Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Krause wrote Volpe a letter from college in her freshman year. She thanked him for helping her find focus and discipline for the first time in her life and for showing her a world outside Levittown and her social set. She added that she was studying education and planned to return to Truman to teach. She wanted to be his assistant director of Truman Drama. If he ever left, she planned to take his place. She started at Truman right after college, but it took her seven years to get the position of Volpe’s assistant director. Someone else had it, and when he left, another teacher with more seniority was awarded the job.

  Most of what she believes about teaching, she learned from Volpe. One of the lessons: Be bluntly honest with students. Tell them their strengths, their weaknesses, what they need to do to get what they want. Volpe always gives much more praise than criticism. It sometimes seems to me there is a formula—about three compliments to one reproach—except that I know Volpe’s methods to be too instinctive for that. The praise is never phony, and the criticism never gratuitous. “The main thing is, Lou never lies to a kid, and I’m not ever going to lie to a kid,” Krause says. “I’ve seen him lie to adults, but never students.”

  Krause also learned to close out the noise from other teachers who might sometimes question her methods. Volpe told her some might sincerely believe there needs to be a higher wall, more delineation of adult-child authority. “Lou made me understand that closeness and respect are not mutually exclusive. That’s one of the biggest things I learned from him. I can joke around with my students, I can have fun with them, but I know there’s respect. I never worry about that.”

  • • •

  Krause serves a multitude of roles in Truman Drama. One of them is enforcer of decorum. In Connellsville, students from some of the other high schools wear sweatpants and sweatshirts to the workshops and performances—or even pajama bottoms. A Truman student in such attire would be sent back to the hotel to change. They wear neat jeans or slacks. Some of the girls wear skirts. The boys cannot let their pants droop and their boxer shorts show. “The theater is the theater,” Krause explains. “You dress a certain way.”

  The festival is in some ways like any other kind of conference, in that awards presentations, schedule changes, and various other routine business matters are transacted at a lectern on the stage. Students hoot and holler when one of their own—their drama teacher or a fellow student—is called forward or even just when the name of their school is mentioned. This is another no-no for the Truman kids. “We do those little golf claps,” Zach says, demonstrating with his hands stretched far out in front of him and his wrists pressed together. (Only the hands move.) “Very classy. We get mocked by some of the other kids for it.”

  In a showcase of shorter performances that afternoon, another high school performs a production number from Pippin. It’s racy, with the student playing Pippin reclining onstage, his legs splayed, as girls shimmy and slither around him. Volpe and Krause are taken aback. They sound like prudes, which, considering their oeuvre at Truman, strikes me as more than a little ironic.

  The director from the school doing this Pippin number is a friend of Volpe’s. “She told me it was a little edgy,” he says from his seat in the auditorium. “A little edgy? Mother of God!”

  Krause swivels around to address a row of Truman boys behind her. “I just want you to know that you are not allowed to have anything to do with those girls.”

  “Really, Krause?” Bobby says. “You’re going to trail us night and day to make sure?”

  “If I have to.”

  At five P.M., Wayne, Britney, Courtney, Mariela, Bobby, and Zach find a corner of the library at Connellsville High to run their lines one more time. They sit on the floor in two rows, facing in opposite directions, using each other as backrests. They make a game of it. If anyone flubs a line, the whole scene has to be started again from the top. It happens just twice. The first time is Courtney’s fault, and Bobby responds by punching her lightly on the arm.

  “Hey!” Courtney says. “What was that?” She punches him back, but harder.

  Bobby would remember that moment, and others like it, in the coming weeks and months. High school casts always get to know each other well—if they don’t start out as friends, they become close over the course of the production. But this was more than that. How many actors ever get to do a play with people they absolutely love, who are as close as family?

  • • •

  We’ve got, like, ten problems right now,” Robby Edmondson says. Truman’s cast and crew have been given two hours to set up in an unfamiliar theater, after which the doors will open again and nearly a thousand people will pour in. Robby has to learn the sound-and-light board, then program it for the play. He keeps shooing away Tony Bucci, the faculty audiovisual advisor, because he figures he can master it more quickly himself.

  Everyone else at the conference is eating dinner in the Connellsville High cafeteria. The Truman kids gobble down takeout pizza as they haul in their set from the rental truck Bucci had driven behind their bus. A prop—a lamp that is to sit on an end table in the Hardy family living room—breaks backstage. Tyler Kelch, the stagehand who dropped it, looks like one of those cartoon characters with sweat shooting off his brow. “I can’t believe I did that,” he keeps saying. “Shit. Shit!” No one tells Volpe; these are the types of things he does not handle well at the last moment. Wayne finds some glue and puts the lamp back together.

  The most critical problem is the size of the stage, which is much bigger than Truman’s. The traveler, the curtain nearest the front, comes down right in the middle of where Volpe figured they should stage the play. There is not enough room to play it in front of the curtain. All other options, it seems to him, would have this intimate play taking place in an ocean of space.

