Good Kids and ‘Good Kids’

“Maybe this is one we shouldn’t touch.”

That is what Katy Wood Hills, Colorado Academy’s Visual & Performing Arts Director, thought to herself when she heard about the drama the Upper School’s Advanced Acting class wanted to stage in November 2025.

The play was Good Kids, Naomi Iizuka’s provocative retelling of a high school sexual assault case based loosely on the one that occurred in 2012 at Steubenville High School in Ohio. The crime and the yearslong legal proceedings that followed it divided a town and attracted national attention: Two of the victim’s peers were found guilty after the event was documented on social media, even though some students and adults in the community tried to shield the perpetrators. Exploring themes of rape culture, social media, and victim-blaming through the conflicting stories of teenagers, Good Kids looks at the ways that digital platforms such as Instagram and YouTube warp the truth, harming young people.

It was indeed a potentially controversial work to consider bringing to CA’s Leach Center for the Performing Arts, even its Black Box Theater, a smaller and more intimate venue designed for just this kind of production. With adult language and content throughout, Good Kids was the first work produced through an initiative established by the Big Ten Theatre Consortium, a collaboration aimed at advancing the work of young female playwrights. Since its premiere in 2014, the play has been staged hundreds of times, mostly by college and university theater departments accustomed to dealing with mature themes. 

Yet Hills doesn’t believe in avoiding what she calls “difficult conversations” in the arts; the trust she shares with faculty members and students across all three divisions of the school means that decisions about tough topics are made with input from all involved. And this year, it was the experienced Sophomore, Junior, and Senior actors enrolled in the course themselves, working with Theater and Dance Instructor Melissa Zaremba, who unanimously chose Good Kids after evaluating several scripts at the start of the fall trimester.

According to Zaremba, “When the students chose this play, I was surprised, concerned—and also very proud of their willingness to take on such a complex subject.”

Through conversations with her students as well as with faculty and staff members, she heard that sexual assault and toxic behavior on social media weren’t far-away problems that affected only “other people”—they were real issues experienced by family members, friends, colleagues, and even CA students and teachers.

Upper School Principal Max Delgado, too, affirmed why this kind of work is so relevant and important to students, and he offered his full support.

As Senior cast member Caroline Haley, who played assault victim Chloe, explains, “Everyone found important meaning in this show, and the Black Box is the space to put on these kinds of intense works that can’t be seen on our Main Stage. You get a lot of laughs and a lot of love from those big shows, but we felt we almost had to portray these themes here, because it was an opportunity to do such a different kind of piece.”

Fellow Senior Gideon Silverman-Joseph, who played one of Chloe’s attackers, adds, “The play is all about kids in high school. It felt like we should take the bull by the horns and perform it from the perspective of high school.”

Confident in both her colleague’s and the actors’ decision, Hills realized this was a moment for CA to lean into its mission, “particularly the notion of courage,” she says. “It was a truly courageous decision by the class as a whole to engage with such challenging content.” 

Courageous conversations

But Hills’ involvement with the production didn’t end there—it was only beginning. 

She and Zaremba knew that staging Iizuka’s play would require extraordinary care and sensitivity, both to protect the student actors who’d play roles that were vulnerable or violent, and to ensure that the disturbing narrative—based on a real-life assault and focusing on themes that could feel painfully immediate for high school-age viewers—didn’t result in harm for audiences.

“We embraced the idea of nurturing this courageous conversation, but at the same time were wary about forcing something that could be troubling or even traumatic for the participants and viewers,” explains Zaremba.

The two consulted with CA’s counseling team as well as Amy Wintermeyer, the Assistant Head of School, who helps lead efforts to bolster Culture & Community, to seek their guidance in wrapping safety and support around every aspect of the production. Their first step, and probably the easiest, was crafting a warning that would accompany any promotion of the play; it noted, “This production contains material of a highly sensitive nature, including strong language and discussion of sexual assault that may be triggering for some individuals.” They also resolved to allow admission to performances only for students in Ninth Grade or above.

What was more challenging, however, was establishing the supportive rehearsal environment the 12 student actors would need if they were to succeed in portraying characters—all of them their own age—whose experiences and beliefs could be painful, offensive, shocking, or cruel.

 

Good Kids takes place after a high school party, when a student, Chloe, is raped by a gang of football players after passing out from alcohol consumption. Most of the play follows the repercussions and rumors that circulate afterwards among Chloe’s peers, some of whom blame her for causing the assault. If, as one of the female characters says, “We’re all good kids, every single one of us,” then the play asks what could lead so many “good kids” to collectively assault a classmate, fail to intervene while the act is happening, and then post and share the evidence on social media?

According to Iizuka, “You don’t solve a problem like sexual assault with anything other than a deep shift in attitude, and a deep shift in attitude happens conversation by conversation, in dorm rooms, parties, and rehearsal halls.”

 

Conversation, notes Zaremba, was the key to creating the safety net the performers needed. 

Early on, she gave the students a study guide used for college productions of the play. The questions in the guide—about topics like consent, peer pressure, and when to intervene—sparked valuable discussions that both built shared understanding among the cast and smoothed the way for their inhabiting roles and ideas so different from their own.

Worried what her students’ families might think when they heard from their children about the kind of material they were discussing in class, Zaremba extended the conversation to parents and guardians through individual meetings. They were universally supportive, and the frank talks they were able to have with their students about difficult topics turned them into some of the play’s earliest boosters.

“The biggest takeaway for me at this stage of the process was that our students are really thoughtful and smart,” Zaremba recounts. “Sometimes we may not give them the credit they deserve for it, but these are really good citizens in our community.”

