“If you learn nothing else from me from these two weeks, do not ever pantomime holding a phone like this!”

Crystal Arcand jokes with the teenagers and young adults in her acting camp, which is sponsored and held through the Lake Country Playhouse and the Historic Select Theater in Mineola.

The teens laugh and giggle, debating whether anyone has, in fact, actually held a phone in the classic “y” shaped hand gesture that is now widely recognized.

While this was a moment of silliness, welcome (and frequent) in an afternoon of rehearsals and character-building, the theater’s acting camp was not all jokes. In fact, Arcand worked quite hard to ensure that all 16 attendees of the camp got “the full experience” by the end.

“Even though the runtime on this particular play is only 30-35 minutes, we will still have an intermission!” she said. “Because we do a full-on (experience where) you come on early, you go backstage, people pay admission, we have a show, we have an intermission, we do a curtain call – so that they have as close as possible an experience as if they had been doing this for 6 or 8 weeks.”

This is the third year of the acting camp, which Arcand says has completely sold out in past years.

This summer, there were two “tiers” of camp – one for ages 8-12, and one for ages 13 to 17. Over the course of the acting camp, the theater’s website and Arcand said that the “students” played improv games, learned basic theater skills and theater history, worked on scenes and eventually memorized a script and stage directions to put on a final performance.

To Arcand, the annual acting camp is so much more than just another summer activity. To her, it’s about the preservation of small-town theaters and the raising up of a new generation who will keep the old traditions alive.

“The whole point of this is to keep live dramatic theater going in our community,” said Arcand. “We can keep live theater going in Mineola, because if we don’t have younger people coming in, our audition pool dries up, and we don’t have young people to play, and we don’t have live theater arts in Mineola.

“The idea of not having live dramatic arts in our community is abhorrent to me,” she continued. “So that’s my main point for this, is to share my love of theater and hopefully ignite that in some younger folks.”