The future is looking very bright for rising CSI senior and Communications: Media Studies major Samuel Schell. His new play, Ghoul Fools, is in performance until July 30 and he recently received the news that he will be interning at Saturday Night Live.

Samuel’s interest in theater began back in the second grade when he was part of a production of Pinocchio. After that experience, he found himself coming back to theater.

“In both middle and high school,” he recalled, “I specialized in theater, so I got to be a part of a lot of productions and really get into the history of the artform and explore the many different ways it can exist as well as all the parts that there are to play in the process.”

However, by the time he was entering college, he thought that his theater days were behind him, as he focused more on filmmaking and other interests. Nonetheless, the theater called him back.

“Around the start of my freshman year I began working with this company called Piper Theater, which is a non-profit Brooklyn-based theater company run by my middle school drama teacher John McEneny. I’d first worked for them as an assistant director for their youth summer camp. From there, I ended up performing in a number of shows that they produced by local up-and-coming playwrights and directed my first-ever play for them in the form of a children’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

He continued on, performing with Staten Island’s Ghostlight Players and eventually landing an internship, last summer, with Chain Theater, thanks to support from CSI.

 “I found out about the CUNY Career Launch program thanks to Professor Emma Johnson and John Kesaris from the Career Center,” Samuel noted, “and I was lucky enough to match with the Chain Theater. I very quickly fell in love with the atmosphere and the work that I saw they were producing. I was a marketing and communications intern so I did a lot of work for their social media, taking videos and creating promotional material for the festivals they had going on at my time there…Since working there [last] summer I was lucky enough to be brought back on board as a livestream operator in February for their winter one-act festival, a job which I am once again doing this summer.”

Samuel also appeared in CSI’s production of This Murder Was Staged last spring.

Now, once again, one of his plays is being performed. Samuel originally developed Ghoul Fools as a one-act audio drama in his sophomore year in high school.

“I wanted to challenge myself to produce a piece of my own for the following summer festival. I took the original concept I had for Ghoul Fools and reinvented it a little bit from what it was initially,” he explained. “The play is a supernatural comedy about two down-on-their-luck guys who are the hosts of a podcast where they perform paranormal investigations. Upon investigating the home of a lonely old woman, they end up discovering ‘an actual real-life ghost’…and they try to capitalize on this discovery and turn it into a piece of content. The only issue with that being that they aren’t very good.”

Samuel’s goal was to make the play feel like a sitcom, “so my main concern as a writer was making it funny and creating an energy that was constantly moving.”

He added that this isn’t his first play, but considered it his most ambitious.

If all of his accomplishments to date weren’t enough, Samuel will be a general production intern at Saturday Night Live during the show’s 52nd season, from this September to next May.

“I am a huge fan of sketch comedy and have enjoyed of SNL for as long as I can remember. I saw the application for the academic year SNL internship around May and I worked with Professor Johnson a little bit to refine my résumé and make sure it was a good fit. I received my interview for SNL and after two interviews I ended up getting the gig.”

Samuel commented that he will most likely be responsible for a variety of tasks to support the show’s production.

“I’m really excited to just be able to be in the space and observe how a production environment of that scale manages to function and create an entirely new show in real time every week,” he said. “The people who I interviewed with also emphasized the fact that there will be a lot of learning opportunities such as workshops and talks with industry professionals. I hope to work in the world of production at some capacity post-college, whether that be in film, television, theater, or wherever else I may end up. I’ve really enjoyed getting to exist in different spaces and observe the different ways in which the things that I’ve spent most of my life doing and the things that I’m now studying in school can be applied in a professional way.”

Ghoul Fools will be performed as part of Chain Theater’s Summer One-Act Festival ’26 until July 30. Visit the Chain Theater website for more information.

By Terry Mares