Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Volpe has a student in his drama program by the name of Rachel Greenberg. “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” I say to her one day, “but are you Jewish?”

  “No,” she replies, “I’m Irish Catholic. I think my great-grandfather was Jewish.”

  Years ago, the schools on the other side of Levittown, the upper end, had substantial numbers of Jewish students, but I was one of no more than ten Jewish students in my graduating class. As far as I can tell, there are no longer any Jews (other than teachers) at the school. The Reform synagogue in my part of town, which my family attended, struggled along for years as its congregation dwindled, before it finally shut its doors in 2011. The Conservative synagogue moved out of Levittown north of Route 1. Truman’s longtime debate and forensics coach, Carl Grecco—he is retired as a teacher now, but began at the school even before Volpe—told me that many of his former standouts have gone on to be lawyers and doctors, among them a specialist at the Cleveland Clinic whom he has consulted on his own medical care. “At least half of them were Jewish kids,” he said, “but we don’t get any of them anymore. It’s been years.”

  Minus the Jews, however, and with a few other minorities now added into the mix, the demographics of Truman remain what they always were—predominantly white working class, with an African-American population that hovers around 10 percent. In the 2010 U.S. Census, white residents accounted for 88 percent of Levittown’s population.

  Certain characteristics of the community have remained constant. For example, it is not a place where people generally wait to have children until they are in their late twenties or early thirties—until their careers have lifted off. Sometimes they don’t even wait till they’re out of high school. Tracey Krause, when one of her own children was in kindergarten, had a senior girl in one of her classes with a child in kindergarten. “We could compare notes!” she says.

  When I was a student at the school, my coeditor of the high school newspaper got his girlfriend pregnant. They married and had a daughter before senior year. Volpe always had a knack for imparting life lessons without being gross or embarrassing about it. For whatever reason, I’ve always remembered what he said when word got back to him that this fellow was claiming that he and his girlfriend had sex just that one time. “Once people start doing that,” he told us, “they don’t usually stop.”

  One day in the spring of 2011, a young woman pokes her head into Volpe’s classroom and says, “Volp, I’m having a boy!” At first I hope maybe this is a young-looking teacher, but I pretty much know that’s not the case.

  “Isn’t that what I told you?” he answers back.

  “Yeah, that’s what you said, that it’d be a boy.”

  After she leaves, he says, “She’s sassy. Sometimes she gives me a hard time, but she’s very smart. One day she left a paper on her desk with some doodling, and it said, Volpe is awesome. I put it up on the door—she has to walk past it every time she comes in here. But she won’t get through the year. She’s having that baby pretty soon.”

  The classroom session that follows involves students prepping for a “night of theater” at Truman, not one of his ballyhooed productions, but just a one-act and a series of monologues that might, at most, attract an audience of a couple of dozen. But Volpe’s coaching is no less intense and exacting. He suggests to a junior named Colin Lester that he build his monologue, which is from Red, a play about the painter Mark Rothko, a bit more slowly. “But I don’t want you to say yes if you don’t agree,” he adds. “You’re the one who has to present it.”

  Another boy performs a cut from a Paul Rudnick play that is dead-on hilarious, but marred just a bit by one mispronounced cultural reference. “I don’t think you pronounce the bat in bat mitzvah like you say baseball bat,” Volpe interjects. “It’s baht mitzvah.”

  Volpe occasionally includes me, and this is an obvious opportunity. “That’s right, isn’t it?” he says, turning in my direction. “Baht mitzvah?”

  Next, a junior who has won leads in previous plays reads a part from Rabbit Hole. Volpe feels that she, too, has built too quickly to anger. He wants her to slow it down, give it more layers of emotion.

  “But you liked it the last time,” she shoots back.

