Class Notes
Alumni Highlight:
A New Challenge for Kathryn Cloonan ’17 by Leslie Bowen
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athryn Cloonan ’17, a junior at Nobles, is passionate about movies and theater. At DCD, she acted in every play and loved the option offered by DCD Drama Director Elisa Sidoli to write a sequel to each one. Last year, she wrote and directed her own original play, the first student at Nobles to do so. The Impossible Case, performed last October, came to life as part of an independent study project on playwriting that she began in spring 2019. At DCD, she sang, danced, acted, taking lots of arts electives in drama, and singing in the chorus as well as performing in every play. The classes Let’s Dance, Let’s Act, and Director’s Cut, taught by Elisa Sidoli, were some of her favorites. DCD middle-school English teacher Rob Thacher, who attended one of the performances of The Impossible Case, was also a significant influence on her. “Mr. Thacher had a huge impact on my writing, encouraging me to find my own creative voice and to write what I was passionate about,” she said. “It was awesome to see him there in the audience.” Kathryn started and now runs the Creative Writing Club at Nobles and also runs the Play Reading Committee that is part of the Nobles Theater Collective. With The Impossible Case, she’s
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Kathryn, third from the right, with actors from The Impossible Case, a play she wrote and directed at Nobles. added writing and directing to her repertoire. As to which art she’d like to pursue in the future, she answered, “I love all aspects. I’d like to be like Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote, directed, and acted in his own play.” “Directing was cool. I made my actors do some funny stuff. One did a forward roll, and another did a Mission Impossible act,” she said The Impossible Case takes a lot from the police sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It features a lot of physical comedy and slapstick, inspired, she said, by her life at home with three younger siblings as well as female comedians Tina Fey and Kate McKinnon. The cast features two female roles, two male roles, and one gender-neutral role. “I loved that both leads in my play were women,” she said. “It’s rare to see comic relief come from a female character who is doing slapstick and also
being really witty.” Before COVID-19 closed schools, she was getting ready to perform in the spring play, John Proctor is the Villain, about feminism and the me-too movement in high schools. Her character, Beth, she said, is a teacher’s pet who is running a new feminist club and wants to go to a good college but has issues around self-esteem. “She apologizes all the time. I think it’s good for young girls to see that it’s really common for women to do this.” “I always thought women should be in power, maybe that comes from being in a family of three girls and one boy. Women can drive the plot, but they’re not always funny. I always wanted to be a funny character, to make people laugh.” And, in The Impossible Case, it seems she’s done just that.
