The student who leads his tech crew in 2010 and 2011, Robby Edmondson, walks right out of Truman after graduation and into a job operating the light board at the Prudential Center in Newark for professional hockey and basketball games. The pay is $20 an hour, good money for a Levittown kid right out of high school, and it helps pay his tuition at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Volpe also pays Edmondson to continue to help out at Truman productions in the year after his graduation, until a richer high school nearby lures him away with an offer of $12,000 for three months’ work. “Good for Robby,” Volpe says. “He really needs that money.”
He keeps no running list of the whereabouts or exploits of his former students, which sometimes frustrates me because I want to know about them. He mentions one Emmy winner, but forgets about the other one. (Both of them, Bob Schooley and Jim Schumann, are producers at Nickelodeon.) It isn’t a matter of favoritism, but just that he lives in the present and is focused on his current students. “Oh, have I never told you about her?” he says after I tell him I have received an e-mail from Elizabeth Cuthrell, his former student and a highly regarded screenwriter and independent film producer in New York. (Her movie Jesus’ Son, which she adapted from a collection of stories by Denis Johnson, made the 1999 top-ten lists of Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.) “Stunning,” he says when I ask about her. “Brilliant. Homecoming queen.”
In talking to many of Volpe’s former students and his current ones, I am struck by how many believe that he knows them better than they know themselves, that he knows, at the very least, where a particular light switch is located and reaches inside and turns it on—just as he did with me when he asked if anyone had ever noticed that I could write. “He saw something in me that I would have never recognized in myself,” Sheri Cunningham, a Volpe student in the mid-1990s, says. It is a version of what I would hear dozens of times from other Volpe students through the generations. In fact, it is rare to talk to a former Volpe student who does not volunteer a story just like that.
Elizabeth Cuthrell recalls being fourteen years old, a high school sophomore, and in the grip of turmoil and unhappiness in her home life when she first encountered Volpe. “Lou steered my life away from something dark and devouring, and toward something unimaginably happy,” she says. “He took me on. From tenth to twelfth grades, he recited to me a mantra about how I could do anything. The recitation wasn’t literal, but it was in the subtext of every interaction we had. He praised my writing, my acting, my dancing. He laughed at my jokes.”
I sometimes look at a Facebook page devoted to Truman Drama, where Volpe’s former students communicate with one another and reminisce about what the program meant to them. A student from the late 1990s, Raul Castillo, whose younger sister, Mariela, I have come to know as one of Volpe’s most accomplished performers, wrote about participating in Confronting Guernica: “This play forever changed my life. It gave me the fearlessness that I proudly wear on my sleeve to this day, showed me how beautiful and ugly us human beings really are, and I got to wear a dance belt. Uncomfortable!”
When I visited with Ansel Brasseur, a former lead in Truman’s plays, he was partway through an MFA program at New York University, a “theater boot camp,” as he put it, consisting of fourteen-hour days. On full scholarship, he was one of eighteen students, whittled down from hundreds who auditioned. As an undergraduate at Cornell, he started off as a public policy major. “I wanted to just make theater a hobby, but I couldn’t,” he explained. “I think Volpe knew I would come back to it. It’s this weird feeling I had.”
Brasseur did not seek out Volpe’s advice, “but I felt his presence. He’s that person you encounter in your life who shows you a bravado you didn’t know yourself that you had. It’s a gift that he gives you.”
LOU VOLPE AND HIS SISTER, ROSEMARY, WITH THEIR MOTHER, LILY.
WE WERE AN AMERICAN FAMILY
When Volpe tells me about his younger years, I imagine them taking place in black-and-white, like in an old movie. He was born in 1948. For most of his childhood, his family lived in the far northern reaches of Philadelphia, in what is called with some inspired grandiosity the Great Northeast, a kind of suburb within the city, similar to neighborhoods in Queens where people settled after they had achieved a measure of success. But many of them did bring their old ways with them.
The adults in Volpe’s household—his mother, father, and maternal grandmother—spoke Italian to one another, but not to him or his younger sister, Rosemary. His grandmother could speak virtually no English and rarely left the house. She stayed by his mother’s side as the two of them cooked, cleaned, and sewed. Volpe loved being able to understand Italian, but could not speak it fluently. His mother and father spoke to their children only in English as a point of pride and a matter of definitively severing the bond to the Old World. “We were an American family,” he says, “and my father was the most American person I ever knew. He went into the Marines in World War II. He only made it as far as Puerto Rico. I think it was like a vacation. But oh my God, he was a Marine for the rest of his life. He had a flag flying 365 days a year, a huge flag on a pole in front of the house. The Yankees and barbecuing and his lawn and his garden were his life. He had the best lawn in the world.”
It would have been highly unusual to be a New York Yankees fan in Philadelphia, which had two major league baseball teams of its own, one in each league, through the mid-1950s. But Thomas Volpe may have believed that rooting for the Yankees made him even more American.
I am with Volpe at his town house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a pleasant community about fifteen miles north of Truman High. The walls of his living room, nearly every inch of them, are taken up by theater posters of shows he has seen in New York, with one wall devoted entirely to Sondheim and a prominent place given over to his favorite, Sunday in the Park with George. Outside, his own American flag hangs from a pole above the front door. “I would always have a flag, wherever I live, because of my father,” he explains.