  This seems to violate some code, an unwritten pact between Volpe and his students. His mode of directing is to use a word, a nudge, a silence, a wise-ass comment, a digression from his own life or from something that happened that day at school—anything but an overt command—to coax the performance that he wants. He might tell an actor, “You need to move more in this scene. I’m not going to tell you when, but you’ll feel it.” Or: “Your shoe is untied and it was bothering me, so why don’t you fix that and try it again.” It is well understood by all that the issue is not really the shoelace; the performance was just all wrong, and the actor needs to reset and try it again.

  For all the banter that flies back and forth between Volpe and his students, it is a collaboration that seems based on respect. Students rarely push back, because there is nothing really to push back against. His direction, almost always, is open-ended. They need to think more deeply. Slow down and allow moments of silence. Use the stage more intuitively.

  To recoil against such direction is to imply that a monologue or a scene is finished. Perfect and complete. And if there is one thing Volpe teaches, it’s that the art of theater is always evolving—rehearsal to rehearsal, one performance to the next. It’s live theater. If it reaches a fixed point, it’s dead. When his student says, “But you liked it the last time,” the classroom lets out a collective “oooh,” and someone makes a catlike screech.

  “Oh, you’re fine, you’re great,” Volpe responds. He has been holding a printed copy of her monologue in order to follow along. He gets up from his seat and hands it back to her. Theatrically. With his arm fully extended and his palm up, as if the script were on a serving tray. “I wouldn’t change a thing. That was perfect. Just really wonderful.”

  As she sits down and sulks, Volpe moves on to Edward Albee’s The Goat. The play is about a man who has taken up with a goat, but is really about the nature of love. The material is right in his sweet spot: a drama about human interaction, conflict, and betrayal. “I’ve cut some parts of it out,” he tells the class. “Otherwise I would be fired and you would be expelled. It seems sick, yes, I know it does. It’s about a man who has sex with a goat, but it’s really an allegory about love, about how it can be ruined, that there are certain things that can kill love even if you don’t want it to. It’s a heartbreaking play. It’s not a dirty play at all. Is it shocking? Yes. Is it pornographic? No.

  “Albee is what we call an absurdist playwright,” he continues. “He’s probably America’s greatest living playwright.”

  A student interrupts him. “He wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, right?”

  “Yes,” he says, “and that is a remarkable piece of theater. But I have to tell you, The Goat is not as famous a play as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but when I went to New York and saw this for the first time, I was knocked out by it. When I left the theater, I was just emotionally devastated in the way you are after you see something like that. I had to walk around the corner and have a cocktail.”

  Everyone laughs at that. Volpe is riffing, ruminating, enthusing. The first couple of times I saw him start down a path like this, I would look out into a classroom, or at a cast sitting on the edge of a stage listening to him, and I would expect to see eyes glazing over. I could not imagine that teenagers anywhere—and certainly not here, where so many of them were not that academic and read the Twilight series if they read at all—really wanted to listen to a man in his sixties rhapsodize about the plays of Edward Albee and the nature of love.

  Amazingly, they do.

  I asked Volpe once how he knew when he was connecting with students. His answer seemed like a credo any educator could use. “When the bell rings, I want th
em to feel like they wish the class wasn’t over and they don’t want to leave. If I see that, then I know we’ve had a great class.”

  • • •

  Two weeks before the beginning of the 2010 school year, the principal at Truman gets moved to the lesser position of principal at one of the district’s nine elementary schools—and the principal at the elementary school is put in charge of the high school. Such an abrupt job swap, on the eve of a new academic year, is not recommended in any manuals on how to run a school system, but Bristol Township has never followed what others might consider best practices. Sudden shake-ups, politics, and palace intrigue have long been routine. When I was growing up, my father took me to the barbershop around the corner one Saturday morning, but my regular barber—also the school board president—was not behind his chair. “Why wasn’t Lou there?” I asked my dad later. He explained that Lou had to go to jail for a while—something having to do with school business and bribe-taking.

