In the upcoming feature film “Mad River,” reality doesn’t hold steady for long.

The film, written and directed by area artist Jarrod Robbins, was shot in part in Yellow Springs and will make its debut in several Miami Valley theaters this month.

“Mad River” follows Benjamin Elder, a quiet, solitary man who pursues a romantic connection as his inner life begins to splinter. At its core, Robbins said, the film is an attempt to humanize that unraveling by placing the audience inside it.

“It’s the story of a very lonely man’s descent into insanity,” said Robbins, who plays the main character. “It’s told from the inside out. So it’s not about an insane man — the audience experiences Ben’s fracturing mind along with him.”

Robbins said the film’s structure mirrors its subject, fracturing its narrative by moving between what Ben believes is happening, what he tells others and what may be unfolding just outside his perception. In one sequence, those threads unspool at the same time, forcing the audience to reconcile conflicting versions of the same moment.

“I got to show multiple perspectives simultaneously,” Robbins said. “What’s onscreen is what actually happened, and Ben’s voiceover is him writing about how he perceived what happened.”

That layered approach carried over from the novel of the same name, also written by Robbins. Having written two novels and written and directed several independent films over the last several years, Robbins said he was interested in exploring the possibilities inherent in translating the written narrative to the screen.

“I can show something with a single image that might take me three pages to describe,” he said.

Robbins grew up in Enon, and after attending Wittenberg University to study English, spent years working in Los Angeles and Nashville as an actor. Having returned to the Miami Valley, Robbins said shooting “Mad River” entirely in Ohio communities — Enon, Fairborn, New Carlisle, Urbana, Cedarville and Yellow Springs, including a pivotal scene at the Corner Cone —  was due to a desire for the film to feel rooted in the place where he grew up, even if that place was never explicitly named in the film or its source material.

“I never say where it takes place, but it takes place here,” he said.

Robbins said the story was inspired in part by his interactions with a man he came to know while working overnight shifts at a Los Angeles hotel — an experience he said reshaped how he views people living with mental illness.

Robbins said the man, who frequented the hotel where he worked, could be unpredictable — at times “cordial and funny and witty,” and at others “violent and a menace,” throwing objects at guests and lashing out at staff. Rather than avoid him, Robbins said he made a point to listen. Over time, the man shared that he had once been a mechanical engineer with a master’s degree before losing his job, his family and, eventually, his stability. The distance between how the man was perceived and who he was  stuck with Robbins.

“We label people as ‘crazy’ or ‘evil’ to keep them at arm’s length,” he said. “It changed my paradigm entirely; I started seeing people differently.”

That shift became the emotional core of “Mad River,” which aims to invite audiences to experience a facet of the complexities of mental illness and, hopefully, empathize with that facet.

“If my little film has even a fraction of that impact on anyone, then it was worth it,” Robbins said.

Local resident and actor Mike Taint, who plays the role of Ben’s father in the film, said working on “Mad River” offered a rare opportunity — both in its subject matter and its process. With a background primarily in stage performance, Taint said the shift to film required a different kind of discipline, with scenes shot out of order and emotional beats needing to be reached quickly.

“You have to turn it on immediately,” he said, noting that unlike stage work, film requires actors to jump between emotional moments out of sequence. “You’re here now, and then, boom — now you’re here three weeks before.”

At the same time, he said working directly with Robbins, who has lived and breathed the world and characters in “Mad River” through multiple iterations, provided unusual clarity.

“This is the god of the ‘Mad River’ universe,” Taint said. “When he gives direction, you don’t have to second-guess that direction.”

Having produced multiple independent films, Robbins said he encountered the expected challenges in working with a limited budget — “We didn’t have unlimited resources,” he said. But having worked for years in logistics, Robbins said he’s good at streamlining processes — and in finding ways around roadblocks when they occur.

“Filmmaking is logistics, if nothing else,” he said.

Robbins stepped in to compose part of the film’s score after a collaborator left the project, and built a full-scale replica of a mobile home interior in a barn outside New Carlisle, where several of the film’s central scenes were shot.

“It takes place in summertime, but we filmed in November — and it was unheated,” Taint said with a laugh. “I had the thickest long underwear on underneath my costume.”

