Emily Cronan’s theatrical journey has come full circle, reconnecting to YPT just as they is hitting their stride as a promising new playwright and Executive Director Stephanie Holmes aims to appeal to a broader youth audience, including high schoolers, accustomed to edgier entertainment fare.

Alum propels YPT into new era with Nova Goes Below

Emily Cronan
photo by Graham Button

Toward the end of last year, Young Performers Theatre Executive Director Stephanie Holmes found herself struggling with a question that had been weighing heavily for some time: What play to present at YPT’s new space at the Southside Theatre at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture?

YPT hadn’t mounted a fully staged production since before Covid. Almost all of its repertory players from before 2020 had moved on or aged out of performing with the company. So, Stephanie would need to assemble a cast almost from scratch, recruiting from YPT classes and summer camps.

A talented new group of players, nurtured by her, was ready to step up. But what play would fit their personalities and abilities and serve as the right vehicle for YPT’s long-awaited comeback?

It turned out to be an adaptation of a new play that no one saw coming. Nova Goes Below, written by YPT alum Emily Cronan for a Berkeley Repertory Theatre workshop in 2024, tells the story of a restless girl thrust into navigating between two parallel worlds. Feeling emotionally adrift working at a robot dog store in the pristine but sterile suburbia of Glenwood Green, Nova, after calling a local 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.

“The thing that’s crazy: the actors we have are so perfect for the parts,” said Stephanie. “It’s unbelievable. It’s as though Emily wrote those parts for them, unknowingly.” 

Emily — a product of San Francisco public schools who got their start performing for audiences at YPT classes and summer camps — had appeared in such YPT mainstage productions as The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes and Puss in Boots, and later began writing for the stage while attending Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA). After double majoring in Theatre and Communications at UC San Diego, they trained at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England, later resettling in San Francisco.

Since her early days at YPT, Stephanie has structured classes and camps around a workshop model. Students create their own characters and adventures, which are woven together by the instructor into short, original plays staged for friends and families. “I have all the students write a character description,” she said, “telling me who this person is and why they are like that.”

After Covid, it became apparent that the themes the students wanted their plays to be about, as well as the characters they invented, had taken on an edgier, more contemporary vibe. “They’re aware of everything; there’s nothing that they don’t know about,” she said of her students.

One boy around the age of nine named his character Depressed Guy. If you had a lousy 9-to-5 job and made so little money that all you could afford to eat were pizza bites and chicken nuggets, the student wrote, in so many words, wouldn’t you be depressed?

Stephanie also recalled improvising with a young girl from another class. “We’d go on different adventures in different vehicles.” Aboard a boat, apropos of a scene from the Disney movie Frozen, the situation suddenly became quite serious. “The boat had to be back in 10 minutes or else the kid’s parents were going to get killed.”

“Even with the little kids, there was an element of darkness. That’s the only word or way I can describe it,” said Stephanie. “No one’s sad. They’re not depressed. They haven’t lost their humor. Just a little bit darker. They’re aware of darkness.”

Which got the YPT maestro thinking about a departure from fare based on children’s stories and fairy tales set in (and informed by) long-ago times, and that had long been YPT’s bread and butter for fully staged productions. “To think, ‘What if we do Winnie the Pooh?’ just didn’t feel right.”

Kelly Ferrero as Puss, Emily Cronan as Hesperia and Emerson Meyer as Albert in YPT’s 2013 production of Puss and Boots
Photo by Rachel Meyer

Everything would come full circle, as if by fate. After returning from traveling abroad in 2023, Emily reconnected with Stephanie and eventually signed on to teach a five-day YPT summer camp session in August 2024. The first day, the students improvised and brainstormed roles. “The word ‘carnival’ came up,” they recalled. “A kid wanted to be a spy, and I was like, ‘carnival of spies.’”  

What did spies have to do with carnival personas and attractions? Nothing remotely obvious, that’s for sure. An outlandish mashup was in the offing. “This one guy was like, ‘I just want to be an FBI agent.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, well, we’ll just have to make this work.’”

