At Simon's Rock, Bontempo explored illusions that separate the actor from the audience —a blank mask, a funny nose—and he learned the dramatic body language an actor needs to communicate through and around them. He appeared in Joan Ackerman's The Batting Cage and in a movement piece based on Peter Barnes' Sunsets and Glories, among others.

Bontempo said Nicki Wilson, producer and director, and founder of Castle Hill, had seen some of his work at Simon's Rock, and she offered him the part of Feathertop, a scarecrow with the blank face of a pumpkin. Wilson and Andy Jaffe adapted Feathertop from a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. A witch creates a scarecrow and brings it to life. She teaches the scarecrow to move and speak, and to resist its natural pull towards the open fields ? until it sees itself in a mirror and must decide whether or not to remain a man.

Bontempo said he took inspiration for the part from his Clowns and Comedy class with Karen Beaumont. The class created characters and short scenes, he said. Beaumont would be an authority; the clowns would try to please her and would comically, elaborately fail. The students wore clown noses, which called out and focused a manic, bumbling energy, but their work did not feel circus-like or slapstick, he said. Something sad and serious underlay the comedy.

Castle Hill is light-hearted and active in the community, Bontempo said, and Wilson has an intuitive understanding of what works well on stage. Children's theatre often tells a story in a series of shocks, he said, in short and pithy scenes. The actors have to be decisive and declarative enough that children understand the plot. The actors then have the challenge of deepening the story and bringing out its subtleties. He believes children are open to these depths and twists.

"Aimée Michel [Simon's Rock faculty in theatre] has talked about how free and open to space and impulse and improvisation kids are...," he said. "Give a few lines more harshly, change a scene, and they'll follow intuitively. I trust them to follow and not to need images from TV or a circus. They are more willing to trust a performer and take a journey with him."

Bontempo said playing Feathertop in solid orange makeup reminded him of Japanese No Theatre: his face, in its even color, became ageless and blank, like a mask. In his class with Beaumont, Bontempo learned the discipline of acting through a mask, as well as the comic art of clowning. The class begins with neutral, blank masks and then took on full character masks. They learned to wriggle and writhe with mean ones and float with gentle ones, Bontempo said.

"We put masks on and become children, newly newly born," he said, "because we've never done this before. You put on a mask and your personality in its most recognizable form is gone. Expressiveness of face is replaced by expressiveness of body. We have a lot of tendency to base acting on the face and hands. Take that away, and how does your body express anger — kick a chair, pound the ground?"

Many of his classmates were excellent dancers, he said, and moved beautifully. He and several friends improvised Bhuto, a form of Japanese dance that emerged after the Second World War, to live guitar music.

Bontempo performed Feathertop in the Triplex Cinema, in a setting made for screen, not stage. Working in a converted movie theatre has made him aware of the immediacy of acting: "When people see a movie, they're passive," he said. "In live theatre, they don't have that comfort. They can see our chests rise and fall when we breathe." He liked connecting to the history of the place, he said. He likes performing in spaces with tangible history, where he can see scuff marks on the stage and the dents where someone threw a chair.

Bontempo says he enjoys being an artist in the Berkshires, but outside of college it is a challenge to find venues for his work. With the independence and self-expression he has learned from Simon's Rock, he has been working to find venues or create his own. He values the Simon's Rock students who protested for workers' rights, who began the community garden, who quilt weird hammocks in their dorm rooms.

In the same spirit, he remembers Shirefest: young performers found a space, built a stage and created a venue for themselves. Bontempo is putting together a Vaudeville show with Simon's Rock alumni. He performs with his band in his own house, and young alumni gather there. He has also done work with Mixed Company and has had a show of silk screens at JWS Art Supply on Railroad Street. Feathertop is his second paying job as an actor.

"It's odd to be plying the trade for rent, after studying the theory," he said. "You have to worry about scheduling, punctuality, is your makeup good, did you mess up that line and will fewer people come next time. I'm pretty confident from my training at Simon's Rock that I can do what I'm supposed to do. The challenge is to advance my craft."