A future playwright’s immersion into the arts at a young age fostered a fertile imagination and a lasting passion for multidisciplinary creative expression.
Emily Cronan, YPT’s Stephanie Holmes and Nova Goes Below cast member Jake Lowenberg (Robot Coco) review the playwright’s illustrations based on the play
photo by Graham Button
Emily’s world
Emily Cronan’s route to finding a home at San Francisco’s Young Performers Theatre (YPT) came by way of a random encounter with a casting director from the Barbizon Modeling and Acting School (slogan: “Let your Star Shine”), while shopping at Target with their dad. The come-on about making dreams come true wasn’t subtle: “Do you want to be on iCarly?”
Emily, then about eight years old, loved the teen sitcom on Nickelodeon, whose lead character, Carly Shay (Miranda Cosgrove), becomes a star by accident when a teacher puts her in charge of a school talent show. The audition process itself becomes a “show,” secretly recorded and posted on the Web. The previously “normal” adolescent lives of Carly and her sidekick friends Sam and Freddie (Jennette McCurdy and Nathan Kress) are turned upside down as their creation, iCarly, becomes a regular internet gig — and a pop sensation.
Emily went to a Barbizon audition. Then their dad received a call from the agency. They had passed the audition and could sign on with Barbizon, for a fee of approximately $2,000. “My dad was like, ‘Emily, do you know what a scam is? If you’re actually interested in acting, we’ll find a local kids’ class.’”
As a sixth grader in 2012, after having found their footing in classes and summer camps at YPT, Emily appeared in their first YPT main stage production, a take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novel The Hobbit. “I was a troll and one of the dwarves. It was mostly boys in the cast, but I had such a fun time.”
Will Leschber, who wrote and directed the adaptation, was “super passionate,” Emily remembered. The cast featured talented older players including Max Rogerson, who was about 18 years old, as Gandalf and Hana Bixler, a high schooler, as Bilbo Baggins. Emily fondly recalled the gorgeous “handmade cloaks” worn by the cast, working alongside the seasoned performers and the thrill of “just going to Fort Mason and kind of experiencing that and going into that world. I was just really taken by it.”
Now Emily is back at YPT, having adapted their original play, Nova Goes Below, for younger audiences and actors. Its world premiere, at YPT’s Southside Theatre at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, is set for March 23. It’s YPT’s first production since the pandemic and marks a departure for a company known for presenting adaptations of classic fairy tales and children’s stories.
Fresh and quirky with finely etched, eclectic characters, Nova tells the story of a restless girl thrust into navigating between two parallel worlds. Feeling emotionally adrift working at a robot dog clinic in the pristine but regimented suburbia of Glenwood Green, Nova, after calling a psychic for advice, is inspired to visit a controversial world “down below.” She quickly takes to the ramshackle desert town, meeting various outcasts who escaped from the suburbs to follow their hearts and learning about a rare collection of interplanetary lost letters revealing a tangled web of connections between both worlds.
Emily grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset neighborhood, with strong familial ties to the San Francisco Unified School District. Their dad is a speech pathologist for the district; their mom works with special-needs children. Emily’s paternal grandmother, a longtime substitute teacher, loved the theatre and turned her grandchild onto An American in Paris, My Fair Lady and other movie musicals.
As a kid, thanks to their parents’ love of visual art, Emily frequented museums and open studios hosted by local artists. They also attended avant garde music and theatrical performances. “My dad wasn’t afraid of showing me stranger art as a kid. So that definitely let my imagination kind of blossom.”
Around the ages of eight and nine, Emily started taking piano lessons and, inspired by iCarly and with some help from their dad, made a few episodes of a “kind of improvisational” Web show. “I am an only child, so I feel like I was always kind of make-believing and playing pretend and making up stories when I was little.”
At A.P. Giannini Middle School, Emily performed in the ensemble for a production of Guys and Dolls and played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. And they sang in the school choir, under the direction of the “super-incredible” Courtney Lindl. Emily also joined YPT’s repertory ensemble, appearing in such productions as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and The Little Mermaid.
Asked about her impressions of Emily back then, YPT Executive Director Stephanie Holmes recalled “a definite uniqueness to them, strong in their individualism, I felt. But also was pretty quiet; never one of the sort of rowdy kids up on stage at lunchtime dancing and singing at the top of their lungs.”
Emily became a go-to when Stephanie needed someone to fill in for a role on short notice. “I would memorize the lines like the day before,” they said, “and then kind of figure it out.”
Emily performing in Georges Feydeau’s play A Flea in her Ear at UC San Diego
photo by Tim Hardy
Emily described YPT as “such a warm environment” where “everyone just felt super at home” and free to “explore imagination” and “just try and fail and experiment with characters.” Repertory players spent long hours together, “and it didn’t matter if someone had a bigger role or smaller role. Everyone was part of the ensemble.” There was a sense of independence, as well — a feeling that the kids had the run of the place, a communal sanctuary where it was “a joy to play with and imagine worlds” and everyone could “go backstage and try on makeup and costumes and help each other get ready for shows.”
Looking back, Emily said, “YPT was more welcoming and allowed for more imagination than a lot of the other things I did after it.” At Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA), as they would discover, “it was way more based on competition and perfectionism.”
