Sumiah Gay and Robert "Espo" Esposito on Thursday morning. The two started their day teaching acting to a group of seniors together. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Sumiah Gay lifted an imaginary treasure chest up from the worn, faded green carpet, its heft visible in the flex of her arms, the way she paused to bend her knees. She fiddled with the imaginary latch, flicking it open. Inside, her eyes paused on something invisible perched at the very top. She lifted it out, shook it gently, and then brought it to her mouth. Without missing a beat, she began to brush her teeth, making space for even the imaginary foam.
She did that Thursday morning on her first day as a theater teacher at—and alum of— Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, on the first day of the New Haven Public Schools’ (NHPS) 2025-2026 academic year. She’s not the only alum teaching at Co-Op this year: hold tight for a story about dancer Tayvon Dudley this fall.
Gay knows the school well: she spent four years as a student learning the building’s hallways, its lunch waves, the nooks and crannies and backstage spaces where she could run lines or do a quick costume change. When she graduated in 2016, she came back to teach at a summer camp that the Shubert Theatre runs at the downtown public school. Now, almost a decade after she left, she’s back to teach full-time.
She replaces Christi Sargent, who made the move to Betsy Ross Arts & Design Academy (BRADA) over the summer. Sargent has taught in the district for almost two decades. In seperate interviews for a different Arts Paper story, both Gay and Sargent called the move bittersweet.
Sumiah Gay, Christi Sargent and Valerie Vollono at a conference Tuesday morning. Gay had both Sargent and Vollono as teachers during her time at Co-Op, for theater and English respectively.
“As a Co-Op alum, I’m really excited to be here,” Gay said Thursday, as she walked briskly to her second class of the day, a practicum in children’s theater that she teaches in the school’s first-floor lecture hall. “It feels like returning home.”
On day one, she wanted students to stretch their imaginations. “I love seeing how your minds work,” she said, already making mental notes about the five students (by the end of the class period, it was seven) with whom she would build a children's theater practicum this year. It was already her second class period of the day: her first is spent in the school's blackbox, teaching seniors with Robert Esposito.
Slowly, they joined her fictitious world, in which a treasure chest had landed at their feet, and they could choose one item to pull out and use. Senior Nadia Okwuosa, who is studying choir, twisted the cap off an imaginary tube of mascara, applying it gently, gingerly to her eyelids before passing it on to the right.
Lizandy Monter, a sophomore who plays the violin, opted for an old rotary phone, picking up the receiver with a kind of ginger, cautious optimism. Dakarai Langley, a junior in the dance department, opened a pretend book, and made its weight seem real in his hands. He paused over the words just long enough to seem like he was reading, and then passed it on.
“The skills that you learn in this class can translate to many, many things,” Gay had said to students one class period earlier, and the words seemed to echo.
A Teaching Artist’s Path
"Ms. Sumiah" teaching at the Shubert Theatre's summer camp in July 2022. The camp was one of her biggest motivations in becoming a teacher. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Gay’s road back to Co-Op has been many years, and maybe just as many performances, in the making. Before she was ever formally interested in theater, Gay grew up in the city’s Newhallville neighborhood, just a few houses from where the Freddy Fixer parade steps off at Dixwell Avenue and Bassett Street. At home, her mom Lavonne was her first and most formative teacher, instilling in her a love for words by the time she could walk.
At first, theater wasn’t even on her radar; it was dance that held her heart. As a young kid, Gay danced at Gloria Jean’s Dance Studio in West Haven, and then the Ultimate Dance Experience in New Haven. She attended the former Jackie Robinson School (now King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School), able to skip a grade when it became clear she was reading and writing far ahead of grade level.
By second grade, she had transferred into L.W. Beecher Museum Magnet School of Arts & Sciences, where she soared in her classes. She kept dancing, an art form that would later feed her interest in choreography. And then when she was 12, Gay landed in Beecher’s after-school drama club. The play was Once On This Island. A teacher tapped Gay as the narrator, unaware that they were about to change her life.
“I knew the entire show by heart,” she said with a bright, lively smile that lit up the hallway well before 9 a.m., when some students were still wiping the sleep from their eyes. “That was it.” To this day, someone can still point to a random place in the musical’s soundtrack, and she can tell them where they are in the play. She knew, then, that she had to pursue theater: the art form called out to her.
Top: Gay leading a game called "These Are Five Things" on Thursday. Bottom: Student Eileena Fisher.
So when she and her mom learned about Co-Op that same year, it seemed like the school had been made for her. Teachers Scott Meikle and Robert “Espo” Esposito – Gay is now teaching alongside Espo in a second period arts block – were two of the first people to welcome her into the space her freshman year. So was Sargent, who she never imagined would leave the school. Thursday, the halls felt incomplete without her.
At Co-Op, Gay could feel her wildest theater dreams taking flight. She dove into her schoolwork both in the classroom and on the stage, in performances that ranged from The Drowsy Chaperone, King Lear, and Clybourne Park to musical comedies like Curtains (read about some of those in the New Haven Independent here, here and here).
She realized that warm-ups, which she'd never given much thought, were sometimes necessary to help her move into a different headspace. She flexed her tech theater muscles, jumping onboard as an assistant stage manager for the school musical her sophomore year. She learned the importance of working in an ensemble, including with students she didn’t particularly like. By the time she graduated, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“All of the shows that I did, I loved them,” she said Thursday morning, as she greeted seniors in a second-period theater class that she teaches with Espo. Or in his words, "she was birthed here." ("Right here," she agreed, pointing at the floor).
Gay in 2024, teaching back at the Shubert's Summer Camp.
