Most Main Character: Isa Peña
If you find yourself in a musical theater around Harvard on a given weekend, there’s a good chance that you’ll bump into Isa Peña ’23-’24. At first, you might not recognize her. One week, she might be singing soaring ballads set in a brothel; on another week, she could be sporting a yellow wig, rosy cheeks, and bright red boots.
Today, sitting in the basement of Cabot Science Library, Isa is herself. Donning an unassuming leather jacket topped with a pair of sunglasses, she admits that despite her many theatrical roles, she does not consider herself a “main character.” Instead, Isa believes her eventful life is what makes her stand out.
“Whenever someone makes a joke about some disaster or crazy sequence of events, it’ll happen to me,” she says. “I feel like the main character is always the one who has the crazy day, and I have a habit of having crazy days.”
Spontaneous happenstances should be a rarity considering Isa’s packed schedule. Every day, she wakes up at 6 or 7 a.m. before heading for a full day of back-to-back classes. On most weekdays, she shuttles into Boston where she is dually enrolled at Berklee College of Music. Her evenings are filled with rehearsals or performances across multiple productions and the Opportunes, an acapella group that she has been a part of since freshman year.
Yet, what might seem like random accidents turn into formative experiences. In the fall of freshman year, Isa received an email from the producers of American Idol, inviting her to audition. “It was a total ‘roll with the punches’ moment. I couldn’t let an opportunity like that pass me by,” she says.
After meeting with the cast directors, Isa flew to Los Angeles over Halloweekend. There, she performed in front of celebrity judges, Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan. In a way, her audition represented a full-circle moment. When she was 11, Isa auditioned with Perry’s “Firework” on “La Voz Kids,” a Spanish children’s edition of “The Voice,” but she left the blind audition with no chairs turned.
This time, she made it past the audition round, and soon, she learned what it was like to be in the entertainment business. “I always knew that being a performer was more than just singing. But that was a huge wake-up call. I was like ‘Damn, you gotta be on 24/7’ because there’s always a camera on you,” she says.
In spite of the glamor and glitz of Hollywood, Isa maintained some semblance of a normal college life. She still showed up to her 9 a.m. classes after catching a red-eye back from filming. Fresh from her elimination, she lugged her suitcase to Tasty Burger with her freshman roommates.
Whether it’s a nationally-televised competition or a campus-wide production, Isa treats every experience to perform as a learning opportunity. One of her most formative experiences was playing Vanessa from “In the Heights,” which connected theater with her Latinx culture and family history. She also dabbled in comical evil as Heather Chandler in “Heathers” before toggling over to powerful vulnerability as Lucy Harris in “Jekyll and Hyde.”
Isa credits the Hasty Pudding Theatricals for pushing her outside of her comfort zone, describing it as an “out-of-body experience” with their extravagant costumes and overdramatized characters.
“I can really just immerse myself because I love it. I care about it. And this is important to me,” she says. “Taking that kind of seriousness to something as unserious as playing a diva who is yelling at her boyfriend every two seconds — it’s kind of beautiful.”
Still, the most challenging character to play might be herself. She most recently ventured into songwriting, jotting down lyrics as an outlet in times of high emotion. But accepting the vulnerability of sharing them with the world has been daunting.
This semester, she co-wrote a song that was selected to be performed at Berklee next spring. “The song was absurd. It was about this girl seducing her dentist at her appointment. I was like, ‘This is fine to share with people because it’s weird,’” she says. “But if I tried to write something from the heart, I’m like, ‘Nobody’s ever seeing this ever in a million years.’ I don’t know why that is. But hopefully, I grow out of that soon because eventually, I would like to have my own stuff out there.”
Beyond the stage, Isa’s academic interests are just as ambitious and spontaneous. Initially a Government concentrator on the data science track, Isa took an interest in Chinese foreign policy. When she found out that she could not work with her dream thesis adviser unless she concentrated in East Asian Studies, Isa was unfazed. She made the last-minute decision to pursue a joint concentration.
Isa understands the absurdity of her academic trajectory, characterizing her switch as “the craziest email that you could get from a junior in May.” Next spring, as she rushes to complete the joint concentration, she will be the only senior in her sophomore tutorial class, though she foresees it as a “nostalgic” experience.
No matter how disparate her passions seem, Isa finds a way to fuse them together. Her senior thesis looks at Chinese propaganda during the Cultural Revolution through the lens of musical theater. It’s a relatively new realm for her.
“I think it’s just so different to apply what I’ve learned about popular music and why it’s popular to 1960s Chinese model opera music and why it was successful. I’m like ‘Ah, this is so different, but it’s been fun,’” she says.
Fun and stochasticity are common threads in Isa’s life. Despite the intensity that she approaches each of her passions, she has no regrets.
“Definitely, I’ve had my flops,” she says. “But I think that’s like the biggest thing that I’ve come out of college with. I’m just like, ‘You gotta go 100, or why?’”
— Magazine writer John Lin can be reached at john.lin@thecrimson.com.