Wayne is not one of the Volpe actors who began thinking about performing at Truman in grade school. He was a football player. He began playing football at the pee-wee level, grade school, and he was good. As he enters his senior year at Truman, he weighs 230 pounds on just a five-foot-ten frame, and he doesn’t look fat—just solid. “I know,” he says. “I still look the part. Everybody says, ‘You play football, right?’”
He did play at Truman through his sophomore season. What happened after that was a little like the Michael Massari situation, except that Wayne called the shots, not the coach. Football had started to feel boring and routine. The “product,” as he calls it, was not as good as theater. He told Zach, with whom he had played football since they were little kids, “I’m done. I’m not having fun.” Zach understood, but some of the other guys didn’t. Big Wayne, of all people, giving up football to devote himself to theater? It made no sense. “They were like, ‘Nobody quits football for theater.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, they do—I’m doing that.’”
Wayne first told an assistant coach who was his football mentor. “It was sort of heartbreaking. This was a person who really helped me out, and he says to me, ‘Dude, I really need you. I’m low on guys, and the ones I have aren’t that good.’ And then he starts saying that I could really go somewhere with football, play in college and all that.”
Wayne then sought out the head coach and told him, “I know this isn’t the thing you want to hear, but there’s no time for football in my life anymore. My heart is in theater.” The coach either did not hear him correctly or pretended not to. “Okay,” he said after Wayne had just quit his team. “I’ll see you in the weight room this afternoon.”
Wayne had to ask Volpe to get involved. Even all those years after Michael Massari, Volpe did not relish confrontations with coaches, even one he knew he was going to win. As Wayne put it, “I hesitated, because I know he doesn’t like to butt heads with people.” But somebody had to help Wayne get his point across.
Volpe told the coach he knew Wayne well enough to understand what a valued team member he was. He knew the football team was short on players. “But please, you have to stop struggling with him,” he said. “He’s not going to change his mind.”
Freed of football, Wayne became a fully committed theater kid. On the first day we talked, he had just returned home from six weeks at a summer performing arts camp in upstate Pennsylvania. It was called the Performing Arts Institute at Wyoming Seminary. He auditioned to win his place, then found out it cost almost $6,000. “I sent a nice e-mail. I said, ‘I’m honored, but the money is not there for me, so I can’t accept the offer.’” The camp director responded that he would make a place for him if he could pay $900, which Wayne pieced together from his mother and his earnings at a restaurant job.
The camp consisted of twelve-hour days—classes, choir practice, rehearsals. He landed a lead in a show, the part of Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Every night there was some kind of performance, including classical concerts performed by instrumental students. “The whole experience was a big mind-blower,” he says. “Everything about it. All the talent up there, all the different stuff going on, all the stuff we were exposed to. I was never into classical music, but after listening to their concerts, I started to download it on my computer. I downloaded some jazz, too. Miles Davis, stuff like that.”
• • •
Among all of Volpe’s students, Wayne is the best at describing his teacher’s directing, maybe because he sometimes struggles with it. In tenth grade, he won a part in Blood Brothers, a musical about fraternal twins separated at birth. Wayne played the narrator, who at different points in the musical just sort of appears onstage and interjects commentary. Volpe did not give him any blocking; he told him to listen to the show and pop up wherever it seemed to make sense at that moment. “I tried to do that,” Wayne says. “I mapped out to myself how much time I had between scenes to get to a different spot. And I’d say, Okay, you’ve got thirty seconds, or two minutes, and that’s what I did. I would come out of sidewalls. I would go backstage and emerge somewhere else. I’d show up on one side of the stage, or down the steps.”
Volpe would like where he placed himself during one rehearsal, and then, at the next one, say it was all wrong—even though he had retraced his steps from the previous day and arrived in the very same spots. When Wayne expressed his frustration, Volpe said, “Feel the mood of the play and move with it. Just watch the show and think about where the narrator would overlook it, where he would be hiding. Why would it be the same place every time?”