Teaching empathy

As rehearsals began in earnest, Zaremba found herself pondering another question: What does a high school acting class look like when young actors are supposed to say and do unkind things to one another?

 

First things first, she thought. “Students would arrive at class, and sometimes they hadn’t even seen each other that day yet. So we always got started with a game or a warmup,”—tossing around a stuffed animal was a favorite. “It was sort of a daily check-in that allowed us to be together before shifting gears to the script.”

Once they did shift, Zaremba and her cast were careful to keep in sight the clear line between what was real and what was acting. 

 

Silverman-Joseph recalls, “The first day of rehearsal, I felt so much anxiety—one of my lines to a female character was, ‘Shut your mouth!’ I was actually a little scared to say those words to my classmate, Mika [Chesnutt, a Sophomore], whom I hadn’t known at all before this.”

But then, he recounts, Chesnutt did something that would come to define the rehearsals from that point on. “She said, ‘It’s okay; just say it.’ And in that moment, I started to feel more comfortable showing the villainous side of my character. Our castmates knew we were acting; they knew our real selves weren’t like that.”

For Zaremba, the effort to understand and portray people so unlike themselves—whether a hyper-aggressive member of the football team or judgmental social media bystander—was the central challenge for the students in the class.

“Advanced Acting isn’t the same as a professional theater company; it is a learning experience,” she explains. “So we choose material based on what it can teach.”

In this case, she goes on, the lesson was empathy. “Acting for theater is one of the most powerful ways to inspire appreciation for another’s perspective. Our class discussions revolved around questions like whether Gideon’s character is pure evil, or why a female classmate of the victim would bully her. The answers weren’t black and white; they required us to imagine how good kids make bad decisions.”

 

According to Junior Christian Aposporis, who played a football teammate of Silverman-Joseph’s, the impact of the piece hangs on the actors’ willingness to empathize with the characters—not turn them into caricatures. 

“The point of Good Kids is that this could literally happen to anyone,” Aposporis argues. “Throughout the play, there’s confusion about why people did what they did, and who is to blame; there’s no one with an evil laugh to point to—that would diminish the story.”

 

Agrees Senior Celia McCarty, who played one of those critical of Chloe’s actions, “There’s a duality to every role: Everybody has good in them, and everybody has bad in them. Part of your journey as an actor is trying to figure out whether they think that what happened is wrong or not.”

Still, after immersing the group in so much that was negative and conflicted during rehearsals, Zaremba always guided the class back to “home” before dismissing her students, having them literally “shake off” their roles with a group exercise at the end of each day. 

“It was time for us to separate from those characters and remember our real relationships with the people in the room.”

A new world

By the week of the show, the Advanced Acting students felt closer than ever. How they felt about performing the intense drama in front of an audience of their peers and families, however, was less clear.

Just as with the teenagers in Good Kids, social media was top of mind for the 12 cast members: What if someone in the audience used their phone to record one of them, in character, saying something awful, and then shared it? Would it be taken out of context? Could it shatter a reputation, ruin friendships?

 

“It’s a whole new world—something could easily get misused,” Zaremba knew. She had to be able to reassure her students that performing for an audience would feel as safe as rehearsing in class, behind closed doors. So, partnering with colleagues like Hills, she decided to enact a strict “no phones” policy at every show; anyone who had a device out during a performance would be asked to leave.

 

Zaremba was certain these actors would run up against another phenomenon that’s all too common in high school theater: nervous laughter from peers in the audience, especially when a friend’s or classmate’s performance clashes with their day-to-day school persona. Aware that the show’s sensitive material would only feed the nervous energy, Zaremba and Hills also agreed to step in if giggling or comments became disruptive to the cast, which they never did.

But most important for the cast was knowing that, when the lights went up at the end of the show, they’d still be seen by friends and family members as themselves, not the violent or traumatized characters they played on stage. Zaremba suggested they hold a “talk-back,” a post-show Q&A session during which audience members could ask questions and the cast could respond in their own voices. 

This addition turned out to be crucial. Each night during the show’s brief run, attendees were eager—and relieved—to get the chance to hear from the students, who were just as grateful.

 

“They immediately started asking us questions about how it felt to interact with each other as ourselves after being something completely different on stage,” recounts Junior Sequoia Holzmann, who played school bully Amber. “People told me, ‘We love you so much as a human, but we hated you so much as your character.’”

Haley’s grandmother was in the audience for one performance; instead of the shock Haley expected, her relative felt pride. “She said it really speaks to our courage to see us perform this kind of material on stage, in front of everyone.”

The talk-back, observes Hills, encapsulated so much of what makes theater at CA unique.

“This was such a diverse group of students—three grades, and none of them necessarily in friend groups together. But over and over again after the show, they talked about how close they had become, and how doing something so difficult had made that connection even more meaningful.”

 

Adds Junior Gia Gile, “The proximity we have to the audience in the Black Box intensifies that experience. You’re surrounded by them, just a few feet away. It feels so much more personal, like you’re delivering your lines directly to the people in front of you. And knowing that CA can present this kind of piece means we can have other hard conversations with our audiences.”

For this group of good kids, staging Good Kids was a risk. But it was one that returned far more in rewards, states Zaremba. “Students are learning, parents are learning, and we, as educators, are learning, too: that CA is a place where we can do something uncomfortable and challenging—we can even get it wrong at times—but in the end it will be okay, because we know we make the choices that help all of us grow.”

Would she do it again? Absolutely, says Zaremba—just maybe not too soon. She and her students are already looking forward to singing and dancing on the Mainstage this spring in something a little lighter, a musical about a young prince on a quest for happiness: Pippin.