. Lebron, at the center of it all, shows how quickly technology can take over, and how it’s a system built on vulnerability, loneliness and addiction.
It’s a stark reminder, of course, to check in with your people in real space and time. Or as Lebron said after a full run-through on Friday, “I feel like I’ve learned that everybody is going through something.”
Friday morning, that vision came brightly to life, able to find both the humor and the deep, sometimes squirm-worthy discomfort that comes with watching a young person fall into, recognize, and break a vicious cycle of addiction. As the lights came up, Lebron-as-Monet sat slumped in the principal’s office, everything in her body making clear how much she didn’t want to be there. She texted with Robbie, slow to put her phone away even in the presence of an administrator. She lambasted the school resource officer (Keith James). She made a case for not needing to be in school at all.
As she waited for an entrance—and then pounced—Pressey channeled a whole number of school administrators, from former Co-Op Principal Val-Jean Belton to Dr. Ed Joyner circa 2017, when he proposed a duel on Bowen Field during a Board of Education meeting (Abbott Elementary is not a strong reference in the play, but Pressey is definitely an Ava).
Around them, characters sprang to life, speaking in distracted, tech-induced pauses and at a clip that mirrored the rapid-fire back and forth of a good text thread. At one lunch table, Camejo seemed to address no one and everyone all at once, live streaming every aspect of his life between class periods. Beside him, a winning Bosley spoke quickly into her cell phone camera, turning the pedestrian routine of lunch into a profitable TikTok strategy. Already, things seemed totally detached from reality, and yet not, part of this brave new world that students are forced to navigate.
So too at a table half-cloaked in shadow in the corner, where Abdus-Salaam was so thoroughly absorbed in her phone that she missed three-quarters of what Ingram was saying, then looked up like a deer caught in the headlights (if we are being honest, who among us is not guilty of doing that?). At the center of it all, Lebron and Diaz shone, trading jokes, suggestions, and then sharp barbs that felt so real that it was hard not to check in with them mid-show.
Backstage, meanwhile, a whole team of seniors turned the black box theater into their technical playground, with a student-led crew that handled set, sound, lighting, costumes, props and projections (kudos to teacher Janie Alexander, who has clearly made her mark). No sooner had the show opened than a flurry of text messages, complete with the incessant, too-cheery ding of phones, appeared on projections behind the actors, one after the other as though the audience was inside a conversation (projections by Makayla Holley, Julian Gasca, Farida Biao and Arianna Ellison).
Some of the staging configurations, which do a lot with a little, showed how quickly students Vanessa Serrano, Trinity Highsmith, and Kaelynn Fowles have learned to work with what they’ve got, rearranging the space to be a cafeteria, an office, a hallway, multiple bedrooms, and a car on the highway, at different moments of the show.
Co-Op may be the city’s arts magnet, but it doesn’t have the budget of a Sacred Heart Academy or Amity Regional High School, and this cohort has learned how to make magic on a shoestring. Meanwhile, sound stuck its landing, from Capone’s “Oh No” remix (itself an adaptation of the The Shangri-Las’ “Remember,” a recent TikTok meme that is already old) to a live rendition of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.”
The result, of course, was and is something totally new, with a kind of empathy that cuts through the noise. Together, actors ask: Is this really what these students, and we, want our future to look like? Do we want to overshare everything, to forego the basic protections of privacy, to put our lives superficially on display? Are we really any more in touch with, and connected to, each other if we just talk through screens all the time?
Do we want the semblance of connection, or the reality of it?