Robbins, on the other hand, was often dressed for summer scenes in shorts and a tank top, despite the cold.

“We ran a blast heater between takes,” Robbins said. “But it was so loud we had to turn it off when the camera was running. We also had a kerosene heater, but it was only good for about three feet.”

“Mad River” will begin its area theatrical run with a private premiere for cast and crew at Little Art Theatre this weekend, followed by public screenings at the Fairborn Phoenix on Friday, April 10, and the State Theatre in Springfield on Friday, April 17. Screenings in Cincinnati are slated for later in the month.

Robbins said he chose the Little Art to debut the film for the more than two dozen area folks who worked on it because he’s always had a soft spot for the village, and hopes to honor the small town that helped him create the visual and thematic world of “Mad River.”

“I want the people of Yellow Springs to know that I care about it,” he said. “I love this town, and I love this theater.”

Springtime is waxing in Yellow Springs. Treebuds are proudly poking up and ephemerals checker the thawing earth. The days begin to grow long as coats are cast away for the few months ahead.

Energy abounds this time of year, but for some organisms, growth takes time and blooms must be carefully planned.

Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice, a local 128-acre educational farm about a mile west of Yellow Springs, is among those circumspecting organisms — and for good reason.

It’s been three years since the farm’s operations were suspended due to financial and legal precarity from insurmountable payroll and payroll taxes that the farm couldn’t afford. Thirty employees were abruptly furloughed in February 2023, and most agricultural and educational programs ceased altogether.

Since then, growth at Agraria has been slow, steady and measured. This spring is no different, staffers told the News last month.

“We’re still building our capacity,” Eric Bee, operations manager, said. “We’re being careful and intentional with how we use grants, and especially with how we manage our bandwidth — seeing what projects we can and can’t take on.”

“Exactly,” Programs Director Florentina Rodriguez agreed. “We’re trying to regain the trust of the community, of our donors, and prove that we’re not going to stretch ourselves too thin. We’re still doing important work, and the community is invited to help out.”

Bee and Rodriguez — the only two paid staffers at Agraria — said they’re reliant on the goodwill of volunteers and the curious, those who hope to learn new skills and those who want to help feed their neighbors.

To that end, Agraria has narrowed its operational focus to four areas: enacting farm-scale permaculture practices, building local ecological knowledge, fostering citizen science and reskilling to preserve traditional practices.

The next reskilling program will take  place Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26, when Agraria will host “Making A Home Apothecary: Herbalism as a Community Skill,” wherein workshop organizers will teach pro-health approaches to plant foraging and making herbal remedies. Information and registration on the workshop can be found at agrariacenter.org.

All the while, Agraria is hosting “Seed Saturdays” at the farm every Saturday through the end of May. It’s a recurring event, Bee and Rodriguez said, that touches on all four of the farm’s operational pillars. The educational component, though, is paramount.

“We’ve been growing and breeding plants to do what we want for more than 10,000 years,” Bee said. “But lately, what we want isn’t necessarily good for us. Plants are being bred to be productive and easily shipped, not necessarily healthy and flavorful. So the concept of saving and carefully selecting seeds means we can grow better food for ourselves and the land.”

Seed Saturdays are just that — a casual exchange of produce and flower seeds that are well-tuned to grow and flourish in Yellow Springs’ particular biome. They’re open to the public 10 a.m.–noon, and no one is required to bring their own seeds for exchange — there’s plenty for the taking Rodriguez said.

“So many big seed contract growers and companies — mostly in the Pacific Northwest — tout things like frost resistance, but they don’t necessarily have drought resistance, heat tolerance, humidity tolerance — the kinds of climate struggles we have to deal with out here,” Rodriguez said. “Seed exchanges and swaps can really be a way to gain knowledge about your local ecology — they can be a way to reconnect with your land, your own personal stories.”

Faith Morgan gave a prime example and held aloft a particularly rotund butternut squash. 

Morgan is a longtime Agraria volunteer, advisory board member and granddaughter of the late Arthur Morgan, who founded Agraria’s earliest iteration, the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, in 1940. She was also director of Community Solutions for four years.

