Mountain Top Theatre is an experimental theatre ensemble that Isaac formed in 2001 with students from Utah Valley State College and his wife, Shannyn Thompson Walters. Together, the members of Mountain Top created their first work, Images of the Soul, which was presented in the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in LA as part of Cornerstone Theater’s Festival of Faith. Images was an attempt by the ensemble to begin to find a new way of working which would allow them to create the opportunity for a spiritual experience in the theatre. They melded together different images and texts from varying traditions which had spiritual resonance for them. The Festival of Faith received national attention in publications such as the LA Times and American Theatre Magazine.

In 2004, Mountain Top was inspired by Victor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, to create The Space Between. They wanted to explore what Frankl had spoken of as a “space” between outside stimuli and internal response in which there is freedom for an individual to determine how they are going to respond to a situation. Mountain Top was invited by the Kô Festival in Amherst, MA to develop The Space Between at a rehearsal residency. It was then presented at the New World Center for the Arts in Indiana.

Currently, Mountain Top Theatre is working on an adaptation of the C.S. Lewis novel, ‘Till We Have Faces.

Mountain Top Theatre is a member of the Network of Ensemble Theaters, a consortium “committed to preserving and passing on the legacy of the ensemble theater movement”.

Members of Mountain Top Theatre include:

Isaac Walters
Shannyn Walters
Angela Staheli
Jacob Blocker
Andrea Walker
Sara Forsyth

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The mission statement for Mountain Top Theatre is:

Mountain Top Theatre is an ensemble dedicated to the creation of a new kind of theatre based on the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel has the power to cross cultural boundaries, and Mountain Top Theatre attempts to use that power to bring people from different cultures together in the theatre. We, in the ensemble, believe that one of the purposes of theatre is the creation of Zion, the city of Holiness, where the people are of one heart, one mind and there are no poor among them. Zion must be composed of people who are sensitive to one another’s needs and yet still celebrate each other’s individuality. We attempt to do this on the stage by creating the opportunity for a spiritual experience by:

1. asking questions which lead to a deeper spiritual place,
2. allowing our personal spiritual lives to affect the rehearsal process,
3. creating theatre which allows freedom for a variety of responses from the audience,
4. recognizing that the use of fiction on stage allows the performers and audience to join together in an act of spiritual creation, through the power of the imagination, to create a new reality in the theatre,
5. and inviting the Spirit of God into the theatre through the use of our souls which are made up of our bodies, minds, and spirits. Of those three, we recognize that the easiest one to control is the body.

We hope that in making this kind of theatre our audiences will become more sensitive to one another, that we will all begin to feel one another’s pain as our own, and that the wrongs of world will begin to be righted.