  With no obvious solution at hand, Volpe looks like he is about to hyperventilate. One of the kids is sent to find Mark Zortman, director of the theater program at York High School and a well-regarded practitioner in all aspects of technical theater. His arrival a few minutes later has the approximate impact on Volpe of a generous dose of Xanax. Zortman stands onstage, hands behind his back, as Volpe explains the problem. He walks around a bit, deep in thought. He consults with Robby. There is something both commanding and soothing about Zortman. He’s a first responder with an artistic eye.

  Zortman figures out where to put the set and how to light the stage to make it work. It is his idea to flood the whole area beyond the set in a blue light, which is a masterstroke—it will both make the stage look less vast and lend the production a foreboding moodiness.

  With fifteen minutes to go, Volpe calls the cast together. He says he doesn’t want anyone to be nervous or undone by the unfamiliarity of the theater. A stage is a stage. “I want you to support each other and love each other. Whether we get a chance to ever do Good Boys and True again, it doesn’t matter to me. What you’ve done is what I’m so proud of.

  “A director opens a door. That’s all I did, nothing more. You walked through it. I want you to know that at ten-thirty tonight, when we’re done, their jaws are going to be dropping in the audience. They are going to be stunned, because that’s how good you are. So be proud of our tradition. They’re out there, and they’re excited that Truman is about to do a play. Think about that. It’s special to them that we’re doing this play. God bless all of you. I love you all.”

  As he walks away, I hear two voices call to him, “We love you, too.”

  • • •

  Zach is what in sports is called a “red-light player”—the bigger the stage and higher the stakes, the better he is. He once again knocks his opening monologue straight out of the park. Just farther this time.

  A few minutes later, his first scene with Bobby, when the shirts come off, causes the same reaction it had back at Truman, only louder—with perhaps six hundred high school girls shrieking. (High school theater attracts many more
girls than boys.) The two boys again let it subside, then pick back up with their dialogue.

  Toward the end of rehearsals, Volpe did something uncharacteristic. He told Zach and Bobby to stop acting in their scenes together. Just say the lines. He felt they were locked in and polished and did not want them to keep working it. Anything new they added, he wanted it to occur onstage, in performance. Spontaneously. There is a scene in Act 2 that is the most emotional in the drama. It occurs after it has become clear that Brandon has ruined everything—brought shame to his family and school and sullied the reputation of a girl he doesn’t even know. He has a final falling-out with his friend Justin, whom he has lied to throughout. It’s a breakup.

  In the script, the dialogue is written with some exclamation points, but Bobby has stopped playing it with bombast. He speaks his lines slowly and softly. “Never talk to me again,” he says. “Never call me. Never seek me out. If we see each other—anywhere—on the street—in passing—don’t stop. Don’t say hi. Don’t wave. Don’t anything.”

  Volpe would say of Bobby, “He is fearless. One of the smartest actors I’ve ever worked with. He came to see how powerful that character was in his quietness. Whenever I think of how far he took that performance, it gives me the chills.”

  In previous performances, Bobby stood face-to-face with Zach. In Connellsville, he walks behind him, puts his arms around him, and strokes his chest. He leans forward and whispers the words with his lips right up against his left ear. He has not told Zach he will do that. He had not known himself. “We could feel the effect we were having the whole play,” Bobby would recall. “You can, or at least I can, get a read on the audience. We were bringing something they hadn’t seen before. When I did that, I heard some gasps, then it was dead silence.”

  Onstage, as the scene plays out, Zach has tears in his eyes. He is no longer conscious of acting. “That’s the ultimate,” he says later. “I’m that person. I’m Brandon Hardy. I totally fucked everything up, and I just lost the best friend I ever had.”

  • • •

  There is so much talk of “risk taking” in theater that it can lose its meaning. But the courage displayed by Zach and Bobby is palpable. They kept adding layers of intimacy and vulnerability to the already charged interaction between their characters.

  Mariela is, again, remarkable. Wayne’s big voice and presence are especially welcome in the bigger auditorium. As Coach Shea, he blows a whistle early in Act 1 to call his class together for calisthenics. “Two lines, gentlemen!” he says in his booming baritone. Anyone not paying attention before that was called to order.

  Volpe wanted the transitions between scenes to be seamless and fast so that audience members never had a moment to squirm or shift in their seats as they waited for actors to arrive at their spots. The material is not light; he didn’t think it could withstand being weighted down by a too-slow pace. In Connellsville, right from the start, the play clips along at the tempo Volpe wanted. He thinks to himself, They just keep making this better.

  The very last scene is also a flashback—Brandon and Justin, as high school freshmen, meeting for the first time. Their dialogue is light and silly, just two boys testing each other, seeing if they might one day be friends. Justin teases Brandon about his last name—Hardy—and it turns out both are fans of the Hardy Boys.

  The moment the play ends, the audience in Connellsville bursts into a thunderous roar, then a sustained standing ovation. The cast members take their bows. They clap back at the audience. They bow again. The ovation just keeps rolling. They stay out there and bask in the glory—too long for Volpe’s liking. Remember: Truman Drama stands for many things. And not least, a crisp professionalism. Volpe motions with both arms over his head to them, a waving motion to signal them to get backstage. They don’t get the message. Finally, they see him mouth the words—Get. Off. The. Stage—and finally exit.

