Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2013 | Page 40

alumni association

by Jennifer Grant ’89

Photo by Rick haRig

one great
workout

38     W I N T E R   2 0 1 3

Arena Theater celebrated its
40th anniversary with a “Workout Reunion”
honoring M. James Young, the
group’s founder (at left).

That more than 200

Wheaton alumni
gathered on campus for a reunion this past
August isn’t remarkable. That the diverse
group—missionaries, therapists, and artists
among them—traveled from locales as far
flung as Alaska and Australia to do so is noteworthy. But that they attended Wheaton over a
span of four decades, and yet feel inexorably
linked to one another is, well, dazzling.
The summer 2012 “Workout Reunion”
began on a Friday, and included a memorial
service for the theater group’s founder—M.
James Young. The closing event, a “Farewell
Hoopdewalla” on Sunday afternoon, fittingly
appropriated the whimsical lexis of the man
who started it all.
On entering Arena Theater for the festivities,
Stacy Tomson Rispin ’89 overheard someone
say that he felt he had arrived at a family

reunion, but “just needed to figure out how he
was related to everyone.”
“It was a brilliant analogy,” Stacy says. “We
all felt like family.”
The impetus for the celebration was Arena
Theater’s 40th anniversary; but the death of
Young, at age 85, in April 2012 added even
greater meaning to the event.
Young came to Wheaton in 1972 and served
as director of Arena Theater for almost a
quarter century. When he retired 17 years ago,
students returned to campus from 27 states
to take part in a ceremony given in his honor.
Afterward, though the future of Workout was
uncertain, the group has continued to thrive
under the direction of Young’s successor, Mark
Lewis, associate professor of communication, v