James Cronin wears gold plastic Elvis sunglasses and polyester pants. He sports a curly red afro. His western-style shirt is buttoned down to expose red chest hair and a long gold necklace. A tiny gold wedding band dangles from the chain.
“It was my mother’s,” he says about the ring – shortly – and only when asked.
It’s one of the few times the 21-year-old actor and philosophy major becomes quiet during a two-day interview.
Otherwise, Cronin is as talkative as his outfit is loud. “I can’t keep my mouth shut,” he says, unselfconsciously striding across campus in an outfit that is partly his own clothes and partly a costume for his upcoming role in an ETSU theater production of Wallace Shawn’s play, Aunt Dan and Lemon. “That’s the actor in me.”
It’s not surprising that acting comes naturally to Cronin. His mother, Beatrice Colen Cronin, who died when he was in high school, played roles on television’s Happy Days and Wonder Woman, while his father, Pat, ETSU acting instructor and former Basler Chair of Academic Excellence, performed in recurring roles on Seinfeld and Home Improvement, among others.
Cronin, who grew up in Los Angeles, started acting when he was three years old with a part in a Nestle’s chocolate chips commercial. It was the beginning of an 18-year off-and-on relationship with a craft that has been both rewarding and frustrating.
“Really good theater and really good film have the ability to make you realize things about life – about what it means to be a person,” he says over lunch with his brother, Charlie Cronin, 20, at the Firehouse restaurant in Johnson City. “But the state of television today is crap, and 85 percent of the movies that get made today are crap.” He pauses, squirting barbeque sauce into a smiley face onto his plate. “If I can’t stand watching television or movies, then why on earth would I want to be in them?”
“So you don’t starve?” Charlie says. But Cronin doesn’t smile at his brother’s practicality. Instead, he says, “If I have to do that kind of stuff to make it as an actor, then I think I’d rather do something else with my life.”
Balancing career and principles is an issue for Cronin who, like many of his fellow students, faces his impending graduation with both excitement and trepidation. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m really confused,” he says. “I would love to be a celebrity, but I just think you have to sell parts of your soul to get there.”
For now, Cronin isn’t quite sure which direction life will take him. As a university honors scholar double-majoring in philosophy and speech, his options are varied. He’s considering graduate school, but he’s unsure if he’ll opt for theater or philosophy.
Perhaps the real issue is that Cronin doesn’t want to narrow his choices just yet. His interests are so varied that he’s been active in just about everything from honor societies to ETSU Democrats to co-founding a theater and arts organization called Patchwork Players. With all of this, he even found time to study at Napier University in Edinburgh and then travel across Europe.
But acting is where Cronin’s truth lies. His small but pivotal role as Raimondo Lopez in Aunt Dan and Lemon characterizes a somewhat shifty womanizer who seduces a seductress in a steamy scene. “It’s the best part in the play for an actor,” says Cronin during rehearsals. “I get to be in a hot scene that steals the show, then I get to leave. It’s every actor’s dream.”
The scene is so hot, in fact, that the first rehearsal for it was closed to everyone but the director, the lighting designer and the two actors involved because quite a few clothes come off. The closed set, director Pam Hurley explained, was a result of the actors being “very vulnerable right now.”
Cronin is drawn to the theater because of moments like these – the intimate and the vulnerable – with each offering him the chance to figure himself out. In real life, he said, “I have cuddling issues. And because my mom died, I think sometimes I have mixed emotions about women.”
Cronin’s friends, however, dismiss any cavalier attitude he might take, “He puts up a good front. He’s highly intelligent and sometimes he can be brutally honest,” says friend and fellow actor, Elyse Milligan, a junior in theater, “but he’s really a softie inside.”
Productions of Aunt Dan and Lemon will be in ETSU’s Bud Frank Theatre Feb. 26-28 at 7:30 p.m. and Feb. 29 at 2 p.m. Call 439-6041 for information.

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