Emily auditioned for SOTA’s theatre program. The faculty gatekeeper, before even seeing they perform, immediately questioned why they wasn’t seeking admission to the musical theatre department, having noticed on their resume roles in musicals and training in voice and music. “Like, ‘Why are you here?’ And I remember just being so kind of deflated,” Emily said. “Then I ended up not getting into theatre. I was crushed but kind of reassessed and was like, ‘Wait, this is the opportunity for me to actually pursue singing and music.’”
Emily auditioned for SOTA’s vocal department and was accepted. Emily, who likes to write songs and poems in their spare time, “has a beautiful singing voice,” commented Stephanie — “stunning.” (Check out their music on Soundcloud and a performance of an original song, “Dopamine,” on YouTube.)
Emily’s musical inclinations meshed nicely with a challenge that presented itself their junior year: writing a short original musical. Emily, who had performed in a SOTA production of Into the Woods the previous year, turned to Stephen Sondheim for inspiration, particularly the felicity of some of his characters with patter and almost rhythmic rapping.
The result was 20-minute murder-mystery musical, Flushed, following the mysterious passing of Jeán Foegüt, grandfather of modern-day quilted toilet paper. His eccentric family tries to find out who among them is guilty, while dealing with their grief through patter songs and an introverted yet all-seeing dog named Charles. Emily wrote the script, lyrics and music.
The piece was staged for students and faculty, friends and family. “I ended up accompanying the performers on piano, which was really fun, and playing the songs that I had written for my classmates. So that was a really great experience.”
Emily would continue writing for the stage while attending the University of California San Diego, double majoring in theatre and communications. Colors Eve — a story set in San Francisco’s historic Sutro Baths, the remnants of which can still be found near Ocean Beach — grew out of a playwriting class Emily took junior year. Three San Franciscans wander to the beach to experience their last sunset, after scientists proclaim a natural disaster in which the world’s youth will lose their ability to see color. Their fates become entangled in inexplicable ways, thanks to a shared connection to the land and the influence of one among them who possesses supernatural powers. A classmate of Emily’s, Rachel Halili, directed the play, which premiered in March 2023 as part of a student-run new play festival at UC San Diego.
“I write for a kind of desire in my younger self to have more in-depth and complex roles overall, not just for kids but with any actor in mind, any performer that would play a role.”
Emily at the ruins of San Francisco’s historic Sutro Baths, the setting for Colors Eve
Photo by Graham Button
Emily experienced delight stepping back “from the performing side, the directing side” and letting “someone else kind of take over and have trust and faith in them, and then also be able to focus on the visual world and developing the play and working with the actors to make it feel authentic, without feeling the pressure of directing it.
“And people’s reactions, as well, I was really taken by. To just sit in the audience and kind of witness people — it was terrifying but super electric. That was the first time it felt almost out of body. Just sitting at that opening night and kind of seeing reactions and feeling that energy was unlike anything I’d done before.”
Emily was hooked. “I love the role of a writer,” they said, of creating and then having “a whole constellation of people bring it to life [on stage]. That was a super-invigorating experience.”
Visiting Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in 2019 and Joshua Tree National Park and the surrounding desert in 2021 opened new imaginative vistas. Emily came across the dilapidated remnants of Bombay Beach, a one-time vacation destination on the Salton Sea frequented by the likes of Frank Sinatra in the 1950s. The area had “experienced an explosion of graffiti and installation art. It’s a singular setting that engages the senses, and there’s a contrast of this super-bleak horizon with explosive imagination. That contrast is what inspired me to begin Nova’s journey.”
Emily developed the idea for the desert story that became Nova more fully for a playwriting workshop at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2024. After graduating from UCSD and traveling abroad in 2023, Emily had returned to San Francisco and was “feeling really lost and out of place and not sure of certain parts of my life, being transient and going back home but being older.”
Writing Nova became “my way of grappling with the uncertainty of post-grad life and search for purpose while also trying to honor different versions of myself and people I’d met along the way — close friendships I had fostered my last year of college” that brought a “change of perspective” and insight into “how sometimes you have to face past parts of yourself to move on. A lot of the characters in the play, pretty much all of them, are experiencing something from their past that they’ve pushed away or tried to try to separate from themselves. Then it kind of bubbles up and they have the choice to either continue to push it away or really face it.”
It seems fitting that Nova, with its collection of intrepid, idiosyncratic characters inhabiting an imagined, partly science-fictional world, would receive its first fully staged production at YPT, which nurtured young Emily’s imagination and has long been a haven for “fish out of water” — youth who might not fit in easily elsewhere.
Emily would like to see more new plays that meet younger people where they are today and offer characters with more dimensionality than can be found in some children’s classics. “A big reason why I started writing plays was because, when I was younger, there were so many characters and roles where I just felt were meant for kids, like an adult writing a character for the kids rather than writing a fully fleshed-out character. So, I write for a kind of desire in my younger self to have more in-depth and complex roles overall, not just for kids but with any actor in mind, any performer that would play a role.”
Anything else, Emily said, “just doesn’t feel right for me as a writer.” — Graham Button