Nelson students perform for their parents before going to Gravenhurst for the National Theatre School finals

By Pepper Parr

April 12, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

It was an Encore Presentation at the Nelson High School on Friday night.

A cast of 25 people with another dozen doing behind the scenes work to make a 35 minute production work very smoothly.

Titled Disconnected, the focus was not on the performers but on their cellphones which they seemed to be attached to at the hip.

Totally mesmerized by their cellphones.

Scenes we see all the time: students glued to their cellphones, was taking place on stage.

These students were totally mesmerized by their cellphones.

Kidnapped, a mesmerized student was converted and helped find the solution to bring a halt to the excessive use of cell phones. They cut off access to GOPHER.

Three cast members saw the dilemma. They kidnapped one of the mesmerized students and put together a plan to disconnect their peers from their cell phones.  It proved to be easier said than done – but they found a way.

They shut down the GOPHER app that saw a group of people who didn’t know what to do with themselves.  Used to getting everything from the GOPHER, the name of the computer application they were using, one student said, “We can look it up in the dictionary. “What’s a dictionary asked another.

August Frade, Michelle Stern, and Zainab Majid co-wrote the script.

The writing was tight, no one flubbed a line.

Before the performance began the students were “pumped”.  Walking quickly from one place to place in the spaces outside the auditorium as they went through the pre-performance jitters.

Nelson drama lead Marisa Cavataio said she wasn’t sure what the turn out was going to be. “If we get 75 I will be happy”.  There were at least 150 people in the auditorium seats.

The play was one of the National Theatre School Drama Fest entries.  Nelson High had made it to the Regional level and would be on stage in Gravenhurst later in the month competing against other Regional high schools. The National Theatre School, located in Montreal, has put on these annual festivals for more than 50 years.

Marisa Cavataio, the lead drama teacher at Nelson, explains, “We will load up a bus with the 40+ students for the three-day outing. They will all stay in hotel rooms that don’t have mini-bars

Disconnected wasn’t a performance that had a lead male or a lead female on stage.  The audience was watching a grade  9-11 students perform in a production they created.  August Frade, Michelle Stern and Zainab Majid co-wrote the script.

The choreography had one superb highlight.

The students came up with a name, GOPHER, for a computer application that would let them communicate with each other.

With the focus on the students and their cell phones, which they seldom took their eyes off of, they had to come up with a way to communicate without relying on the GOPHER , the playwright’s version of Google AI.

Early in the performance, two students, Caden Kingsmill-Norton and Emily Iorfida, were conversing with each other on their cell phones – the expected back and forth  babble. The English language possibilities get challenged when cellphones are the medium used to communicate; there were LOL’s all over the place.

When these two actors found themselves trying to communicate without access to GOPHER they didn’t know quite what to do

Both actors did a superb job of portraying the initial spark and shyness of a first meeting. Later in the production when access to GOPHER was gone, Caden Kingsmill-Norton was superb in the way he used his body to half curve his way around Iorfida, who sat motionless.  It was something to see how he kept repeating the movement, trying to make contact. From where I was sitting, it was the best part of the performance. He was reaching for words that just didn’t come out of his mouth.

On the drive home after the performance, I found myself thinking that most people would have agreed with the message the performance was sending and wondered how many would change their cell phone habits, or if these devices had become something we felt we could not live without.

We will let you know how they do in Gravenhurst.