It is about a month after I delivered the graduation speech. Volpe, it becomes slowly clear to me, still has much to teach me—but we are starting out on an entirely new relationship. The one we already have is, in some ways, stuck back in the mid-1970s: I still look up to him, and he is proud of my successes. But now we are two middle-aged men. I have a job to do and will not get very far forward as one half of a mutual admiration society. My interest is in learning how he became the person who built this vaunted drama program, who has endured four decades at a challenging school, who makes art that dazzles, stuns, outrages, terrifies, and delights people in a town that, without his presence, would be perfectly content with fare that runs the gamut from Bye Bye Birdie to High School Musical. We talk first about his family, or three families, really—the one he grew up in, the family he built with the woman he married, and his most enduring family, the one at Truman High.
Over time, one of the things that I come to see is how deeply Volpe knows his students. How couldn’t he? They take chances onstage that reveal their inner selves. But it is also true that the very things they learn from being involved in theater—empathy, the ability to imagine lives other than their own; the actor’s gift for giving a character a backstory, a biography beyond what the playwright put on the page—allow them to know him.
You have to “find your character,” he tells them, meaning they have to imagine lives they cannot fully know. Not the prosaic biographical details, but beyond that. What is it like to be that person? What resides deep within, and what is missing? Volpe gives his students only hints of his personal life—tells them about the show he just saw in New York, the purchase he made at the mall—so they have to imagine the rest, intuit it, figure out what it’s like to be Louis T. Volpe, high school theater teacher.
I travel with Volpe and a group of students one night to see another high school perform a musical called The Drowsy Chaperone, a very good show wit
h a really dumb title. The central character, known only as the Man in the Chair, is a finicky, brilliant middle-aged man, a lover of the theater and of language. He directs an absurd play within a play, orchestrating actors onstage to whom he is invisible. The Man in the Chair is not easy to know. He keeps things hidden. He is charming and cultured and clever—but opaque. You sense that offstage, out of public view, he is lonely.
Volpe and his students love the show, and one of them says afterward, “Mr. Volpe, you’re the Man in the Chair!” He does not disagree. The character was played by a gifted high school actor, someone talented beyond his years, the only student actor I would see anywhere who rivaled Truman’s best. After the show, he comes walking by, and Volpe’s students insist on getting pictures of him with their teacher. Volpe eagerly agrees and poses, beaming, as his students click away with their cell phones.
• • •
At his town house, Volpe shows me pictures of his parents. His mother, Lily, had the olive-toned complexion of her forebears, who came from southern Italy, all the way down in Sicily. Her father had immigrated to America first with his oldest son, leaving his wife and other children behind until he found work. Lily was the youngest of her parents’ nine children and the only one born in America.
Volpe’s father, Thomas, came from northern Italian stock and was lighter-skinned, almost Irish-looking. That side of the family was more sophisticated. It had more money, a little more education. It was never spoken of, but there was no love lost between the families. They must have been together, on some occasion or another, but Volpe has no memory of it. On both sides, everyone had their own little business. “Hoagie shops, pizza parlors, things like that,” he says. “It was a cliché. We were living in a cliché.”
Thomas Volpe owned his own small business, a tavern called the Rex Café. “That was his little thing. It was like a corner bar, but with a back room with food and tables and a kitchen. Every once in a while, if he had to do something, or if he was getting a shipment in, he would take us down there. We would sit in the dark and look around. My sister was always so much more adventurous. One day, he was getting us sodas with cherries in them, and we went around in the back of the bar and we found a gun. And we picked it up. He saw us with that gun, and I can remember the fear in his face. He was a very gentle, calm, kind man. I very rarely saw his temper, but when I did, it was terrifying.”
The kids did not see much of their father, and Lily Volpe did not see much of her husband. The Rex Café was all the way on the opposite side of the city, and he worked day and night. In the mornings, he ordered the food and liquor and stocked it. Later in the day and into the night, he served his customers. He found time to drink with his buddies at the bar. At closing time, he cleaned the place up before coming in the next day to do it all again.
Volpe’s mother was “the centerpiece of the family. The hard-edged one and the ruler.” She was, as well, “tenacious, bold, and risky.”
She never believed that being safe was worthwhile. If either of her children had a question about what to do, and one option involved a risk and the other did not, her answer was always the same: “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” She was never the kind of person to say, “You’re comfortable, you have a great life, don’t change anything.”
So while Volpe’s father worked behind the bar at the Rex Café, his mother opened the world to her two children. She took them to the public library, bypassing the little branch nearby to go instead to a big stone structure in one of the city’s historic neighborhoods, a cathedral of books, where her son devoured the Greek myths and spent hours trying to discern the meanings of the various gods and goddesses. On weekends, she took them to the movies to see big Hollywood extravaganzas like Cleopatra and to the theater for classics like Guys and Dolls and South Pacific (which his father, the superpatriot, attended). They went almost every Saturday into the center of the city to Philadelphia’s finest department stores—Strawbridge’s, Gimbels, and Wanamaker’s, where afternoon tea was served in its Crystal Tea Room.