“This is Peggy’s butternut,” Morgan said of the squash she cradled.

She referred to Peg Champney, a beloved local resident  who died in 2019. Champney was a lifelong gardener who, over the course of several decades, bred a squash to her liking — one that, after so many years of guided selection, would grow well in Yellow Springs (particularly The Vale, where she lived), be the right kind of sweetness she and her husband, Ken, preferred, and have the right structure to prevent early rotting.

Peggy’s butternut seeds are among the many dozens available for exchange or taking at Seed Saturdays.

“So, this is all about taking seeds, trying them and experimenting — citizen science,” Morgan said. “And we’re not just passing seeds out, but we’re teaching people how to grow them, too.”

For now, that’s the prerogative of Agraria — seed saving and proliferation.

According to Bee, Rodriguez and Morgan — Agraria’s present intellectual “triumvirate,” as Bee refers to them — turning Agraria into the local repository for seeds is a  sustainable approach to meeting current and future local agricultural needs. It’s a way to bring people to the farm, think about the locale and its attendant ecology more critically and, ultimately, commune with one another in an increasingly disjointed food system.

But Agraria’s not only growing crops for seed preservation — a more immediate need is being met, largely thanks to volunteer and villager Al Schlueter’s green thumbs. Last year, he grew 10,000 pounds worth of produce on Agraria property, the vast majority of which he donated to the Yellow Springs Food Pantry.

Schlueter said he has similar plans for this year. As of press time, he had long and impressive rows of garlic, potatoes and leafy greens in the ground — likely all going to a local hungry belly in the near future, he said.   

“This kind of giving and sharing is in the spirit of Yellow Springs, I think,” Schlueter told the News. “People who go to the pantry deserve more than just boxed and canned food. People really like what I drop off. They come and give me a big hug sometimes.”

Though Agraria has only 12 tillable acres on its 128-acre property, according to the triumvirate, they’re keeping true to the longtime mission of Agraria to regenerate the farm’s soil —  perhaps in the interest of future growth.

Recently, Agraria has partnered with the new farming enterprise across the road. On the north side of Dayton-Yellow Springs Road is Yellow Springs Provisions, a burgeoning farm that recently took charge of a 185-acre property and, on it, placed a conservation easement, rendering it agricultural in perpetuity.

As the News previously reported, the DeLacey and Coppock families bought the land at the end of 2025 with the intention of raising grass-fed, grass-finished cattle and other livestock and crops on the land.

“And we’re letting them rotationally graze on our land,” Rodriguez said. “By moving these cows around, having pasture-based ruminants on the land helps the soil in a lot of different ways, sequestering carbon and mimicking the natural soil that had been built here in the first place.”

“This is called flash grazing,” Bee said of the neighboring cows’ occasional presence on Agraria land. “It’s an important regenerative practice that harkens back to when bison and other animals roamed around in giant herds, eating, grazing, pooping, stamping on the poop and moving along.”

Presently, the rotational herd is up to 24, but that number is poised to go up: calving season is here. One was already born March 17.

“What a great partnership this is,” Bee said.

“Doing anything alone by ourselves is not the way to go,” Rodriguez said. “We just don’t have the bandwidth. But we’d love to do more in partnership with others. Maybe someone wants to grow something they hadn’t before. Maybe someone wants to start a seed collective.  We have the space and, in some cases, the resources.”

She continued: “Local partnerships spread out the risk and multiply the rewards. Stop by some day and see what we’re doing.”

To learn more about Agraria’s upcoming programs and volunteer opportunities, see the News’ “At Agraria” column or visit the nonprofit’s website at http://www.agrariacenter.org

The Yellow Springs Senior Center announced this week that it has signed a contract to purchase the former lumberyard property at 108 Cliff St. The Senior Center had previously announced in January that it was considering the Cliff Street site as a location for its future new facility.

As outlined in a March 28 press release, the contract represents what the Senior Center describes as a “strategic shift — not a restart,” following months of analysis, community input and negotiations with the property’s current owners.

