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       As a youngster I was able to see everyone as a person with a name, not as an adult or child, black or white, old or young, fat or skinny. This has formed a solid core in my heart, for we are individuals that can offer many thoughts and ideas. Just look at Informal Dramatics. How can so many people from many walks of life come together and in fifteen minutes produce a skit from a single word or an ending line? We are strangers, but in most cases become friends and comrades striving to solve a problem, and then come together with a satisfying solution that physically comes together into something real.
       Sure, there are those who like to take charge and dole out the roles, or need to be in the limelight. But as individuals and as a group, we work out the kinks and make compromises that leave a good feeling for all, including "the audience." The shy and quiet feel the esteem of participation and get that "good feeling" inside, knowing they won't be intimidated or laughed at. The outgoing "bosses" get knocked down a peg, but realize in the end that they are still important in the effort.
       Pat Emerson was one of my mentors. I loved her dearly and she made a very positive impression on me. When I was 11 years old and a veteran of Informal Dramatics, I asked one year if I could "try out" for Small Scenes. She asked me for my "credentials," for the age limit was 12 or 13, and finally said yes! I can still feel the elation because "Pat said yes!." I don't remember the play, but I was given a line to say. And the whole week was so neat, in the end I felt that I had made a great accomplishment. Even though I couldn't stay up for the Evening Program (12 was the age limit), I was in Small Scenes!

Jim Norris was a central figure at ECRS in drama. He did a lot of acting in the theatre and this contributed to his ability to teach and to the development of the philosophy of dramatics at ECRS.

       Drama is a situation set up whereby any person can live vicariously through another person's presentation of a character, or a series of persons and characters. Living temporarily inside the skin of another person can be a very freeing experience in a well directed and performed theatre piece.
       To grow or develop physically, we must stretch ourselves. If we wish to portray a character different from ourselves, we must reach and stretch beyond our own personality: in acting it seems to be easier for the average individual to stretch himself as far away from his own self as possible. For example, it is much easier for a shy young girl to play a tough character than it is to play a shy young girl.
       If we're just being ourselves in a play, we're not acting. We are just showing off, or what is worse, being embarrassed. And often in a play put on by people who do not know what they are doing, people are just given the opportunity to become embarrassed. I think that is one of the reasons so many people say they can't act, or don't like acting. It's because they never have acted. I say that anybody can act, and I have yet to find the person who cannot.
       Two things happen when we first try to act. First, we're frightened because we're afraid to venture away from our own personality. This is the only personality we've ever had and we hold onto it for dear life, because this is the only place we think we are safe. For this reason it seems to be much better to start by playing a part that is so far away from ourselves that there is no danger of putting ourselves on the spot.
       Sometimes it's wise to start by playing something that isn't even human. In the simpler forms of improvised dramatics, I have seen certain individuals working very happily and comfortably in a sketch or charade as a swinging door, a tree, a rat, or a water cooler, while if they had been pushed into a part where they had to use their own voices, they would have been tongue-tied. But the squeak of a rat or the gurgle of a water cooler comes as freely and vocally as you please.
       Everybody play acts whether he knows it or not! When we were all children we did it very well - with abandon and without self-consciousness. Civilization, education, social standards, what-ever you choose to call it, have about killed all that freedom in the average adult. This has been accomplished primarily by focusing attention on the individual, making him think about himself: how he compares with other people, can he compete with them, can he be as good or better, and if he can't what will be the effect? Strangely enough, no matter what form this process takes - whether it's working to get bigger muscles, better clothes, or more degrees - it ends up in a striving, unhappy person.
       Now there is nothing more deadly to our early youthful play-acting than an overdose of a manipulative mind. Most people are apt to start acting from the neck up. Let them start there. Later the torso reacts as far south as the waistline. Many times I have seen people express very strong and violent emotion, very sincerely, while dragging a couple of half dead legs after them as they approach the object of the emotion. The next step, of course, is to fill up the hollow legs and then you've got an instrument you can play a tune on.
       Why bother getting outside your own skin, you may ask. Well, when a baby yawns and stretches, it never quite bounces back to where it was before that last long stretch, otherwise it would never get any longer or broader. When an adult really has an experience in acting someone outside his own skin, he comes back with an emotional and even spiritual understanding of something he didn't know about before. I have seen sensitive, over-shy persons become articulate through a real acting experience. I have seen habits of bad posture and carriage have their causes removed by the right choice of characters over a period of time. I have seen people gain tolerance by playing the very characters who typify the race, creed or group they despised, simply by finding out through acting what makes the other fellow tick. I have seen a boy who stuttered, stop stuttering, by playing the part of a man with poise, assurance and the ability to hold people's attention under great difficulties.
       These things don't always happen, and they will never happen without the right method and leadership. But they do happen, and many times subtler and more intangible results accrue, results that are just as important but not so showy.
       I think it is possible, through acting, to go back to an understanding of that free and creative and imaginative state we all had when we were children and never should have lost in the first place. Let us find it again - and never let it go!
       As a director, don't do anything that directs attention at an individual. You can't stop jittery hands from moving aimlessly by drawing attention to them. If you do, they will jitter even more. You can stop hands from jittering by directing attention to the other characters, and getting the actor to react, in character, to the emotions of the other characters in the play and the situation.
       Listening is one of the most important factors in acting and takes the actor's attention from himself. This doesn't come at once, either, but it can easily be developed through interaction - to finding how you react to the other fellow. But there's a vast chasm between our mental concept of listening and the experience of hearing a thing all over.
       The greatest sin created by a director is telling the actor what to do or giving him the answer. This will kill all his sense of spontaneity. Ask an actor an intelligent question and you are apt to get an intelligent answer - his answer. This is one of the most powerful tools in directing. You will learn how to continue asking questions until you get answers that relate to the author's meaning which the actor will understand and which will project the author's meaning to the audience. This is the kind of dramatics I want to see at ECRS.
       Another "don't" that seems to be a great surprise in the amateur dramatic field: don't have your actors learn lines, either before they come to rehearsal or early in the rehearsal period. If they do, they learn something about words on a piece of paper that is related only to their own living room, or wherever they happen to have learned them. The place for actors to learn their lines is in rehearsal, and then they don't just learn lines. Actually, it isn't the words themselves that we learn and remember. We learn motivation, relationship with other characters, patterns in the motion of themselves and of the other characters.
       In a play, what happens between the lines is a large portion of real acting, like spaces that happen naturally in life in our speech, when we allow ourselves time for motivation before we say something, no matter what the situation is. In the play these spaces come unconsciously, even as in every day life, if the rest of the process is real. If we try to make spaces in our dialogue, we are going against everything we have talked about so far. Letting the meaning come between the lines, and the effect the lines themselves have upon the people who are listening to them, are more important to creative acting than the lines or words themselves. Of course, the lines are naturally indispensable, but without these other things they lose their meaning.
       The expression on the other fellow's face and how he moves and reacts to what I say to him should cause me to listen carefully for what he is going to say, and learn again his movement and physical expression while he is speaking. And so the ball bounces. The average layman will say to a good actor, "How do you learn all those lines?" We have just told you. You don't. They learn themselves.