Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Volpe was up onstage that night, among several teachers who took turns calling out the names of graduates. I tried to remember details of my own graduation night. Had he been the one to call out my name? Had I thanked him? Had I even said a proper good-bye?

  I know that he gave me a gift, a collection of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Inside the front cover, in a note dated June 3, 1974, he wrote, “As a prospective English major, I felt you couldn’t survive without the Sonnets.” He added, “Sure!” maybe just in case I was naive enough to believe the Sonnets were something I’d have to consult daily, like some kind of guide for living or dating. But I have kept the book, through many years and many moves, always on a prominent shelf, and have never once held it in my hands without thinking of Volpe and rereading his words.

  I am my lawyer father’s son, a journalist, rational. I don’t say that everything happens for some divinely inspired reason. But as I stood at the podium facing the Truman High Class of 2010—including several who were children of my own high school classmates—there was providence in the moment.

  I had considered writing about Volpe many times, but other projects always got in the way or I found some reason not to. But from the moment I received the out-of-the-blue invitation to return to Levittown and give this speech, I knew it had happened for a reason: to let me know that it was time to tell the story of Lou Volpe and the magical things he does at Truman High.

  BOBBY RYAN (LEFT) AND ZACH PHILIPPI IN GOOD BOYS AND TRUE.

  GOOD BOYS AND TRUE

  Not everyone, of course, starts with an equal chance of being cast in a Volpe play. If a part calls for a handsome boy or a beautiful girl, Volpe doesn’t put someone ugly in the role. (Does the basketball coach, out of a sense of political correctness, play a five-foot-five kid at center?) Volpe is a compassionate person, but he casts on merit, not out of empathy. At one audition, a boy with a great voice and big stage presence tries for a part. He seems like a good prospect. But he is known to have a rap sheet that includes convictions for assault, including one with a deadly weapon. After his reading, Volpe says to Krause that he hopes the kid gets his life turned around, but there is no way he is giving him a role. “It’s more than I want to handle,” he explains.

  After everyone has read at the callbacks for Good Boys, Volpe tells the ten who are left, “It breaks my heart that some of you are not going to be in this play. That’s not bullshit. You were all astonishing. But there are only six roles.”

  The next morning, he posts the casting choices on the wall outside his classroom. Mariela Castillo, Zach Philippi, and Bobby Ryan have won parts, along with Wayne Miletto, a would-be anchor of Truman’s defensive line except that he quit football for theater; Britney Harron, a rarity among Volpe’s actors in that she has taken years of private lessons, in voice and dance; and Courtney Meyer, a dazzling actress and sometimes lost soul whom Volpe and Krause worry over when she is not under their watch. All six of them are seniors and closely bonded as friends. Volpe is thrilled they auditioned well and held their places, as it were, because he considers them one of the finest classes of actors he has ever directed, a special group that comes along no more than once a decade. (Miletto and Harron won parts in Rent as ninth-graders, when they were the “new.”) He chose this play, in part, to show off their strengths, but he could not just hand them the roles. He needed them to step up, and they did.

  “We’re gonna have a great time,” Bobby Ryan, the clown in the group, says to the others on the first day they gather as a cast. “We’ve got some chocolate flavor,” he says, referring to Miletto, who is black. “We’ve got some Latin flavor,” he continues, looking at Castillo. “Hey, Mariela, are you gonna bring in some of those great rice and beans your mom cooks?”

  Mariela was part of a salsa duo with her older sister and likes to say proudly that she is “one hundred percent Puerto Rican.” She shoots Bobby a wicked look. “I made those fucking rice and beans. What do you think, I can’t cook?”

  Volpe does not demand decorum in any traditional way, just excellence. As he begins to speak to the cast, Britney Harron, a diva since he first encountered her as a freshman, is stretched out on one of the couches, her feet up, her eyes half open. But she is attentive in her own way, and Volpe doesn’t care. He lays out the rehearsal schedule—basically, every day after school—and then tells them, “This is not a Nebraska play. It’s too much on the edge of the knife for Middle America,” by which he means that no matter how high the quality of performance they achieve, the adjudicators who make the selections for the International Thespian Festival will find the material too disquieting to honor with a Main Stage selection. “So I don’t even want you to let that enter your minds,” he continues. “We’re going to create this play, this piece of art, and take it as far as we can take it, and we’re going to be happy about that.”

  But he is just trying to tamp down expectations, and everyone knows it. Volpe wants to take Good Boys to Nebraska. That was the goal from the moment he chose it. He likes to shake things up. Likes to push the limits. If he could get Good Boys to Nebraska, it would create a stir. The kids in the audience would love it; some of the teachers would hate it. It would be a sensation.

  Three of the cast members had been on the Main Stage two years before, as sophomores, performing a quirky play called The Rimers of Eldritch in a massive theater packed with an audience of 2,800. They wanted to go back, and the rest of the cast wanted to get there for the first time. (Rimers is a Lanford Wilson play, “a dark, brooding contemplation of a small ghostly town frozen in time and place, the mid-century in the Middle West,” as The New York Times described it—so, in other words, a pretty good introduction to the level of work Volpe demanded.)

