“Are We American? The Tipperary Coal Miners Musical” will debut Oct. 22–25 in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College. The musical was penned by local resident Maggie Heston, who based the play on the life of her own family in a 1920s Iowa mining camp. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
‘Are We American?’— Original musical by Yellow Springs resident to debut
- Published: October 21, 2026
Last week, Westminster Hall at First Presbyterian Church was transformed, for a while, into an early-20th-century coal camp. Miners sang about watching each other’s backs; women debated the power of their newly won vote. Moonshine passed from person to person, staying just beyond a police officer’s notice.
It was a rehearsal for “Are We American? The Tipperary Coal Miners Musical,” which premieres Oct. 22–25 at Antioch College’s Foundry Theater. Written by 95-year-old villager Marguerite “Maggie” Delpierre Heston, the musical follows immigrant families making lives above and below ground in 1920s Tipperary, Iowa.
Maggie Heston’s story, brought to life by a panoply of area actors and singers, is rooted in family: her parents, Philip Delpierre and Eva Dernovich, emigrated from France and Croatia, respectively, and met in the Tipperary mining camp. Their lives, and those of their neighbors, form the basis of the show. In 2024, when the show was still being workshopped, Heston told the News that though her family history prompted what would become her first full-length musical, she plumbed the meaning of community and collective action to bind that history together.
“It’s got love songs, tragedy, unions and union bosses and workers’ strikes,” she added. “Miners had to take care of each other.”
Melissa Heston, Maggie’s daughter, is producing and co-directing the show with Magnolia Cooper. Alongside family history, the production draws on Iowa historian Rose Marie Briggs’ book “Tipperary: Gone But Not Forgotten,” which preserves former residents’ stories and photographs. As in 2024, when select scenes from the still-in-the-works musical were performed at the Senior Center, this year’s premiere will take place just before the November election. Then as now, Melissa Heston said her mother hopes the play will still be fresh in audience members’ minds as they head to the polls.
“That’s really important to her — talking about who is American, and who belongs here,” Melissa Heston said.
“We are all Americans,” Maggie Heston wrote in a press release for the show. “We have transplanted and loved our cultures throughout this land of the free. We are all equal and of equal value.”
Local resident Maggie Heston based “Are We American?” on the Tipperary, Iowa coal mining camp where her parents and grandparents lived in the 1920s. Alongside family history, the production draws on Iowa historian Rose Marie Briggs’ book “Tipperary: Gone But Not Forgotten,” which preserves former residents’ stories and photographs.
Maggie Heston worked for about four years, she previously told the News, on the book and lyrics for “Are We American?” before workshopping it in 2024. After nearly two more years of work, the show hit the ground running with rehearsals beginning in August this year. Auditions yielded a core cast, and calls and recommendations brought other folks on board. Cooper told the News that rehearsals have been scheduled three nights per week, two hours at a time, in order to accommodate work and life schedules.
“Some of these people have not been in a play before,” Cooper said. “A lot of them are singers first.”
As with any big show — particularly one being built from the ground up — some things were still in flux even as rehearsals began, including casting. Art Boulet, who plays the villainous mine boss, was cast later in the process, and was in his second week of rehearsal when the News visited. As he wrote out his lines in a large journal at the back of the rehearsal space between scenes — “It helps me memorize them,” he said — he said Melissa Heston asked him to join the cast, an invitation that held a personal appeal.
“Reading the history of Melissa’s mom’s family, and everything it meant to her — I said I would love to be involved,” Boulet said.
Chase Meddock, returning to the local stage after several years away, echoed Boulet in his assessment of the show; Meddock plays Augustus “Gus” Dernovich — Eva’s father, Juliana’s husband and Maggie Heston’s own grandfather.
“Bringing this story to life like this is such a gift from [Maggie and Melissa Heston],” Meddock said. “There’s a deep sense of personality in the story.”