He told Wayne to imagine he was in one of those Where’s Waldo? books. His job was to surprise the audience, and to do so, he had to be unpredictable to the rest of the cast, and even to himself. Volpe kept talking to Wayne right up to opening night. He was trying to get him to let himself feel some discomfort onstage, to give in to a sense of not knowing precisely what would come next. “It’s like when you played football,” he said at one point. “The same play might be called twice in a row, but a player’s movements have to vary in response to actions on the rest of the field.”
“I was so young. I was still in tenth grade, and he was giving me more freedom than I wanted,” Wayne says. “During the whole show, I was never stationary. Sometimes it was fun, but I got frustrated. I was like, ‘Everybody else is getting basic blocking, so why can’t I get blocking?’ I was begging him for more direction, but that’s not what he does. He turns that back on you every time.”
Over time, Wayne came to realize that his conversations with his teacher were only partly about theater. “Find your character,” Volpe tells his actors, by which he means they must fully understand and inhabit the roles of the people they are playing. Wayne tries to look into his characters from every possible angle: up close, from a distance, how others see him, whether he sees himself realistically or believes his own lies. He looks at the character’s background, what motivates him in the present, what future he imagines for himself.
“The big thing you learn is there’s not an endpoint,” Wayne says. “It’s a creative process, and it keeps evolving. Mr. Volpe might say, ‘You’re on the right track,’ or even, ‘You’ve found your character.’ But then right away he says, ‘Okay, now go somewhere else with it. Make your character better. Make him more believable.’”
When Wayne struggled with the role in Blood Brothers, Volpe said to him, “I know you can do this because last year you played one of the most difficult roles I’ve ever seen a ninth-grader do, and you were magnificent.”
That role was Tom Collins in Rent. “I was glad when he gave me the part, but then I was like, Whoa! How do I connect with this character? This character is an MIT professor who just lost his job, and I don’t think I ever heard of MIT before that—and he’s a great guy who falls in love with a drag queen. I did know what a drag queen was, but I had never encountered one.
“I read the script and I watched the movie of Rent, and I looked at stuff on the Internet where people were talking about the play. Mr. Volpe talked a lot about it with us, about the whole context of this being something where AIDS was out in the open for one of the first times. It was awkward at first, but then I just had to say to myself, All right, you’re going to be a homosexual in this play, and you’re going to be with a guy who dresses like a girl, and you have to be okay with that. People are counting on you to fulfill this part, so you’ve just gotta open your mind and figure out what that’s all about.”
• • •
What I liked is you were listening to each other, you weren’t just saying lines,” Volpe tells the Good Boys and True cast after rehearsal one afternoon. “This is not a half-ass-commitment play, it’s a full-commitment play, and I think you’re all understanding that. Each of these characters has to keep evolving.”
He has watched from his usual spot—center of the theater, about eight rows back, next to Tracey Krause. He
walks forward and takes a seat in the front row to talk to the cast, which is gathered at the edge of the stage. His writing journal, the “Book of Tears,” as everyone calls it, rests on his lap. When he gives notes to the cast in the order in which he has written them into the journal, they come out in a kind of stream of consciousness.
“Zach, do you like pears? Would you eat a pear?” he asks, just a beat after his opening riff.
“Yeah, I’d eat a pear.”
Volpe is thinking about a scene in Act 1 when Zach’s character, Brandon Hardy, comes home from school and finds his mother waiting to confront him. As the young master of the universe, still believing (or hoping) that he is in control, he leans back on the couch, puts his feet up on a coffee table, and grabs an apple from a fruit bowl. Except that Volpe has decided he prefers a pear; visually, he likes the shape better, and a pear seems like something the wealthy Hardy family would eat. Also, once the actors are miked, he doesn’t want Zach biting into an apple and having an audible crunch bounce off the auditorium walls.
“Okay, we’re going to put pears in that bowl,” he says.