Lily Volpe loved fashion and was an inspired seamstress. At first she made things just for her family—dresses for Lou’s sister, Rosemary, wedding gowns for cousins and nieces. Word got out and it became a business, quite a successful one. She would do anything from putting up a hem to making a ball gown.
Thomas Volpe built a workshop in the basement for his wife’s business, with big mirrors for fittings. The basement itself was “gargantuan,” Volpe says, with enough room for a couch and a settee to make up a little waiting room, almost like one of the department stores. “It was beautiful. She became as successful financially, or more successful, than he was. They never shared anything about their finances, of course, but I judged it by the cars. One day, he showed up in a Cadillac, and I figured out they were doing pretty well.”
Volpe and his younger sister, Rosemary, were exceedingly close as children, and still are. She lives in the Philadelphia area, about thirty minutes from him, and works as the office manager of a software firm. “Oh, you want to talk to me about His Majesty, my mother’s favorite?” she says to me when I first make contact with her. She is kidding, of course, though that kind of comment within families is never entirely a joke.
She tells me that her brother’s artistic eye, his tastes, his whole way of relating to the world, come through their mother. He would spend hours by her side doing art projects. Once, when she was invited to some sort of masquerade party that required a mask, “Lou and her started with a paper bag and just added elements to it—this went on for hours—and when they were done, it was like something from New Orleans. It was just beautiful.”
Plenty of Philadelphians back then still called their neighborhoods by the name of the local Catholic parish. One of the biggest, and certainly the one with the most dramatic name, was Most Precious Blood of Our Lord, also known as MPB. The Volpes lived within the boundaries of Maternity Blessed Virgin Mary, or BVM. Lou went to Mass every Sunday, served as an altar boy, and attended BVM’s grammar school before moving on to Father Judge High School, which had three thousand students. All boys.
From the first day of ninth grade, he thought to himself, Jesus, this is not going to be a very good four years. “I was different than the other boys,” he says, “and I knew it and they knew it.”
Father Judge was a “humorless cement box” with numerous stairwells and endless hallways that at class changes became a swirling sea of boys in matching blue jackets and red ties. The school’s instructors were priests from the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, an order dedicated to a seventeenth-century French cleric known for his sunniness and kindness who is sometimes called the “gentleman saint.”
Volpe’s science teacher that first year used to break Life Savers in half with his teeth and put one part in his mouth and return the other to the foil wrapper to eat later. He asked Volpe, incongruously, if he “came from a dockworker family,” which he figured was intended as an insult. Always adept at turning pain into humor, he wondered later, “Did this teacher have a problem with On the Waterfront?” Another instructor was a terrifying man who sat in a chair atop his desk during exams to see if anyone was cheating.
Volpe considered many of his classmates to be mean-spirited and some to be outright dangerous. It was a Lord of the Flies atmosphere—they taunted and sometimes physically assaulted weaker classmates. “The priests—not all, but many of them—would see boys attacked and they would look the other way. And they would laugh. That part of it is absolutely burned into my brain. Some of the priests were very open about the fact that they wanted to be friends with the bullies, the leaders.
“And then you’d go to Mass, and they were parading around in their vestments, giving sermons about humanity. And you’d say, Wow, that was well rehearsed. They should have been in the theater. I thought about this many times after I became a teacher, and I told myself I’d never be that person who encourages or allo
ws that kind of cruelty, for any reason.”
Father Judge’s football team was perennially one of the best in the city. Volpe did not miss a game, home or away, for all four years. He always did the driving, transporting friends and his sister in an ancient Pontiac with scratchy woolen seats that his father bought him when he turned sixteen—“a big, heavy, vulgar automobile that I absolutely loved.” In his senior year, the football team won the city championship, beating Frankford High, the Public League representative. Volpe was among the masses who rushed onto the field and helped pull down the wooden goalposts, and for many years he kept a little chunk of one of them as a souvenir.
Several of the best players on that team were his grammar school classmates and fellow altar boys, and they served as his protectors. “To this day, I don’t really know why, but they continued to feel close to me. I was accepted by them, and they would not allow me to be victimized. They saved me, whereas other boys weren’t saved.”
Volpe dated in high school, went to dances, had girlfriends. He first met Marcy Hargrove at his junior prom, where they both had other dates, then didn’t see her again until a couple of years later, when he was a student at La Salle College, another Catholic institution, and she came to a mixer on campus. She was smart, funny, and sharp-tongued. If she had been born a generation later, or even a half generation, she surely would have gone on to college, but she worked as a secretary.
Marcy’s life had not been easy. She was adopted at birth—had never known her birth parents—and remembers the pain of being told by her adoptive parents that she was “illegitimate.” Her adoptive father was schizophrenic and for a time lived at Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry, a sprawling mental institution that was later closed by court order because it inhumanely “warehoused” its patients. Family pictures show Marcy at Sunday picnics on the grounds of the state hospital, always in a colorful summer dress and holding a cloth parasol.
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