The move is a change in direction from a previously planned new build on a Livermore Street parcel the nonprofit purchased from Antioch College in December 2023. Rather than build its new facility from the ground up, the Senior Center now plans to rehabilitate the Cliff Street site’s existing post-and-beam structure.

In an interview this week, Executive Director Caroline Mullin said the shift came after extended discussions between the Senior Center board and Massies Creek Ventures, the Cliff Street property’s current owner.

“It took a lot to figure out exactly how we fit,” Mullin said, noting that negotiations required “some compromise on both sides.”

Board President Jerry Sutton said the process took “about six months to make it a reality,” moving the possibility of developing the Cliff Street site from “a gleam in the eye” to a secured contract.

Mullin said the Cliff Street property addresses feedback from Senior Center and community members about a desire to keep the center downtown, where it can be both visible and walkable, while also offering room for growth. According to the press release, the lumberyard lot is “approximately 25% larger” than the Livermore parcel and includes existing infrastructure, and can be expanded vertically to include a mezzanine level and elevator.

As the News reported in January, a space usage study completed previously by Dayton-based architect firm LWC Incorporated identified the Senior Center’s need for roughly 11,000 square feet — about three times its current building’s size of 3,700 square feet. Mullin said developing 11,000 square feet can be fully realized on the Cliff Street site’s ground floor alone, in addition to the possibility of expanded space in an upstairs mezzanine.

“All of the rooms that LWC had considered we needed fit within one level on the Cliff Street property,” she said. “So there’s the opportunity to build up and add even more.”

A feasibility study completed in 2025 by Loring Sternberg and Associates to assess the organization’s fundraising capacity noted room for phased construction as a “priority” for the Senior Center; Mullin said the Cliff Street site, with its size and existing infrastructure, will allow for a phased approach. Earlier this year, Mullin stated that the total project cost was projected to be around $7 million; the ability to build in stages, she added this week, could allow the project to move forward even if full funding is not secured upfront.

The organization has already begun the first phase of a capital campaign to fund the acquisition, inspections and site preparation, with plans to sell the Livermore property to help finance the project.

“There’s one overarching goal [for the capital campaign], but there is an immediacy that’s necessary to close on buying the Cliff Street site,” Mullin said. “So right now, there’s a push to get $850,000 in hand, some of which will come out of selling the Livermore Street lot.” 

The Senior Center purchased the half-acre lot on Livermore Street for $300,000; Sutton said the Senior Center will offer the land for sale via bid, with the aim to “recoup our cost.”

“We’ll see what the market has done in the intervening two years,” he said.

“The market has changed,” Mullin added, “and we also had a slight shift in the lot size, because we went through an alley vacation process, so there’s a little more land now.”

Mullin reiterated that the Senior Center’s current facility on Xenia Avenue, purchased in 1978, has long been constrained by limited space, accessibility challenges and parking shortages; she told the News in January that those constraints have already limited the number and type of programs the center can offer, even as demand continues to grow. She added this week that a previous board originally identified the need for a new space in 2008.

“It’s been almost 20 years; we’ve had every assessment of this building done to know if we could stay in it — and we can’t,” Mullin said.

By contrast, the new site would allow for a largely single-level layout, with around 30 parking spots available on the property, as well as access to nearby parking areas at the Bryan Center and the municipal lot on Dayton Street, which are near the bike path along which the Cliff Street site is located.

Sutton added that the expanded space available in the former lumberyard building will also offer opportunities to partner with and potentially house other local nonprofits; he said early conversations have begun with such groups, though no formal agreements are in place.

“We’re open to use of that space as a community cultural center,” Sutton said.

As the new building project begins to come into focus, Mullin said Senior Center membership has recently surpassed 800 people — more than we’ve ever had,” she said —  up from about 700 two months ago. Those who use the Senior Center regularly, including its members, are often residents age 60 and older — who account for about 40% of the local population — but also caregivers, volunteers and community members of any age who attend meals, classes and events hosted at the center.

Looking ahead, the Senior Center plans to present updated schematic designs at its annual meeting, slated for Wednesday, June 10. An open house at the Cliff Street site is being planned for May to give community members a chance to view the former lumberyard building and learn more about the project.