When Gay graduated, Co-Op became her launchpad to Western Connecticut State University, where she built on an interest in children’s theater and arts education. Each summer, she returned to New Haven to teach at the Shubert’s summer theater camp, which has become a professional pipeline for young artists of color. Then a year after college, she went back to school for teaching. Last fall, she stepped into her classroom at Dunbar Elementary School in Bridgeport for the first time.
Even then, coming back to Co-Op was always her goal, she said. But she assumed that none of the drama teachers would leave, and she’d have to wait until someone retired. So when she saw that Sargent was transferring schools, she went for the position. She was thrilled when she found out that she’d gotten it.
So, it turned out, were many of her former teachers.
“Oh my God, it’s amazing! It’s amazing,” said Esposito, a son of New Haven himself who now teaches a senior acting class with Gay. “One of my goals is not just to build engaged citizens, but to build people who come back to this city and serve like I did. I grew up in this city, I love this city, and I came back. It just tickles me ... I was just so excited and so happy and so proud of her.”
“When I saw she was on the blue sheet [the NHPS personnel report], I was very excited,” said Erin Michaud, a visual arts instructor who was Gay’s teacher at Beecher, then transferred to Co-Op in 2023. “She was just a wonderful student, very active, so great in class. You know, it’s great to see students grow up,” and it makes it all the more exciting to see them come back as professionals.
Teaching, In Action
Thursday morning, that love followed Gay—or as she prefers these days, Ms. Sumiah—through the hallways, her smile contagious as she opened the door to Co-Op’s lecture hall and welcomed a handful of students. Already, she had taught her first class of the day, an acting course for seniors that unfolds in the school’s black box theater with Esposito. Now, she was ready to talk about children’s theater.
Swivelling just slightly, she scanned the room, taking in the five pairs of eyes staring back at her. Co-Op’s lecture hall is big, with rows of seats and low, carpeted stairs that lead up to street level. LGBTQ+ Pride and Black Lives Matter flags hang in the back of the room, breathing color and language into the space before a teacher says anything at all. Watching her students fan out across the rows, Gay gestured for them to join her at the front of the room.
“Let’s make a circle,” she said, describing her own journey from Co-Op to WestConn, WestConn to Bridgeport and then back to Co-Op again as they trotted over. Along the way, she learned about children’s theater, a form of theater that is performed by professionals, but designed specifically for young audiences. After a class at WestConn built a production of Peter Rabbit for kids, she was hooked.
“My goal is to have a show that we can bring to other schools in the district,” Gay said. In the next weeks and months, she plans to collaborate with teacher Valerie Vollano—another staff member who she learned under—who teaches a unit on fairy tales in her playmaking class. She carries around a bag full of children’s books, with beloved titles from Dr. Seuss and Mo Willems.
Nadia Okwuosa, a senior in the theater department.
By the class’ 20-minute mark, students were exchanging favorite children’s books and films, from Frog and Toad (“I really just enjoyed how they made me feel,” Gay said) and Coraline (“It was like my favorite movie growing up,” Okwuosa said) to classics like The Cat In The Hat and the Berenstain Bears. When Langley remembered his love for Jack and the Beanstalk, Monter pointed out that maybe it was fate that he's played the same role in Into The Woods last year.
“Full circle,” Langley said before adding that he still has a soft spot for Frozen.
“Yeah,” Gay said, completely serious as the two compared notes on Elsa. “Sometimes, it's like, 'Let it go today.' I feel her. I respect her.”
“I had this book of fables growing up as a child,” Monter remembered, lingering on the subject. She loved it, returning to the story of The Princess and the Pea over and over again. Gay nodded knowingly.
“A lot of children’s stories have a lesson that teaches kids how to be when they grow up,” she said. “Like The Boy Who Cried Wolf—” She was about to add a thought when Principal Paul Camarco popped his head in to check on the class.
Dakarai Langley, fully immersed in an exercise.
Two hours earlier, he had walked across the school with a magnetized button attached to a wheeled podium, helping students learn about their Yondr Pouches and a new phone-free policy at school. Within seconds, he was part of the conversation.
“I’m old school,” he said as Gay fished around in her bag, and pulled out a copy of Mo Willems' Pigeon Needs A Bath. “Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. You can’t beat Sesame Street.”
It’s those kinds of interactions, that take a person out of their shell, that she’s looking for, Gay said. After reading Pigeon Needs A Bath aloud (“What are some elements—think back to when you were a young, young child—that stood out to you?”), she made time for conversation to swirl through the room, asking students to stretch their understanding of what theater could look like and who it was for.
Last year, her students at Dunbar Hill were in kindergarten and elementary school, meaning the conversations only ever got so complex, she said. These young artists are in high school, some on the cusp of college application season. She gets to go deep with them.
“Would you rather be able to pause your life or be able to rewind your life?” she asked a bit later, as students jogged from one side of the room to the other and the clock sped towards their lunch wave. It was the kind of question she would have been interested in answering during her years as a student.
“Changing the past is really bad for the future,” Langley offered, nodding to a t.v. show he’d seen where characters are able to time travel. “Changing the past is catastrophic.”
“I’d pause if I wanted to get something done,” ventured another student.
Across the room, sophomore Eileena Fisher wasn’t having it. Left to her own devices, she said, she’d choose to rewind. She later praised Gay for returning to the school as an alum. “Why are we rewinding?” Gay asked. For just a moment, the question seemed to hover between a hypothetical and a reality: Gay was rewinding, sort of, in a way.
“Like if I made a mistake I would want to [rewind and] do it again,” Fisher said. She later added that she’s excited for a chance to study with Gay, precisely because she’s a Co-Op grad who decided to come back.
“It’s cool,” she said of having alumni in the classroom. “They went through what you went through.