NEW YORK, NY.- As a teenager in New Jersey, composer and lyricist Zoe Sarnak was a star soccer player, earning her place in the Princeton High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Her position? “Center mid,” she said in a recent interview. “The one who runs the most.”

In addition to displaying endurance, the center midfielder plays a crucial role in coordinating defense and attack, and controlling the game’s tempo. Experience that must have come in handy this year, when Sarnak, now 37, will have had multiple productions at prestigious institutions around the country.

In May, Berkeley Repertory Theater premiered “Galileo,” a musical with a score by Sarnak and composer Michael Weiner, in which science and religion duke it out. A few days later, a retooled version of “The Lonely Few,” a heated love story between two rockers, opened at MCC in New York.

Now Sarnak is back in her hometown, Princeton, New Jersey, with “Empire Records: The Musical,” an adaptation of the 1995 grunge-adjacent teen film that begins previews at the McCarter theater on Sept. 6.

“Maybe it’s from growing up playing sports and feeling like there’s something really gratifying about saying, ‘I can just run that extra wind sprint, I know I have it in me,’” she said during one of three conversations we shared over the summer — each at a different location attached to a different project.

There are yet more shows on the way, so much so that I had to catch my breath from the contact exertion. Sarnak herself appears to be handling the pace just fine. In early August, she even managed to sneak in a production of a different kind, tying the knot with actress Ephie Aardema, who is slated to appear in the upcoming Broadway revival of “Our Town.” (“We didn’t want to wait until our lives are calmer because what if that’s two years from now?” Sarnak said.)

While the 2024 avalanche is partly the result of the pandemic forcing some delays and rescheduling, it’s also clear that Sarnak, who describes herself as “a child of the ’90s,” is finding an increasingly warm welcome for her sound, which tends to display the markers of that decade’s alt-rock. Like, for example, the juxtaposition of quiet verses and big choruses that the musician often deploys to rousing, infectious effect — a prime example being the “Lonely Few” number “God of Nowhere.” Creating a catchy hook that can be repeated is one thing; the trick is to make it work in the service of musical theater and its distinct demands.

For Trip Cullman, the director of both “The Lonely Few” (with Ellenore Scott) and “Empire Records,” that is exactly the feat Sarnak pulls off.

“I think she is bringing not a folk singer-songwriter sensibility, but an actual rock ’n’ roll sensibility to the theater, and in doing so is a kind of a rule-breaker,” he said. “Because one of the rules of musical theater is that you can’t do a repeated line at the end of a song over and over again — things have to keep evolving, like a character has to. But rock-song structure is actually all about the repeated rant at the end.”

In Sarnak’s view, an anthemic earworm shouldn’t preclude development of character. “Every single chorus must do something different, and if it doesn’t, then we’re theatrically arrested,” she said. “I feel, in that sense, very influenced by anyone from Sondheim to Kander and Ebb, but musically I wanted to sound like what I grew up listening to: Green Day’s ‘Dookie,’ Salt-N-Pepa, No Doubt’s ‘Tragic Kingdom,’ TLC, every Nirvana album.”

Still, she is not stuck in the ’90s: She pays close attention to modern approaches to music production, singling out Billie Eilish’s debut album as a model. “It is an astonishing piece and really brilliant for musical-theater inspiration because it teaches you that minimalism in pop can work,” she said. “And if you use minimalism, you can hear lyrics. And if you have lyrics, you have storytelling.”

In a phone conversation, Lorna Courtney, a Tony Award nominee for “& Juliet” who is one of the stars of “Empire Records,” cautions that it would be a misstep to pigeonhole Sarnak’s style, pointing out that “there are different genres within this musical.”

“Even within songs there are different journeys told through storytelling — I love that no two songs in the show sound the same,” Courtney said. “But something similar with pop musicals and with ‘& Juliet’ is that the songs are so catchy that out of context from the show, they are hits.”

Two of Sarnak’s shows this year are set in a musical milieu: “The Lonely Few” in a rock club, and “Empire Records” in an indie record store under threat of a national chain takeover. “Galileo” looks like a completely different animal, but Sarnak said she connected to it just as organically. As the daughter of a mathematician father and a mother who is an ethicist, “academics are my people,” Sarnak said. “So I just was, like, a rock musical about Galileo? That’s my jam.”

Science is her jam, too, or at least it was all through college: Sarnak graduated from Harvard in 2009 with a degree in molecular and cellular biology. Although she took up the guitar at 7 and started composing in childhood, it took her a while to see music as a passion to be taken seriously. “You know that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where they talk about secret single behaviors?” she said. “Music was my secret single behavior.”

When Harvard introduced secondary concentrations in her junior year, Sarnak chose music, a first step toward making the relationship official. For her thesis, she wrote a musical, “The Quad,” that was performed at the university’s experimental theater. Producers saw it and told Sarnak she could do that music thing, so she decided to give it a go. She earned an M.A. in performance studies at New York University, worked on shows and played her songs at places like Joe’s Pub — even though performing in public stressed her out.

Given her discomfort onstage, it has been a big deal for Sarnak to develop a dance-theater project called “Bodies of Work.” This anthology of Sarnak’s songs set to dance, created with the director and choreographer Jennifer Jancuska, puts Sarnak at the center: Acting as a narrator of sorts, she resets the material so it’s less about a character than what was going through her mind when she was writing those songs.

The project is also a way to take stock. “There’s amazing, beautiful content about career retrospectives, but what does it mean to look at a body of work while it’s still in formation?” Sarnak said a few weeks ago when we met at Marist College, where she was working on the show as part of a residency with the New York Stage and Film incubator.

In addition to the aforementioned shows — are you keeping track? — Sarnak has at least three more projects in progress, including one about Eleanor Roosevelt that is in early stages.

The first to get a public viewing is “Split,” about a former Los Alamos scientist on a road trip with her daughter in the 1950s. A developmental production at the New London Barn Playhouse in New Hampshire runs Sept. 5-8, in collaboration with the off-Broadway company Transport Group.

The other, “Particle Fever,” which had its first reading in June, is about a very un-rock subject: physics. The book is by playwright David Henry Hwang, and Sarnak is writing the songs with Bear McCreary, the popular composer behind many scores for the screen (“Outlander,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) and for video games (“God of War”). “He’s excellent at creating magical worlds, so it works really well for gaming and for particle physics,” Sarnak said. “We have a lot of fun writing together.”

Sarnak also appeared to enjoy a satisfying partnership on “Empire Records.” The musical features a book by the film’s original screenwriter, Carol Heikkinen, who said that she and Sarnak were especially interested in rebuilding the relationship between the teenage store clerks Corey and Gina, played by Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger in the film. (The characters are played by Courtney and Samantha Williams in the show.) Heikkinen went back to her 1995 script’s first draft for this production. “That was something where some things got lost in translation in the finished movie,” Heikkinen said of the girls’ friendship.

The story is about a time when young people figure out who they might be, or perhaps, in a more bittersweet way, who they might have been. The protagonists of “The Lonely Few” are a little older, but are also fumbling to figure out who they are — and who they want. In both shows, “there’s a through line that music is such a powerful tool towards self-identification,” Cullman, the director, said.

It’s also a tool that helps connect, and for Sarnak, taking a direct approach that embraces melodicism and catchiness is sometimes the most effective. “It’s my goal to allow an audience to feel like they know the song by the end, not to distance them from music,” Sarnak said. “Music, to me, is communal in its best form.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.