Whiz Kid: Claudia Zhu

Cleveland Heights Patch Whiz Kid of the Week Claudia Zhu

• About to enter the fifth grade at
• Won a contest through the  for writing a play
• Has been mastering the violin for the last four years

It started out as a sad tale. A boy lost his dog and solicits his best friend to help find it.

This is how the play Lost Dog begins. Written by 9-year-old Claudia Zhu, the play was recently a winner at the annual  at Dobama Theatre. Winners, four of whom were from Cleveland Heights, got to see their play acted out on the Dobama stage last month.

It’s during the play’s climax that the audience realizes what they’re seeing is a comedy, when the boy’s friend discovers that the dog the boy lost was not the furry kind, it was a hot dog. The friend buys him a new one.

“It was just something funny I thought of,” said Claudia, who is about to be a fifth grader at Roxboro Elementary School in the fall.

Claudia first heard about the contest from her instructor in a writing class she had been taking once a week for the last several months at a local library. She’s always liked writing, she said, and feels it offers a great outlet to express herself.

“You can really show your ideas,” she said. “You can show a little about yourself to everybody.”

She submitted her play, all two pages of it, to Dobama earlier this year. She said the theater received more than 200 entries and the winning ones were judged three times by people associated with the theater before they were selected.

“I kind of forgot about it after that, so I was really surprised when I won,” Claudia said. “It was really exciting.”

She said her favorite part of the experience was watching her play come to life on stage, performed by two male actors.

Claudia is also violinist and has been playing for the last four years. She recently got accepted to a Cleveland Institute of Music program that she’ll begin in the fall.