They had just two days to write a script with 15 roles. Carnival of Spies included competing factions of international spies, a gnome wizard, a horse and dog, the leader of a bird army “the size of Antarctica,” the FBI agent, the owner of a faltering commercial airplane business and a 145-year old porcelain doll, Dolly Carnival, who runs the carnival and possesses an “exquisite” treasure, a 100-karat gold doll, worth “enough to have riches for life.” Madcap efforts to steal the doll, and foil the would-be thieves, comprise most of the play’s action.

There’s hilarity around the characters’ obsessions with carnival food — funnel cake, deep-fried mushroom pie and other delicacies.

“Hello, little man,” a Russian spy says to the airplane businessman. “Where can we find a German and a French guy around here?”

“I only tried the curly fries,” the businessman replies, “but I heard the classic French fries are outstanding.”

“Not a French fry, you fool — a French guy!” admonishes another Russian.

“Oh, my god!” Stephanie marveled, recalling how blown away she was by the rollicking script and Emily’s panache in pulling off the show. 

Meanwhile, Emily was under the gun to cast Nova Goes Below for a reading at Berkeley Rep. Stephanie asked if they could run the coat check at the Magic Gala, a celebration for San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, where Stephanie is Director of Communications. Turned out that a SOTA graduate Emily knew, Euan Ashley, had been working at Magic. He agreed to read the role of the psychic’s misunderstood rebel son, Splice.

They had an offer Stephanie couldn’t refuse: the role of Splice’s mom, Madame Zuzu. Stephanie’s partner, Caleb Cabrera, a professional actor, read the part of Alfie, an eccentric denizen of the below world who goes three decades not knowing the fate of his long-lost love, Genevieve, who’d saved his life back in his early days struggling to survive as an outcast. Genevieve grows up to become Zuzu.

“I thought it was amazing,” Stephanie said of the play. “It’s such a clear world. Unlike anything I’ve read. A lot of fun. The way Emily uses language and descriptors is just so clever.”

Toward the end of the year, Stephanie was still stewing over a play for YPT. “My son Oliver said, ‘Why don’t you do an original play? Why don’t you get Emily to write a play?’” she recounted. 

Stephanie hadn’t initially considered Nova because it had been written for an adult audience. She decided to ask Emily about a kid-friendly adaptation for YPT.

“Nova had everything I wanted, atmospherically,” Stephanie said. However, “I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t feel compromising to them and their work to make it appropriate for younger actors and audiences. Emily was thrilled to do it.”

The play, with its collection of misfits, fit perfectly with YPT’s longtime ethos as a haven for “fish out of water” — youth who might not fit in easily elsewhere.

Stephanie sought not only to find a good match for her new group of actors, while appealing to a broader youth audience, including high schoolers. She also aimed to mount a production that could take full advantage of Southside Theatre, a proscenium space offering a professional setting with a modern, fully equipped tech booth as well as dressing rooms, expansive backstage and shop areas. 

Especially gratifying for her is having a group of seasoned YPT alumni involved in the production behind the scenes. “I’ve got this amazing crew who are on it for doing the set, costumes, tech, props, and they’re all YPT kids who are just a little bit older.”

Having Emily tweaking the adaptation, based on input from cast members and their interpretations of their roles, is icing on the cake. They even added a new character, Rox, who ventures down below in search of “the last bearded dragon on the continent” and, like Nova after her, becomes smitten with the archive of lost letters.

Stephanie is jazzed about YPT’s future and forging a new identity and direction for the nonprofit. Theatre, says she, has been “long overdue” in adjusting to a generation accustomed to cosplay and a transformed social and media environment in which pre-teens enjoy movies, such as The Hunger Games, It: Chapter 2 and The Meg, with content that might seem disturbing. (Cosplay, short for “costume play,” is a subculture in which people dress up as their favorite characters from video games, streaming series, movies, graphic novels and books.) “It’s been so old-worldy. But no matter what, everybody always needs to find a place to fit in. That and community, especially now — you’ve got to hang on to it.” — Graham Button