Mad River Theater Works Managing Director Chris Westhoff provided piano accompaniment for the burgeoning thespians of last year’s youth summer residency program. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Mad River Theater Works keeps evolving
- Published: May 17, 2026
As Mad River Theater Works continues to settle into its role in the village and surrounding region, the organization’s locally focused model has been taking shape over the last several years.
What that looks like in practice has been a step back from the national tours the company — which is an artist-in-residence at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College — has traditionally produced in past years, and several steps forward on both producing and hosting a kaleidoscope of programming in Yellow Springs.
One such program is MRTW’s annual summer youth theater camp, which will return to the Foundry Theater for its fourth year the first two weeks of June. The two-week program, open to young people ages 8–17, has in past years focused on devised theater, with young thespians working collaboratively to build an original production from the ground up.
That approach continues, and as Mad River Theater Works Managing Director and Foundry Theater Director Chris Westhoff told the News last month, the camp’s focus is again shifting.
“We learned that music is as much, if not more, of an interest than anything else,” he said of last year’s camp. “So I think that’s part of the inspiration for this whole idea — to center music with everything else that we’re doing.”
Westhoff added that, in contrast to last year’s incorporation of musical theater pieces into devised work, this summer’s program will focus more on popular and contemporary forms rather than traditional musical theater.
Returning to lead the program are Westhoff and playwright Daniel Carlton, along with local musician and theater artist AJ Breslin, who will take on a larger leadership role for his third consecutive year with the camp. Joining the faculty for the first time is Dayton-based musician Kyleen Downes, who is both a well-known performer in the village and has a background in youth music education that Westhoff said will help mold this year’s camp experience.
Downes has, since 2021, co-led youth workshops in Dayton focused on collaborative music-making and performance — experience Westhoff said made her a natural partner not only for the summer camp, but for a new initiative Mad River Theater Works hopes to launch this fall.
That initiative — an after-school music program for young people — is still in development, but Westhoff said the goal is to create a space where students can explore music outside of traditional school structures.
“So not traditional music education, but also not folk school,” he said. “The idea that kids could have a place to go to have an authentic experience with a practitioner of music that they resonate with … and then be supported in putting together small groups or bands is our vision.”
The summer camp will serve, in part, as a testing ground for that concept, with the camp’s teachers using the program to collaborate and refine what a longer-term offering might look like. Westhoff said the aim is to have something in place by the start of the school year.
Alongside its youth programming, Mad River is also continuing to expand its role as a presenter and producer of events at the Foundry, including the upcoming third installment of its speaker series.
At 7 p.m. Thursday, June 5, the Foundry will host “Defining American in the Heartland,” a conversation between journalist and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas and public health researcher and writer Dr. William Lopez.
Vargas, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Huffington Post who won a Pulitzer for his reporting, famously wrote a 2011 New York Times piece in which he reported that he is an undocumented immigrant — information he discovered as a child and was forced to keep hidden for nearly two decades. The same year, he founded the nonprofit Define American, which aims to spur dialogue surrounding immigration issues. He has since published the memoir “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Immigrant.”
Lopez’s work intersects with Vargas’: much of his academic research has been around the public health effects of deportation, and his award-winning 2018 book, “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid,” held a microscope to the impact of an immigration raid on the lives of those in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Last year, he published a follow-up book, “Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance,” which zooms out to show how ICE raids have upended small and rural communities across the nation, and how those communities have worked together to rebuild.
The June 5 event will serve as the anchor for a broader week of programming June 1–6; the News will include more information about the expanded programming, dubbed “Immigrants Feed America,” in future issues.
Westhoff said the speaker series event, and the rest of the programming that has grown up around it since it was scheduled, is an example of the kind of thing that Mad River Theater Works wants to continue to facilitate — something that resonates both with what this community cares about and connects that resonance to the wider world.
He pointed to other recent efforts as examples: last year, Mad River Theater Works supported the development of new works, including “We Were There: US Women in Vietnam,” a community-based production drawing on oral histories; “No Visas,” a hip-hop collaboration connecting artists in Yellow Springs with performers in Palestine and Israel. Last weekend’s performance by The Big Family Business reopened the Foundry Theater to present new work in music, dance and puppetry, led by well-known area artists Sharon Leahy and Rick Good.
“Where we’re really working right now is kind of behind the scenes,” Westhoff said. “Without Mad River here, it doesn’t happen.”
For more information on the summer camp and upcoming programs supported by Mad River Theater Works, go to http://www.madrivertheater.com and http://www.antiochcollege.edu
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