  Volpe has a difficult time himself making his way out of the theater and backstage to the kids. Other high school directors, many of them good friends, keep stopping him to lavish praise on the show. One teacher, someone he does not know well, asks how he had managed to get a professional actress to play the role of the mother, Elizabeth Hardy. Volpe pauses for a moment before he answers, thinking the question might be in jest, but it clearly is not. “No,” he says. “That is Mariela Castillo. She’s one of my students.” Volpe asks the teacher if she had liked Mariela’s performance.

  “Oh my God, yes,” she replies.

  • • •

  The cast and crew squeeze into a small room backstage, still caught up in the post-performance adrenaline rush. They know their performance has packed an enormous emotional wallop. They are hugging, high-fiving, finally letting loose and whooping it up in a way they are never allowed to do in the theater. When Volpe and Krause walk in, Zach shouts, “We brought it! We brought it again!”

  The way the festival is set up, each school performing a full-length play is to be critiqued afterward by drama directors from other Pennsylvania high schools. The comments are considered a bit of constructive feedback from the outside, and the teachers who are asked to give them take it seriously. (The adjudicator from the International Thespian Festival, sponsor of the festival in Nebraska, was also in the house, but her verdict will arrive at Truman by mail, several weeks later.)

  The three directors who come backstage to talk to the Truman cast clutch the forms on which they were supposed to formulate comments on the various aspects of the production from both a dramatic and technical perspective—blocking, diction, set, lighting, sound, wardrobe, props, and so on. As Volpe introduces them, the kids quiet down, waiting to hear what they have done well, where they can improve.

  Two of the directors immediately apologize. Their forms are mostly blank. Some marks on the very top, then nothing. “I’m sorry, I started to write a few things down, but it just seemed so stupid to continue,” Andrea Roney, the drama director at North Penn High School, outside Philadelphia, says. “You know what you did. You know how remarkable it was. There were nine hundred kids out there who just grew up a little bit. All I can say is thank you.”

  She continues on for a moment more, but looks on the verge of tears herself. “There is a need for this kind of theater in high schools, a deep need,” she says. “You are so lucky to have a director who has this vision, who has taken you on this journey. This is a journey that will be with you the rest of your lives.”

  Debbie Thompson, the drama director at Upper Dublin High School, also outside Philadelphia, says, “This is the essence of theater, what you just did. Grappling, thinking, pushing up against limits. Most of us do not have administrators courageous or insightful enough to let us do a show like this. My kids are so excited to have seen it. They will talk about it forever.” She adds, “I can tell how much work went into it, because it didn’t seem like work at all.”

  The third woman says she has made written comments on her form, but, perhaps inspired by the first two, does not read from them. Jill Campbell, of State College Area High School, says she had been impressed by the Truman cast’s adeptness at listening to one another. “You made every word count,” she says. “And the silences, too. I heard the silences.”

  • • •

  The next morning, the cast is scheduled for a “talkback” session to answer questions about their performance and the process that led up to it. The sign-up sheet had room for twenty attendees. Someone tacked another sheet of paper next to it, and more than a hundred kids put their names down. It is moved from a classroom to a lecture hall.

  Bobby and Zach answer questions about whether it’s hard to play gay characters. (No.) The cast is asked about how they were possibly allowed to do a play with such edgy content. The Truman kids respond that Volpe’s status—and theater’s high status at Truman—allow them to do things that might be impossible elsewhere. Some of the questions aren’t questions at all, but just kids gu
shing about what they had seen the previous night. “So amazing . . .” “Oh my God, I was overwhelmed . . .” “Do you have any idea how powerful that was?”

  The adulation seems to have an intoxicating effect on the usually grounded Wayne, sending him on an uncharacteristic flight of rhetorical fancy. “It was like we planted a beautiful flower,” he says. “And last night, it bloomed.”

  He pauses, as if to let this soak in. Bobby looks at him and smirks. The expressions of his other four castmates read: Really, Wayne? He catches himself and smiles. “Uh, sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to lay it on so thick.”

  Afterward, a girl from another high school takes Bobby aside and asks if he’s gay. “No, I’m not,” he says. He thinks later that his answer disappointed her. “It was just sort of weird. It seemed like she was hoping I was, so maybe I should’ve said yes to make her happy.”

  That night is the awards ceremony, which includes the naming of an all-state cast. No school could have more than one of its actors named. Volpe, because he does the calligraphy for the certificates, traditionally calls out the names from the stage at the front of the big theater. The last name he calls is one of his own: Mariela Castillo. The audience rises to its feet and gives her another sustained standing ovation. She had willed and worked her way to her performance by reminding herself that theater was what she did not fail at—it was where she excelled. As she ascends the stage to accept her award, she feels “like a movie star getting her Academy Award.”

  Mariela was one of the first of Volpe’s actors I had met. I have tears in my eyes watching her get that award, and a part of me wants to run up onstage and say, “Do you know that this young woman’s performance was even more amazing than you can imagine? The obstacles she had to overcome?”