If all goes as planned, Mullin and Sutton said, detailed construction drawings could be completed by the end of this year, with a build timeline of 18 to 24 months, putting a potential opening for the new facility in late 2028 or early 2029.

The Herndon Gallery at Antioch College will host Chicago-based theater collective Theater Oobleck for three performances of “Song About Himself,” a dystopian, language-driven play by ensemble cofounder Mickle Maher, Friday–Sunday, April 10–12.

The production will mark Theater Oobleck’s second visit to the village after bringing “The Hunchback Variations” to the Foundry Theater in 2024. That show held up the creative process writ-large to a tragi-comic light, and “Song About Himself” continues Theater Oobleck’s practice of examining what it is to be human, this time in a world gone feral after the collapse of the internet.

The play greets audiences immediately with fragmented speech from its focal character, Carol. Unlike those with whom she interacts regularly in gesture and “mumbles,” Carol retains some language fluency, which leads her to encounter, as Theater Oobleck describes, “a mysterious social media site created by a rogue artificial intelligence within the Web itself, only to find that, strangely, she is its only member.”

Playwright Maher, who spoke with the News last week, said the play’s premise grew out of anxieties that were already present when it premiered in 2015.

“If you’re going to write a dystopian future about the internet, AI was absolutely unavoidable,” he said. “It wasn’t what it is today, but that’s where we were headed — the difficulty of identifying what is human and what is not on the internet. I wasn’t any Nostradamus for predicting that.”

The play leans hard into science fiction — of which Maher said he’s proud, since plays don’t have “access to spectacle” in the same ways that films do. Instead, “Song About Himself” relies on language to communicate its core concerns about how people connect — or fail to do so. The world that reveals itself within the play is one in which the internet — the major point of connection for humankind — has been struck a fatal blow.

“What if someone just wrote some malware, and it destroyed everything? There would be nothing we could do,” Maher said. “The dystopian conceit of the play is that, if the internet suddenly collapsed after we’ve invested all of our cultural energy and memory into it … it would be like a trauma. … What would that do, worldwide, to our ability to communicate?”

He noted that the play is “wordy in a perverse way,” in that it requires the audience to be carried along by the curious rhythms and tones of its language as Carol interacts with the AI “Host/Hostess,” as well as the mysterious Tod, who throws a wrench into the AI’s plan when he attempts to log on.

“There’s a lot going on in the play that I don’t expect people to get,” Maher said. “But hopefully they can follow the plotlines of the story and be moved.”

The cast features Theater Oobleck ensemble member Diana Slickman as Carol, alongside Vicki Walden as Host/Hostess, and H.B. Ward as Tod. Slickman, who previously appeared in the company’s local production of “The Hunchback Variations,” originated the role of Carol and returns to it more than a decade later.

“Diana’s my go-to; she’s in pretty much everything I’ve done over the last decade or more,” Maher said. “Playing the part again 11 years later, it’s different, but much of what she brought to it before is still there. She had to completely rediscover the part.”

Maher described the play’s unusual syntax as particularly demanding for actors, but said both performers and audiences can ballast themselves via some familiarity with the work of Walt Whitman.

“A lot of the language is a corrupted version of his verse,” he said, citing Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as inspiration. “Just read a little bit of Whitman before you come; a few lines to sort of refresh yourself.”

Theater Oobleck was founded in the 1980s and operates without directors, instead developing work collaboratively among ensemble members. That ethos carries through to “Song About Himself,” and the play is staged with minimal design. Maher said many of his works have been written to be performed “in any kind of room,” and “Song About Himself,” too, is adaptable to untraditional spaces.

“It’s best performed in the round — or in the rectangle, as we have it now,” he said. “We’re pretty flexible with it.”

Maher described the “in the rectangle” setting — that is, with the audience seated on all four sides of the cast — as paramount to the production. The configuration places the audience in close proximity to the actors, but also within intimate line-of-sight of one another.

“It’s unavoidable to see your fellow audience members,” Maher said. “They become the set and other characters in the play in a kind of ghostly way.”

That closeness, he added, creates a sense of shared experience that both echoes and contrasts with the isolation depicted onstage.

