ACTING NATURALLY: ARTS COUNCIL ACTING CLASSES SET TO PERFORM FRIDAY

April Hinrichsen, left, and Kate Devaney met at "The Wall" in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

These children used their imaginations as a team in the improvisational theater game "Magical Machines."

Brittany Rhodes threw an imaginary ball of energy to another participant in the theater game "Sound Ball."

Eight-year-old Liam Maher thinks he knows why stretching exercises are necessary for actors.

"If you're doing an action movie you could hurt yourself," he says.

Laura Leyes and Shannon Felker assent, but they have something more in mind in the acting classes they have been teaching at Kent Library's Little Theatre for the past two weeks. The stretching exercises and the theater games are aimed at breaking down barriers.

Teaching children about acting means helping them lose some of their self-consciousness, a difficult job at ages when the approval of peers seems so important.

"If you can overcome that you can overcome anything," Leyes says.

Anything includes having two weeks to stage a scene from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," as the class of teen-agers will. The younger students will perform "Paddington Paints a Picture," a scene from the play "Adventures of a Bear Called Paddington."

The students in the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri summer classes will give a performance of the scenes at 7 p.m. Friday at Rose Theatre on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University.

Having the younger students pretend to be a rag doll relaxes them, gets them to use their imaginations and gets them to concentrate "so that you are only thinking about being a rag doll," Leyes says.

Soon they are on to stage directions: X = cross, XC = cross center, U = upstage, D = downstage and many more.

Only three boys are among the 12 children in the younger class of 8-12-year-olds. The older class of 12 teen-agers has no boys.

The consensus is that boys are scared to act. Or "It's stereotyped as a female thing," Maggie Devaney said.

The all-female cast is simply reversing the Elizabethan custom of all-male casts, Leyes reasons.

The teen-agers have different reasons for enrolling in the acting class.

"It fills the time," said Maggie Devaney.

"You learn different ways to express yourself," said April Hinrichsen.

"There's not much to do in the summer," said Heather Thomas.

"It's something for the future," Brooke Beattie said.

Lauren Williams took the class while visiting from Kansas City for the summer. April and Ashley Hinrichsen just moved to Cape Girardeau from California and wanted to get to know people in the community.

Felker is a Cape Central graduate who is studying theater at Ohio Wesleyan University. Leyes is a Southeast graduate who just finished her first year of teaching English in the Farmington schools. At Southeast she was an English major who appeared in "Tartuffe," "Threepenny Opera" and "The Music Man."

Acting has had a big effect on her, she says. "You tend to look at details more, your breathing, how you walk, how you enunciate words. It gives you more self-confidence. It carries through with your daily life."

Acting has made her a better teacher, she says. "I am much less inhibited in front of the kids."

At the front of a classroom, she uses some of the same techniques she used on the stage.

"When an actor sees the audience waning, you do something bigger to draw them back," she said.

She already sees a difference between the students who first sauntered into the theater two weeks ago and in the actors and actresses who will perform Friday.

"They seem to have come out of their shells," she says.