  The schools chosen for Main Stages in Nebraska tended to be from well-heeled communities that poured money into their theater programs, like Grosse Pointe, Michigan, or the Woodlands, outside Houston. A high school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, an outer suburb of Chicago, was another frequent Main Stage qualifier. When the Truman kids got to Nebraska, many of the other students they encountered just assumed that they came from one of these lucky kinds of places.

  “Who’s your diction coach?” a student from another school asked Bobby Ryan after the performance of Rimers.

  “What’s a diction coach?” he said.

  If Good Boys and True was judged worthy, the trip to Nebraska would occur after graduation, during “beach week,” when Truman’s seniors traditionally cram into houses in the tacky Jersey Shore town of Wildwood. “But none of us would care about missing that,” Bobby says as they get started with rehearsing. “Everybody in this cast—me and Wayne; Zach, Brit, Mariela, Court—we’re all, like, best friends. We’ve been through everything together. Good stuff, bad stuff, relationships that got started and didn’t end too good, you name it and we’ve survived it. We’re like a family. If we did go to Wildwood, we’d all be in a house together, but if we get a Main Stage, it’d be like the same except we’d be having our beach week in Nebraska.”

  Going to Nebraska would also mean extending their time with Volpe by one week, a prospect the cast relishes. Each of them feels close to him. He is their teacher and friend—and for some, a father figure—but they had started out feeling intimidated by him, which shocked me at first. Afraid of Volpe? I never knew anyone who felt that way and couldn’t imagine it. But he has an aura around him now and he controls something of value: parts in his productions. “It’s our Broadway. That’s how we think of it,” Tyler Kelch, a tenth-grader, says. Kelch is not in the Good Boys cast, but is hoping to go to Nebraska as part of the stage crew. “It would be, like, the coolest thing ever.” (I would learn that was a signature phrase of Tyler’s—“coolest thing ever.”)

  Antonio Addeo, a Truman student from 2004 to 2007, was one of Volpe’s most gifted actors in recent years. As a freshman, he won a lead role in Truman Drama’s rendition of Parade. He has found some success in New
York—he has an agent, gets auditions, and has been cast in small productions, though not yet Broadway. He hooked on to a touring show of the musical Academy that went to Seoul and won South Korea’s version of a Tony for best play. “I’ve been auditioning in New York for two years now, and nothing was as stressful as my audition in ninth grade,” he says. “It loomed that large to me.”

  He remembers hearing about Truman’s drama director as far back as seventh grade, when he started performing in middle school shows. “People would say, ‘Do you think he’ll come to see our play?’ Somebody would say they saw him walk through the door and everybody would freak out about it. The way he was talked about, I thought, Who is this Volpe? I really want to meet him. To me, he was like a mythic figure.”

  Good Boys is Bobby Ryan’s fifth show at Truman. He auditioned for Rent as a freshman but didn’t get a part. He was too scared to do well in his audition, then “cried like a baby” when he wasn’t cast. The memory of once being kicked out of a Volpe rehearsal for being disruptive is still seared into him.

  “That’s it!” Volpe shouted at him one afternoon. “I’m tired of it. I don’t even want to see your face anymore. Get out of the auditorium!” He added, for emphasis, “I don’t know who this new Bobby Ryan is, but I don’t like him. If you find the old Bobby Ryan, tell him I miss him.”

  The rebuke went straight to Bobby’s gut. “The thing is, you can have fun and make jokes, but when it’s time to be on task, you have to be on task,” he says. “I realized I didn’t like who I was being. I was being a real dick, getting in the way of the work being done. I almost threw up when I walked out the door. When you disappoint Volpe, it’s like the worst thing in the world.”

  • • •

  The Lou Volpe I had known in my youth was self-effacing. I wasn’t even sure he would be comfortable with the idea of this book and the attention it would bring to him. But nearly four decades had passed, half a lifetime for both of us. The Volpe I have now come to know can be self-regarding, though it is a trait he tries his best to keep in check. He is accomplished, celebrated, still a good-looking guy. His cleverness, over time, has sharpened into a rapier wit. I have discovered, to my delight (and, yes, relief, since we have been spending a great deal of time together), that I still love to listen to him talk.

  At a rehearsal, as another opening night draws near, he tells his cast, “You have become so good that every mistake you make has a spotlight on it.” That seems to me such an economical yet elegant way of giving praise while making a demand.

  He can be amazingly unflappable in the face of the surprising and bizarre things that occur in schools, and sometimes deadpan in ways that make me laugh. A student on the way into class approaches him at his desk, glances up at some posters of Sesame Street characters, and asks, “Mr. Volpe, did you know Big Bird?” It doesn’t seem to be a joke, but it isn’t clear whether he is asking if Volpe knew the late Jim Henson—if he knew the person inside the Big Bird costume—or if this student perhaps thinks Big Bird is real.

  Volpe blinks twice, as if momentarily trying to decide. “No, I didn’t know Big Bird,” he finally answers. “But thank you for asking me that.” He tidies up a pile of papers on his desk, takes a seat, and starts class.

