YPT seeds characters, harvests originality in world premiere
Playwright and YPT alum Emily Cronan returns with a funny, heartfelt and imaginative original play featuring a mix of kids from different schools who are thrown together for a “field trip” to San Francisco’s Presidio.
A scene from a rehearsal of YPT’s Tunnel Top Travelers
photo by Graham Button
The seeds for Young Performers Theatre’s new world premiere play, Tunnel Top Travelers — running May 9 - 17 at Southside Theatre in Building D at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (tickets) — were planted in January when YPT Executive and Artistic Director Stephanie Holmes sent a survey to YPT actors asking a series of questions intended to spark ideas for characters in an original story.
The actors had not even the vaguest outlines of a plot to guide them. It was all about characters — and giving agency to young imaginations to conceive them.
What character would they like to play and what would that character be interested in? How old would they be? What traits would they possess? What adventures would they like to have?
After Stephanie shared the responses with playwright Emily Cronan, the actors convened for a workshop. Basically, said Stephanie, it was an improv exercise. “We just put them in different situations and had them react.”
After the workshop, the actors responded to a follow-up survey. Did the workshop change any ideas for the characters and how they felt about playing them?
A lot was in flux, but decisions had to be made. Emily devised a plot involving students from different worlds — public and private schoolers, plus free-spirited “forest” kids — getting thrown together on a “field trip” to San Francisco’s National Park, the Presidio, during a teachers’ strike.
So, no teachers. No rules. Just two student leaders attempting to keep things under control. The result, Tunnel Top Travelers, is a high-energy, family-friendly story about courage, curiosity and what can happen when kids take the lead, secrets surface, unlikely friendships form and a mysterious figure invites them into a magical world of hidden tunnels and treasure beneath San Francisco.
Playwright Emily Cronan with Stephanie’s recently adopted pooch, Toulouse
Photo by Graham Button
As a kid, Emily attended YPT classes and summer camps before becoming a YPT repertory player. A graduate of the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA) high school, they double majored in Theatre and Communications at the University of California San Diego and trained at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. In August 2024, Emily taught a five-day YPT summer camp session and had just two days to write a script, entitled Carnival of Spies, with 15 roles. Emily’s other original works include Colors Eve, set in San Francisco’s historic Sutro Baths, and Nova Goes Below, written for a Berkeley Rep playwriting workshop in 2024 and adapted for YPT in 2025. The cast of Tunnel Top Travelers includes several students in a YPT after-school class taught by Emily: Presenting the Show, Act II: Playwriting.
“They [the actors] presented these characters to me,” Emily said. There wasn’t time for more workshopping before diving into writing. “I have to run with the info I’m getting from them, those first instincts they have.”
Crafting scripts based on character improvisations is in YPT’s DNA. At summer camps, students create their own characters and adventures, which are woven together by instructors into short, original plays staged for friends and families.
“‘It was very under the gun,’ Emily said of the writing process. The actors began rehearsing before the play even had an ending written for it.”
Emily wrote Tunnel Top Travelers on the fly. They’d already penned a big chunk of the script when Stephanie asked if a new role could be created for an actor who wanted to join the cast.
“It worked out,” said Emily. “He had a compelling response. I’d already seen him work, so I can visualize him in this character.”
That character turned out to be the mysterious Orin, who embodies the story’s fantasy element. After surviving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as a young boy, he became a caretaker of treasures in tunnels beneath the city and the conductor of a secret, underground Muni rail line. His disconnect with his present-day descendants in the world above has a parallel in unresolved divides and frictions among the different factions of field-trip students, whose exercise in team building gets off to an awkward start. As their destinies become intertwined with Orin’s, the kids discover that the people you least expect can become your closest allies, and the real treasure isn’t what you find — it’s who you find it with.
Asked if their experience with YPT camps helped in writing Tunnel Top Travelers, Emily noted that the camp plays are only a partial synthesis of the character ideas the campers come up with, and that the result “doesn’t necessarily need to make the most cohesive sense.”
A 75-minute repertory production (not counting intermission) with 17 roles, a replica Muni train and a succession of scene changes is a different animal. “It was very under the gun,” Emily said. The actors began rehearsing before the play even had an ending written for it.
Emily described their relationship with the actors as “symbiotic.” Having them invested in inventing and shaping their characters gives them agency and ownership. Challenges arise, however, when they want to tinker.
“It can be very rewarding,” said Emily of the collaborative process, “but it’s humbling because kids are much more honest than professional actors under a contract. They’re not going to just do their role. If they don’t like something, they’re going to be like, ‘What’s going on?’ Trying to balance 17 opinions on a tight deadline, I can’t write the story that every kid, individually, wants, unfortunately.”
A private-school character, Isa, leading the “Forest Seeker” kids in a rehearsal of Tunnel Top Travelers
photo by Graham Button
Certain lines were rephrased, however, based on the actors’ input about their characters’ voices, and the script deftly accommodates ideas they came up with for their characters, one of whom communicates mainly through meows. It weaves in an a cappella song about unicorns and Pokémon, along with references to other cultural touchstones such as Super Mario, Olivia Rodrigo and Bad Bunny.
At the same time, there’s maturity, substance and real-world relevance. Orin has his own “hangups, fears, quirks,” observed Emily, as do the students comprising the different factions on the field trip. One faction attends a school in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), whose teachers are on strike.
When Emily was writing the play, SFUSD teachers were striking. Their father, a speech pathologist for the district, was picketing every day. Observing the picket line, Emily, who attended San Francisco public schools through 12th grade, thought about the kids who came out in support of the teachers.
“It’s a big thing to grapple with,” they said of the empty classrooms, raising “a lot of big questions and fears” among affected students.
In the play, Orin’s mother was a schoolteacher and his father a train conductor, who picketed with the railway union in 1894. (An actual municipal transit worker strike occurred in San Francisco that year.)
Will another trip into the tunnels to visit Orin bring resolution? Emily described aiming for “brevity and lightness” and “not just a happy ending but an ending that both left some questions and gave a little bit of clarity to the relationships between the students.”
It’s a bit of a cliffhanger. With less than three weeks to go until opening night, Emily had not yet seen the ending rehearsed and was uncertain “how it will manifest.”
Stephanie, for her part, was already feeling it. “I love, love, love this play,” she enthused, “and I’m excited to see how it ends up.” As for the cast, she added, “I think they’re gonna have a lot of fun with it.” — Graham Button