Jonas Bahn, playing Philip Delpierre — Maggie Heston’s father — said he, too, was drawn to the proximity between the production and its creator. And he noted that as the script has changed and the cast has grown, the show has held together as it becomes what audiences will finally see when the curtain rises later this month.
“It’s been super organized, super smooth,” Bahn said. “It’s been a super positive experience.”
When Senior Center members presented scenes from the work-in-progress musical two years ago, they portrayed immigrants taking a citizenship class, celebrating Independence Day and sharing why they came to the U.S. Four musical numbers accompanied those scenes, with Caryn Fox Diamond on piano; Dayton-based musician and composer Brennan Paulin had worked with Maggie Heston to transcribe the melodies she heard in her head and turn them into arrangements.
Since then, Diamond, who serves as composer and orchestrator for the full musical, has expanded the original musical ideas, composing and arranging them into a score for voices and an 11-piece pit band. Some melodies were fragments; she developed them into complete phrases, added endings and worked with Maggie Heston to get the sound she wanted.
Diamond said the collaboration stretched her own musical experience: a trumpet player, pianist and music teacher, she’s played in pit bands and accompanied casts, but her previous compositions were mainly children’s songs, and her arranging has mostly been constrained to individual pieces for ensemble playing.
“I have never done anything this big,” she said.
Maggie Heston visited Diamond’s house on Friday afternoons over the last year-and-a-half, and Diamond described the work of creating the show’s score as being more like play.
“She provided the sand and the toys, and I got to build with it,” Diamond said. “It was a blast.”
Rehearsal has continued to shape the musical’s score; Melissa Heston might ask for singers to join in on what had originally been an instrumental ending, or Diamond might hear a place where a scene needs music. One transition takes the audience from a citizenship class to Philip asking for Eva’s hand in marriage; for that scene change, Diamond adapted a period suffrage song, then composed soft music to carry the change in mood.
“I was literally writing music in the car yesterday,” she said.
“Wake Up,” a gospel number sung by Lauren Caldwell Cromer, is entirely Diamond’s composition. Maggie Heston had suggested listening to Aretha Franklin for inspiration, and Diamond immersed herself in gospel before writing it. Finally hearing the cast put voices to music she had been working with for a year, she said, has been its own reward.
“They’ve been a joy to work with for sure,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
Caldwell Cromer sings “Wake Up” as Juliana Dernovich, Maggie Heston’s grandmother. Within the show’s narrative, the song lives between mourning and celebration — a call to carry on. Caldwell Cromer said she was drawn to the song’s style — it reminds her, in its way, of the music of her late father, the jazz-soul singer Bobby Caldwell.
“And anytime I get to sing, I kind of keep him with me,” she said.
Caldwell Cromer is a vocalist in her own right, and this role marks her return to the musical theater stage after about 12 years; she said the chance to perform near home made the invitation hard to pass up.
“It was an opportunity to do original material five minutes down the road, and Melissa is directing, and I already knew my brother-in-law was going to be involved,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I give it a go?”
Caldwell Cromer’s brother-in-law is Elliot Cromer; he and longtime theatrical collaborator Adam Zaremsky have been treading local stages since childhood. “Are We American?” holds the distinction of uniting the two for the first musical they’ve done together in more than 15 years. Zaremsky plays the role of Tony Pino, the mining camp’s resident bootlegger, and Cromer is the bombastic miner Chicago Mike. Singing onstage again, Cromer said, is something he’s missed in the years since his last musical.
“Whenever you do a musical, you can sing with people for a few hours a night — that’s a feeling you don’t forget, and it felt just the same coming back to it,” he said. “The theater’s always been my church, and that’s my choir practice, and I love it.”
For Zaremsky’s part, he said he sees “Are We American?” as a tale both as old as time and as fresh as ever: “Immigrants built America, and continue to be important to America. That’s what this show is about — community, the importance of being an organized community and having each other’s backs in the face of adversity.”
“Are We American?” will premiere with five public performances in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College: Thursday–Saturday, Oct. 22–24, at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25; for more information, go to http://www.bit.ly/AreWeAmericanFoundry
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