  In another class, he asks students to bring in an object of some personal meaning and say something about it. A girl comes in clutching an urn with her father’s ashes and gives her talk, a bittersweet story of loss and memories, then puts the urn in his classroom closet for safekeeping—where it stays for a week. And then another. “Rebecca, honey, you know I still have those ashes?” he finally reminds her one day. “Oh, okay, thanks, Mr. Volpe,” she says.

  There are a great many ways, and more all the time, to put numbers on what occurs inside a school. One is the so-called Challenge Index, a mathematical equation invented by respected education writer Jay Mathews that divides the number of Advanced Placement and other college-level tests given at a high school by the number of its graduating seniors. It’s very simple. The more tests given—and the more students enrolled in rigorous courses—the higher the ranking a school achieves. (This puts a lot of faith in the AP program, which is costly for students and revenue-generating for the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the tests.) At Truman High, close attention is paid to the PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment)—standardized tests mandated by the state. Truman’s scores rise and fall from year to year—along with the anxiety levels of the administrators and teachers who are held responsible—and usually land just a hair above or below the “acceptable” line.

  Volpe teaches according to no index or formula. He never expounds on education theory or education reform. His career and, in fact, his life, have followed no grand plan. When I return to Levittown in 2010, he is teaching theater, not English—a full day of theater classes, four levels of them. Some who take his classes are honors students; others won’t make it to college, either because they are not academic enough, they don’t have the money, or they will get pregnant and have babies. Volpe’s mission is the same as it has always been—to fill up his students with art, literature, and beauty and put material in front of them, rich in content and complexity, that no one else will. He has done this right through the age of No Child Left Behind and of unyielding educational metrics, which seems to me an act of utter subversion and unwavering conviction of purpose.

  Over the decades, without much acclaim beyond his community and the world of high school theater, Volpe has transformed lives, thousands of them. He is like that person you never heard of who wins one of those MacArthur genius awards for creating astonishing success in the most unlikely of settings. His drama program, in its infancy when I was his student, started on its upward trajectory just as Levittown began going to pieces—as cultural poverty morphed into economic despair, as the jobs died, unions withered, families came apart, and even the churches emptied out.

  His choices of plays have challenged his students, the school, and the still socially conservative community it serves. In the two years I spend with Volpe and his students, I sometimes wonder: Has he pushed it too far? Am I looking at the thing that is finally going to bring him down? His students walk right along with him, on a high wire, the “knife’s edge,” as Volpe likes to say. They come to believe in what he believes—not in art for art’s sake, but in art as a way of fully embracing, and understanding, life.

  They are not yet adults, but in that middle stage, late adolescence, coming of age. They have relationships that matter. Some of them have sex. They have seen enough—parents whose marriages blow apart, homes foreclosed on, family vehicles repossessed in the middle of the night, classmates who commit suicide—to know that life is not a Disney movie. Volpe expands their worldview and shows them that struggle and suffering are universal, but so are hope and resilience. “We deal with all the topics that out in the real world make people uncomfortable,” Courtney Meyer, a member of the Good Boys cast, tells me one day. “That’s one of the big reasons to do theater, right?”

  Volpe brings ideas back to Truman from everywhere. On a trip one summer to Spain, he visited the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and was captivated by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a painting commemorating the brutal bombing of a Basque town by German and Italian warplanes in 1937 in support of the Fascist leader Generalissimo Francisco Franco. He stood and looked at the painting for a long time, then sat on the floor in front of it for what seemed like hours. He had never been so moved by a work of visual art.

  What called out to him from Guernica was both the terrible tragedy of what had occurred and the enormous power of art to explain and ultimately defeat man’s most evil impulses. The fact of the painting itself, it seemed to him, was an answer—a defiance of the world’s darkest forces. The mural was disturbing, of course, just like some of the plays he presented at Truman, but he found it ultimately hopeful. That year’s major production at Truman was called Confronting Guern
ica. It was an original piece, written by Volpe and a Truman art teacher named Bill Double.

  At a theater festival I attended with Volpe and his students, another highly respected high school drama director, Mark Zortman of York High School in central Pennsylvania, observed, “The rest of us do high school theater. Lou does theater.”

  It’s not all darkness and tragedy. Volpe loves theatricality of any kind—all the magic and illusion that can be created onstage. He likes putting sound effects into comedies, the sillier the better, and he reacts to them like a delighted little boy. Every time he hears the crash or exaggerated sneeze or breaking glass at just the right moment is the first time he hears it—even if it’s really the sixth performance of a show, after two months of rehearsals, and therefore the two hundredth time. I got used to sitting next to him in the Truman theater and having him nudge me with his elbow in reaction to his own trickery and whisper, “I just love that!”

  Volpe’s goal is not to send his students into the world of arts and entertainment, but many have been inspired to go into those occupations—among them, dozens who have acted professionally; two Emmy Award winners; a movie producer; numerous drama, dance, and voice teachers; set designers and other technical theater professionals; a television newscaster; a vice president at Bravo; the front man for a heavy metal band favored by mixed martial arts fans; the founder of a community theater in California; and the general manager of Madame Tussauds wax museum in New York.