  A week after the principals switch places, Truman’s football coach quits. It is four days before the season’s opening game. The murky quotes he gives to the Bucks County Courier Times, the local newspaper, do not really explain why, but it sounds a lot like he is trashing his players on his way out the door. The team has not accepted the “educational message” he was trying to promote, the coach says. He had enough players to field a team—though barely, with just sixteen at one practice—but apparently not the right kind of players. “It’s about character, commitment, and having a strong work ethic,” he says. “It’s about the quality of individuals you send out on the field.”

  The new Truman principal is Jim Moore. A math teacher and baseball coach at the high school before becoming a principal at the elementary level, he is a big, gregarious man who talks very quickly, moves in an ungainly fashion, and gives the overall impression of having the metabolism of a hyperactive teenage boy. His vernacular makes him sound like he has just awakened from the 1950s. I was talking to him one day about the cost of attending the Pennsylvania state colleges favored by many Truman students, which run about $12,000 a year. “That’s big dough for our kids,” he said.

  Moore and Volpe spent years together on the Truman faculty. Volpe likes him and is confident that Moore, whose son had been in theater at the local Catholic high school, values the drama program. He is somewhat taken aback, though, by a conversation with Moore early into his tenure. The new principal tells him, “We’ve got to change some things around here. I’m tired of people saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Truman—that’s the drama school.’ I want us to be known for other things besides drama.” Volpe replays the conversation a couple of times in his head. He wonders, Am I getting insulted here? Is he sending me a coded message? He finally just chalks it up to Moore’s awkward manner and figures that what the principal meant was that he wanted other aspects of the school—its academics, its sports teams, even the long-suffering football squad—to rise to the level of Truman Drama.

  One day, in talking to Moore about the drama program, I ask if Volpe’s choices of material ever concern him. His answer seems supportive, if still a bit grudging. “After forty years, with his record of success, he can do what he wants,” Moore says. “He’s Lou Volpe.”

  Volpe has had to endure his school district’s year-to-year tumult just like the rest of his faculty colleagues. It’s tiresome. Counterproductive. Sometimes dispiriting. But he may also, to some extent, be a beneficiary of this ongoing instability. He represents constancy and success, which otherwise are in short supply. Under the radar, and without a formal charter, he had transformed Truman into something like a high school for the performing arts.

  He teaches a full day of theater classes, as does Tracey Krause. A third teacher, also a former Volpe student, teaches drama to ninth-graders. The school offers three levels—Theater 1, 2, and 3—along with a class in musical theater. None of the classes are Advanced Placement offerings. (There is no such thing as AP theater.) In a more affluent community, with students gunning for admissions to selective colleges, parents might not be so happy for their children to take one of these classes, let alone four of them. They would want to know: What credentials are they gaining? Where will it lead them? Where’s the proof that it will increase their reading levels and their SAT scores? But at Truman, somewhere close to half the students take at least one theater class before graduating, and those most keenly interested in theater take the whole progression.

  In Volpe’s classroom, thousands of books are piled into bookshelves and stacked so high on surfaces that if you remove a volume, you have to be careful the whole tower of them does not come tumbling down. The books are a reflection of one man’s catholic tastes—works by Shakespeare and Sondheim; David Mamet and David Hare; Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, Thornton Wilder, Yasmina Reza, Wallace Shawn, Horton Foote, Paul Rudnick, Athol Fugard, and on and on and on.

  They are not for decoration; they are used. If a student is looking for a monologue to perform in a festival or for a scholarship audition, Volpe reaches into the pile, pulls something from the stack, and says, “Look in here. You might find what you want.”

  In the time I followed Truman Drama, I saw one of his students, Wayne Miletto, win scholarship money for his performance of a monologue from August Wilson’s Fences. Another, Marilyn Hall, earned some college money at an audition in which she sang “Lot’s Wife,” a challenging, highly emotive song from Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change.

