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the following is a little about the Instant Theatre organization taken from thier website
The Instant Theatre Company was founded in 1981 to be a year-round, on-going theatre workshop and performing company at the grass roots level. Company participants include professional actors, directors and technicians, university and college students, school students seeking a theatre education, regional and local actors, and technicians. The ITC performs Improvisational Theatre, new works and original plays, experimental and classical pieces, as well as presenting performers and productions from other areas. It also provides free acting classes to grades 1 through 12, and offers these school students an opportunity to perform on stage. The company enhances the community by providing an environment in which performers, writers, directors, and technicians may hone theatre craft.
Collin Wilcox Paxton....was raised in Highlands, North Carolina, where her parents and some of their friends founded the Highlands Community Theatre in 1939. This regional, grass roots theatre employed professional directors to work with professional, regional, and community actors. Collin’s first speaking role was in the HCT production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Her theatre education included studies at Goodman Memorial School of Drama in Chicago, Illinois, where Viola Spolin, originator of theatre games and author of Improvisation for the Theatre, was a teacher. She began her professional improvisational training at The Compass in Chicago, where Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, was a director. The Compass, an improvisational theatre, was the first of its kind in the nation and was the forerunner of Second City and Saturday Night Live. Veteran members of the company included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, and Shelley Berman. After arriving in New York in 1957 she auditioned for the famed Actor’s Studio in New York and was accepted. Collin spent the next eight years studying with Lee Strasberg.
Her first Broadway role was in The Day the Money Stopped with Richard Basehart and Mildred Natwick. For her role in that play she won the Clarence Derwent Award for Best Supporting Actress, on or off Broadway, for 1958. Other Broadway roles include Crazy October with Tallulah Bankhead, Strange Interlude with Geraldine Page, Under the Yum Yum Tree with Gig Young, La Bonne Soup with Ruth Gordon, The Family Way with Jack Kelly, and Look, We’ve Come Through with Burt Reynolds.
Collin is perhaps best know for her role as "Mayella Violet Ewell" in her first film, To Kill A Mockingbird, with Gregory Peck. Other film roles include Jaws 2, A Rainy Day, The Baby Maker, September 30, 1955, The Name of the Game is Kill, Catch 22, The Revolutionary, Jump, Marie, Journey of August King, Fluke, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and The Chester Story.
In the late seventies Collin returned to Highlands and, subsequently, married Scott R. Paxton. She and her husband founded the multi-arts center The Highlands Studio for the Arts which is still the "official corporate name" of The Instant Theatre.