As an honors student, the president of two school clubs, and a notable face around the theater department, one could easily say that sophomore Mona Jahani is undoubtedly an overachiever. I sat down (or awkwardly stood in the hallway) with Jahani to see what’s behind the overachiever status and the story of how she got there.

Emily Wilkinson: Who motivated you to start theater in high school?

Mona Jahani: It wasn’t necessarily one person, although if I would pick one person, it’d definitely be Remy Lierz. Actually, I have a story. I went to go see Godspell at the very beginning of freshman year, and I had never actually seen a live production before (at least none that I could remember).I just thought there was so much work, and so much effort, and so much passion that was put into the show that I thought, ‘I have to involve myself with these people,’ and I signed up for the next show that I could.

EW: What are your responsibilities in theater?

MJ: As of right now, I work on costumes crew in Rep that I’m in this semester. Mostly, we follow directions from our crew head. At the moment, we are doing a lot of reorganizing and finding new storage for a lot of our things, so if I’m given a task I make sure I can accomplish it to the best of my abilities.

EW: Do you think backstage work gets enough credit?

MJ: If I say no, it makes me sound very selfish, but I know that there are quite a few people who started out as actors and decided to do backstage work for once, and they’ve all said to me, “I never realized how much effort it was,” and I think that shows that people sometimes don’t realize all the things that you do unless you don’t do them.

EW: Who are the people that help you the most in your backstage work?

MJ: I would say for sure Anna Torchia because she is one of my crew heads. In general, a lot of seniors, and if I were to start listing all of them, it would be a lot of people, but I feel that Anna Torchia has been a great help to me and a great mentor.

EW: Theater-wise, what has been the hardest thing that you’ve had to do all year?

MJ: I think it’s been sacrificing a lot of outside friendships because theater takes up so much of my life, and I’ve done every show that I can since I started. It was very difficult to find time outside of theater, and so the people who I work with become my friends, and since most of them are seniors this year, I’ve realized that going into next year I’m going to have to find new people to surround myself with.

EW: What are you doing new for Peter Pan coming up?

MJ: For this show, we are bringing in a system to make people fly, and it’s going to be interesting to see how we get that to work and to have the actors working with the flying system and to make sure everything can be as safe as it can possibly be.

EW: What is your motivation for doing so much theater?

MJ: Honestly, it’s because I love my job more than anything, and I think that, because theater is so temporary and you can only put on a show for so long and there’s so much that can happen in that short amount of time. I just want to experience everything that I can before a show is over or before a season is over or before the friends that I have graduate.

EW: How has theater impacted your high school experience?

MJ: I think it has given me something that I really love to do, and I know I want to do outside of high school as well. I want to make it a part of my life, no matter what.

EW: What clubs do you actively participate in and what are your positions on them?

MJ: I participate in French Club, and I’m just a member in that. I participate in GSA [Gay Straight Alliance] as co-president. I participate in Voice in Verse, which is a poetry group, and I’m vice-president for that. I am involved with choir. Chanticleers is a class, which is an audition group, and I’m involved with theater, so with every show this year so far and I’m just a crewmember on that.

EW: What are your responsibilities leading a club? Is there any difference between them?

MJ: For GSA, it’s much more active in the sense that Remy Lierz [GSA co-president] and I had originally filled out a schedule and I have to make sure that I do whatever I can so that activities happen on time, announcements are put together, and people know if they need to bring materials, and in general just to keep the group together. Because it’s so much fun, we tend to get sidetracked sometimes. With Voice in Verse, it’s just that I have to do announcements at time now and then to make sure people know about it because it’s not as well-known of a group. I also try to keep people on topic, but that’s not as difficult.

EW: Would you say Voice in Verse is more structured than GSA?

MJ: I would say it’s actually less structured because we don’t have a schedule that we do for GSA because we do the same things every time. We have a discussion on a poet, or we read our own poetry, or we have a debate or a discussion about something we’ve read, so it’s a lot more whatever we want to do at that particular meeting.

EW: How do you prioritize your schoolwork, and extracurriculars, and clubs, and still get necessary hours of sleep?

MJ: Sleep is a foreign thing to me at this point. I prioritize my schoolwork first to make sure I get all my assignments done. Sometimes if I’m in the middle of a production, you know, some studying may be lost, but I try to do all of my homework to keep up with my classes. Choir comes next in the sense that if there’s a concert, I have to make sure I don’t miss it because it’s a required class. Theater, I feel that that’s a top priority in the sense that it’s something I love. Everything else has to be sacrificed: sometimes GSA or Voice in Verse, but schoolwork tends to come first.