Experience the gift of storytelling through theatre arts.
Our Mission
City On A Hill Youth Theater provides a quality theatrical experience for home-schooled high school students.
We offer a vibrant peer community that enriches students’ artistic education, equips them with Biblical values, and empowers them with essential life skills, while producing wholesome stage plays that entertain the families in the Central Virginia region.
COAHYT has been telling stories since Fall 2011.
Entertain
We produce high-quality, God-honoring, family-friendly shows for our local Lynchburg community.
Educate
We supplement your homeschool curriculum by teaching skills in the performing arts and providing a living history experience through period dramas and comedies.
Enrich
We offer a vibrant peer community that allows students to create friendships and encourage each other while they grow as storytellers and as young adults.
Equip
We seek to prepare our students with essential life skills and Biblical values as they learn how to integrate their worldview into our modern culture.
Meet Our Team
John Knaus
Founding Co-Director
John Knaus, hailing from picturesque upstate New York, has always been drawn to the enchanting world of theater. His journey into the spotlight began in his formative years, where he honed his acting skills on the stages of his local high school.
Today, as John continues to inspire and uplift audiences with stage directions, he remains steadfast in his commitment to fostering a legacy of passion, perseverance, artistic excellence, and ministry for God for generations to come.
Alyson Wagner
Founding Co-Director
Alyson Wagner has a passion for teenagers that began when she was a student at Liberty University. She has taught literature, history, rhetoric, and worldview in the local homeschool community since 2006.
As a founding Director of City On A Hill Youth Theater, investing in the lives of over 250 teenagers who have participated in COAHYT is one of Alyson’s greatest privileges and responsibilities.
Jaymee Wagner
Production Manager/
Summer Production Director
Jaymee holds B.A. degrees in Theatre Arts: Production, Theatre Arts: Dramaturgy, and English from Liberty University. She has worked locally with Alluvion Stage Company and several community theaters, as well as Provision Theater in Chicago.
She loves using her skills to teach and invest in COAHYT’s students.
The Matchmaker
By Thornton Wilder
A Farce in Four Acts
SHOWING: April 30 - May 9
7:00pm | Thursday, Friday, Saturday
2:00pm | Saturday Matinee
Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy, widowed merchant residing in Yonkers, New York, decides it’s time to take a wife and hires a matchmaker. But Dolly Gallagher Levi is no ordinary matchmaker. She’s a force of nature, with a plan of her own. Mrs. Levi soon becomes embroiled in the affairs of the hearts of all those around her—including Vandergelder’s niece, his store clerks, assorted young and lovely ladies, and the headwaiter at an expensive restaurant, where this swift farce inevitably runs headlong into hilarious complications. Indeed, after a series of slapstick situations everyone eventually finds themselves paired with a perfect match.
Thornton Wilder’s uproarious farce opened on Broadway in 1955 and ran for 486 performances, Wilder's Broadway record. It was later adapted into the musical HELLO, DOLLY!. This family comedy about love and money stars the irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi, and through Dolly’s subtle machinations, several unlikely couples come together to find happiness in late 19th-century New York. — Samuel French Publishing Co.
_JPEG.jpeg)
_JPEG.jpeg)