  Volpe’s methods are far from scientific. They are not easily tested, nor have they been really monitored. A couple of generations of principals, school superintendents, and school boards have pretty much just left him alone. He is that one teacher that anyone needs to get anywhere in life. He became that by having been given room to express and expand his genius. Any system that constricts teachers—holds them to small-bore metrics, punishes them for forces outside their control, discourages their creativity and spontaneity, chips away at their humanity—is a bad system.

  I don’t think Volpe is exactly replicable. But a teacher like him is definitely preventable.

  VOLPE IN HIS CLASSROOM DURING HIS EARLY YEARS OF TEACHING.

  YOU’RE CHERYL MOODY

  The theater classes are the foundation of Truman Drama, an essential element of its success. Plays and musicals that Volpe puts into production are often already familiar to his students because they have studied them in class. In the professional theater world, you would say they have been workshopped.

  “You’re Cheryl Moody,” Volpe says one day in a Theater 3 class. “I see you as Cheryl Moody.” He is looking straight at Courtney Meyer—which causes Meyer’s classmates to also look at her, but with alarm. She is Cheryl Moody? The girl in Good Boys and True who, on break from her job, sits alone at a table in a shopping mall food court, is approached by a boy she has never before met, and has sex with him that very night?

  “If you’re reading the play and don’t think too far into it, maybe you think Cheryl Moody is just a whore,” Courtney says one day after school. “That’s fair if you judge her by what she did that night. But as it goes on, you see that she’s smart. She made a mistake, but she’s not a pushover. Mr. Volpe knew that I could understand a girl like that. I was a little taken aback when he said that. I had to think about it, but I wasn’t offended.”

  Volpe actually continued on for several minutes about how he saw this character in Courtney. Someone looking in from the outside might have found it inappropriate. He was referencing her real life—indirectly, to an extent, though everyone knew the subtext.

  But his classroom is part of the extended community he has made. It’s intimate. He knows which kids are private and buttoned up and which ones, like Courtney, have lives that are an open book. “What he was getting at meant a lot to me,” Courtney says. “He was right. His point was that a person can go through pretty much anything and come out on the other side with their head held high, and I’ve don
e that. I’ve gone through a lot of crap, and everyone knows it.”

  Courtney is thin and doe-eyed and holds herself like a dancer. She lives in Croydon, a hamlet just east of Levittown along the Delaware River, which is frequently the butt of jokes among students in the local schools. Croydon’s tiny front lawns are colonized by rusted-out cars sitting up on cinder blocks. Its boys have long been known as rough customers, quick to throw a punch. I sometimes thought Croydon was put on this earth to make Levittowners feel better about themselves. “I live right near Croydon Pizza,” Courtney says. “You know it, right?” She laughs. “It’s our icon—Croydon Pizza, known around the world.”

  When I started off on this book, the youngest of my three children had just gone off to college. One of them would soon be living in Texas; another, for a time, in Washington state. We were about to celebrate the birth of our first grandchild. Our kids had been boisterous, not just when they were little, but right through their teens. My wife and I did not really mourn being empty nesters, but the house now had several empty bedrooms. It felt quiet, and sometimes too empty.

  The Truman Drama kids are about the same age as the children I just sent off into the world. I like being let into their lives. They often make me laugh, but I never think they’re comical. I find them inspiring for lots of reasons: the intensity of work, intellect, and emotion they bring to the stage; the obstacles they overcome; the love they show one another. And I feel an obligation to them, to repay the trust they put in me by making sure I get their stories down right, with honesty and compassion. I am always aware of being older and wiser—of being a parent with parental fears—and being unsure of how life will treat them.

  One Monday, I show up at a rehearsal after a holiday break and ask one of the younger kids in Volpe’s program how her weekend was. Awful, she says. Her father walked out of the house and moved in with his girlfriend. “He was cheating on my mom with my mom’s best friend. She’s my godmother, but I never liked her. Now my dad’s living with her and her five kids. He’s going to pay child support or something, and we’re just hoping we can stay in our house.”