“There’s a feeling of community that you have when you put people in a circle, and you imagine the first theaters maybe were like that,” he said. “Just people around a campfire, telling stories.”

Maher said “Song About Himself” is the “least funny” and “saddest” of his plays, though he noted that Slickman is “hilarious” as Carol. At the same time, he said, the play leaves some room for the possibility that connection, however fragile, can still be rediscovered.

“There’s a kind of tiny sliver of hope,” he said.

Performances of “Song About Himself” run about 90 minutes and will take place Friday and Saturday, April 10 and 11, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, April 12, at 2 p.m., at Herndon Gallery in Antioch College’s South Hall. Seating is limited. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $5 for students and youth; for more information and tickets, go to http://www.bit.ly/SongAboutHimselfHerndon

By Alissa Paolella

Yellow Springs Home, Inc. has secured a $450,000 award through the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati’s Affordable Housing Program to fund 25 home repair projects — 12 in Yellow Springs and 13 in Dayton-area neighborhoods.

The funding, awarded in partnership with The Huntington National Bank, will support repairs for income-qualified homeowners, primarily older adults and people living with disabilities. Work will focus on safety, accessibility and energy-related improvements.

Eligible projects include roof replacements, HVAC systems, accessibility upgrades such as wheelchair ramps and bathroom modifications, as well as plumbing, electrical and window work.

The award reflects both demand for repairs and Home, Inc.’s shift toward regional partnerships to compete for larger funding pools.

“There is a significant pent-up need in Yellow Springs and across the Miami Valley,” Executive Director Emily Seibel told the News, noting many applicants are older residents on fixed incomes facing rising maintenance and utility costs.

Home, Inc. qualified for the competitive funding in part by committing that 13 of the 25 projects would take place in majority-minority census tracts.

“That leveraged additional resources coming into Yellow Springs that wouldn’t have been available otherwise,” Seibel said.

The home repair program began in 2018 with a single $5,000 wheelchair ramp project. Since then, the organization has added local, state and federal funding to expand the work.

Current support includes funding from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati’s Carol M. Peterson Housing Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Housing Preservation Grant and several local and regional foundations, including the Yellow Springs Community Foundation and The Dayton Foundation.

Much of the work now runs through the Dayton Home Repair Network, a coalition formed after the 2019 tornadoes to coordinate applications and funding across agencies, including the City of Dayton, the Dayton Energy Collaborative and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Dayton.

Through the network, applications are processed centrally, with social workers helping residents navigate multiple funding sources.

“The idea is that we could be stacking resources to do more in a particular house,” Seibel said.

Many of the projects address urgent needs. In one recent case, an older Yellow Springs resident lost heat during the winter when their furnace failed. Home, Inc., without immediate funds available, worked with partners to secure emergency assistance.

“That’s an emergency situation,” Seibel said. “There’s a physical and health risk to not having heat in the winter, but there’s also an isolation and mental health impact.”

Other projects have included bathroom renovations to improve accessibility, roof replacements to prevent water damage and mold, and energy-efficiency upgrades to reduce monthly bills. Some homes, Seibel said, appear stable from the outside but require significant interior repairs.

“It’s not always obvious that someone’s suffering just by looking at the outside of their house,” she said.

Home, Inc. identified about 85 potential projects during its most recent application cycle. Individual projects have been approved for up to $16,000–$20,000 per home, depending on the funding source.

Previous USDA grants supported HVAC systems, roof replacements and accessibility upgrades for 11 Yellow Springs homeowners. Unlike some programs, the USDA funding does not include age restrictions or strict project caps.

As the program has grown, so has the organization’s capacity. Despite a small staff, many with more than a decade of experience, Seibel said contractor relationships and internal systems have helped the group manage more complex funding requirements.

Partnerships with the YS Community Foundation and The Dayton Foundation have also supported fellowship roles focused on client services and grant administration.

Looking ahead, Seibel said the goal is to reach more eligible homeowners.

“Ideally, everyone who qualifies would be able to benefit,” she said.

Homeowners interested in future repair funding can complete an interest form at http://www.yshome.org or apply through the Dayton Home Repair Network.

*Alissa Paolella is a local resident and freelance writer for the News.

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