Volpe is wearing a charcoal-gray sweater-vest (one of the couple of hundred sweaters he owns), a blue dress shirt, and a maroon patterned tie. He often wears a tie to school, almost never a jacket. (He has been known to give ties, sweaters, even expensive shoes away to students who have a family wedding or some other dress-up event to attend.) The half-glasses that he uses for reading are secured by a string around his neck. He has dozens of these strings, in every conceivable color, which his students know came from the Dollar Store. He is a sophisticate, a weekend denizen of New York’s theater district, a clotheshorse. But he likes his students to know he is not too proud to shop at the Dollar Store. All teachers, he likes to say, love the Dollar Store. They haunt the Dollar Store.
And Volpe’s tastes, in fact, are not uniformly highbrow. He is hooked on Top Chef, Project Runway, and The Real Housewives of New Jersey. He loves Joan Rivers and never misses her annual red-carpet narrations leading up to the Academy Awards telecasts. When we go to lunch or dinner together, a T.G.I. Friday’s is at the upper end of places he proposes. One day he suggests we go to Friendly’s, a chain I had not realized was even still in existence. “Oh, yes,” he says, “and it’s still as good as it ever was.”
After settling the issue of the pear with Zach, he turns to Britney Harron, who fully inhabits her role as Truman Drama’s designated diva. She is a trained singer and gifted dancer who radiates energy onstage. In musicals, it doesn’t matter how many performers are in a number—all eyes turn to Britney. Her extended family and friends fill up whole sections of the auditorium at shows and account for thousands of dollars in ticket sales. “We all love Britney,” Courtney Meyer says, “but she can be in her own little world. Britney World.”
Britney had wanted the role of Elizabeth Hardy, the mother. But Volpe cast Mariela as Elizabeth and gave Britney the role of Elizabeth’s younger sister, Maddy, who serves the story mainly as a sounding board, someone for Elizabeth to talk to about what’s going on with her son. The role has some intriguing elements—Maddy is kind of hippie-chick bohemian set against her sister’s two-doctor bourgeois household—but as written, it is the weakest in the play. “Britney, I want to stress to you the importance of finding something in this character,” Volpe says. “I know, it’s unfortunate. She’s not part of the plotline. It makes it difficult, but you still have to find her.”
If not the deepest thinker among Volpe’s actors, Britney is probably the most comfortable onstage, a performer who loves the lights. “I’m sure you’ll eventually get this,” Volpe continues. “You never give me what I want in rehearsals, just in performance. But you can’t wait. You have to start building this character.”
He does not tell her how. He never does. It is the essential aspect of his genius as an educator. The world is full of people who cannot wait to tell you what they know. What animates Volpe is creating moments for his kids to figure it out for themselves. His ego, though not small, allows for great patience. Very few high school directors could be more versed in theater, more knowing about what the finished product should look like. But he lets his kids find their own way there.
His notes are often about the context of the material. The character Britney plays serves as a mirror for everyone else. She had attended the same exclusive high school as her sister (the female equivalent of St. Joseph’s Prep), but hated it. “Why does she detest this world of theirs so much?” Volpe asks Britney. “As you think about that, you’ll find the essence of this character.”
Volpe moves on to a question for the whole cast. The scene in which Brandon first meets Cheryl Moody at the mall food court is written as a flashback near the end of the play. You see it already knowing about the scandal that ensued. Volpe has been musing about moving it forward, into Act 1, and wants to know what they think. Britney and Wayne immediately say they don’t like it. Bobby adds, “I think that scene loses all its power if you move it.”
It doesn’t seem to bother Volpe that nobody likes his idea. He had been considering it; now he’s not. “You’re absolutely right,” he says. “We’ll do it as it’s written.”
BRITNEY HARRON (LEFT) AND MARIELA CASTILLO IN GOOD BOYS AND TRUE.
HERE’S SOMETHING I DO WELL
His patience is not endless. In the middle of a rehearsal a few days later, Volpe hisses at Krause in a loud whisper: “Mariela has absolutely lost it. What’s wrong with her? She’s wooden. She sounds like she’s on daytime TV. She’s just lost it. This is a mess.”
