Ann Sobrato High School’s theater program is presenting “26 Pebbles,” a documentary-style play about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, now in its closing weekend with the final two showings to take place Nov. 14-15 at 7pm in the Sobrato Performing Arts Center.
The docu-drama represents a significant departure from traditional high school theater fare, tackling difficult subject matter that drama teacher Christopher deMelo acknowledges required careful consideration and administrative support.
“The show takes place six months after Dec. 14, the events of the Sandy Hook shooting, and it tells the story of the community processing their grief,” deMelo said. “It was written based on interviews with the citizens of Sandy Hook and Newtown, so it’s their own words.”
The play features verbatim testimony from residents of Newtown, Connecticut, following the 2012 tragedy that claimed 26 lives. The show is based on the direct words of members of the community obtained in interviews by the playwright Eric Ulloa.
Senior Cassie Grisham, 17, who serves as president of the Sobrato Theater Society, plays two characters: Jenn, a mother; and Carla, a Reiki healer who co-founded the Jesse Lewis Choose Love support foundation with Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse died in the shooting.
Grisham noted that faithfully portraying a living person is a radical departure from traditional theater roles that take on fictional or historical characters.
“When you’re playing a normal character that someone else wrote, you have this interpretation that you can take with it, and you have some creative freedom,” Grisham said. “With this, it’s a person. These are real people, these are their real spoken words, their real lived experiences, and you really want to do it justice.”
Sophomore Maliyah Neal-Castañeda, 15, portrays three characters in the play including Yolie, whose photograph holding a sign with her son became an iconic image in the aftermath of the tragedy.
“She tries to give hope to the community,” Neal-Castañeda said. “She wants to really put out there that this tragedy that happened doesn’t define us. She tries to see a way to grow from it and to support others in her community and find ways to support anyone who ever goes through this.”
The production comes at a time when school shooting drills have become routine for students nationwide. DeMelo, who is the 2025 Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce Teacher of the Year, noted that although few of the cast members are old enough to remember the Sandy Hook tragedy, they are intimately familiar with its impacts on society as well as those of the many mass shootings that have taken place at schools nationwide in the years since.
“As high school students in 2025, they’ve lived with this since their first days in kindergarten. For me, it was about getting an opportunity to tell a story that they connect to,” deMelo said. “They connect to it because it’s a story that affects their daily lives.”
The connection became personal for Neal-Castañeda during the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting. While performing in another production, she watched a cast member receive texts from their parent, a police officer responding to the active shooter situation.
“That fear they felt, I think it really opened my eyes,” Grisham said. “Before that, I had seen stuff in the news. We did grow up with this, so I’ve known about it, but it being so close to home is really what struck me. With this show, I feel like it is so important to me. I’m so proud of it. It really heals something in me to share this with real people, and have them aware of it too.”
DeMelo, in his 14th year at Sobrato, said the production presented unique challenges beyond typical high school theater. He researched how other schools have approached the material and consulted published studies on supporting actor mental health in order to ensure that the material did not negatively impact the cast and crew.
“The biggest challenge is just honoring the story,” he said. “The first step when you pick a piece of this magnitude is, are you going to have the talent to really do it justice? I am fortunate to have two full casts of talent.”
In staging the performance, the crew decided on a philosophy of minimalism, aiming to center the spotlight on the human stories rather than theatrical spectacle. Unlike typical fall productions that feature more than 100 lighting cues, “26 Pebbles” uses only 20.
“The challenge as a director is not overwhelming it with vision and tech and all the stuff that can create a barrier between the audience and the text,” deMelo said. “The text is so powerful on its own. My goal was to strip as much of the conventions of theatre out of it and make it more about people telling their stories.”
Stage manager August Thurgood, 17, researched authentic props, including recreating cards and teddy bears based on archival materials and hand-painting Yolie’s sign to match the original photograph.
“I’ve never done tech for a dramatic piece before,” Thurgood said. “It’s so subtle, and you can see how all of these subtle things can impact how people feel about it, and can share the story. Any prop, or light, or sound can really make the atmosphere that much different, and it’s been really wonderful to see that.”
The school administration’s support was key to overcoming the challenges in bringing “26 Pebbles” to life, deMelo said.
“When I pitched this to administration, the first question they asked was, ‘Do you think your kids can handle it, both mentally and talent-wise?’” he said. “And the second question they asked was, ‘Do you think you’ll be able to handle it emotionally?’”
The production includes detailed content warnings, acknowledging that not every audience member may be ready for the material. DeMelo said he trained cast members to promote the show respectfully while recognizing some people might prefer to sit this one out.
“Not every audience member is going to be ready to experience this show,” deMelo said. “We have a very thorough content warning on our piece because I don’t want anyone to feel like we snuck something that they weren’t ready for in front of them.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, cast members emphasized the play’s ultimately hopeful message, and the power of live theater to bring to life the stories of people who, for many, have just been names in the headlines of tragedies.
“You truly get the perspective, the right perspective, of the people who really experienced this hardship,” Neal-Castañeda said. “That’s something that’s really special. You can go online and search it up, and there’s a lot of this thing that happened, but I feel like these characters truly shine in this piece. You truly get more of an insight and understanding of what they truly went through and how it impacted them.”
The final weekend of performances runs Nov. 14-15 at 7pm at the Sobrato Performing Arts Center. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit asobratohs.booktix.com.
Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance writer.