Of the six students in the Good Boys cast, Mariela Castillo has by far the most difficult part, that of a forty-five-year-old upper-middle-class doctor and mother. Volpe gave it to her because “at her best, she is remarkable. There are few high school girls who I can even imagine in this role, but she is fully capable of pulling it off.”
Mariela is unlike her peers in several regards. She has plenty of friends at Truman, but her interests, relationships, and loyalties are mainly outside the school. She sings in a salsa duo with her sister, Thaimi, who is fourteen years older, and spends a great deal of time with family and friends across the Delaware River in New Jersey. She travels each summer to see her grandmother in Luquillo, Puerto Rico, a beach resort town east of San Juan. She is extremely close with her mother, a teacher in the Trenton public schools, and her father, a social worker and published poet.
Volpe considers Mariela to be “light-years” beyond the rest of the kids in her maturity. He doesn’t relate to her as a teenager; he has more success if he regards her as a young actress. “That, to me, is what she is. There’s something very adult about her.” But on this day, he is frustrated because, after a strong audition and weeks of good rehearsals, Mariela has stopped growing into the role. With just one week left before opening night, she is headed in the other direction: backward. Volpe can be unsparing when he needs to be. Brutally honest.
As soon as the rehearsal ends, he turns to Mariela. The rest of the cast, sitting with her on the edge of the stage, seems braced. It was obvious how bad she had been. “Mariela, I’m not going to get real down on you,” he says. “You’re already down on yourself. When you’re on, nobody’s better. When you’re off, everybody’s better. You already know that about yourself. And right now, you’re not good. Everybody’s better.”
Mariela’s declining performance has affected the rest of the cast. Zach is blowing lines for the first time in weeks. Everyone in scenes with her is off because she is either skipping chunks of dialogue or speaking them without conviction.
Volpe is not done. “Some actors can show up at seven P.M., dress, walk up onstage, and pull it off. And some have to get here at five-thirty and sit quietly and think and close everything out. Mariela, you’re in that second category. So whatever’s going on in your life—your boyfriend, your fight with your mom, your senior project, the book you’re
reading—you’ve got to put that aside for now, all of it.”
Mariela looks straight ahead, right at Volpe. She does not argue or offer a defense. She looks upset, but doesn’t cry. No one cries at Truman rehearsals.
“I know how good you can be,” Volpe says. “I just need you to get there.”
Mariela nods. She has heard him, every word. “I’ll try, Mr. Volpe,” she says quietly.
• • •
Mariela is different from the other cast members in another significant way: academically. When I embarked on this book, I naively assumed that Volpe’s actors would probably be among the top students at their not-so-great high school, high achievers across the board. They are thespians! Immersed in theater. They could hold forth on Edward Albee and Adam Rapp. They knew the difference between August Wilson and Lanford Wilson. So I just figured that of course they would excel in the classroom.
But what I have learned is that they are not, on the whole, terrific students. Volpe’s program is like a laboratory for the concept of multiple intelligences, the idea that people learn in different ways, that a person’s ability in one sphere does not always predict or preclude performance in another. His students’ engagement in theater taps into their souls and spirits. It excites the parts of their brains that relate to language, movement, and musicality.
But of the six in the Good Boys cast, only Bobby is a truly gifted student. Courtney, perhaps, could be with a bit more effort. Wayne reads haltingly and with great difficulty, but true to his steadfast nature, he works around it—he is always the first one to memorize his lines and be off book, because it is far easier for him than having to read them. Britney’s grades are solid, not stellar. Zach is up and down, and true to his nature, he has a tendency to overvalue his achievements. This is part of what makes him a confident, happy person. When I ask him how he has done on his SATs, he says, “Pretty good, a little above average,” but when he tells me the actual numbers, they are not pretty good, even by the standards of Truman, where students do not, in general, produce high SAT scores.
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