• • •
When Volpe announced that Truman would perform Rent in 2007, the musical was nearing the end of a twelve-year run on Broadway. A movie version had come out two years earlier. If not quite in the center lane of American culture, Rent was surprisingly close considering its content and characters—among them a drag queen, an ex-junkie, and a lesbian performance artist. Three hundred Truman students auditioned for parts, about one in every five at the school. Many had seen the movie without even realizing the story came from the New York stage rather than Hollywood. (And before that, from the Italian opera, as La Bohème.) Tickets for the five performances, over two weekends, sold out more than a month in advance. “The school just went bananas,” Volpe says.
The play was double cast, as is often the case in high school productions, with actors performing on alternating nights. But only one student played the role of Angel: L. J. Carulli, the junior who was gay and “out” since the ninth grade. “He owned that part and he got the most applause every night,” Volpe says.
I thought about this for a moment, about how an audience in Levittown rose to its feet after a show like Rent and saved its most rousing cheer for the gay boy who played a drag queen. In my day, something like that would have been received as a joke or a freak show. The people on their feet would have been laughing. But that had not been the case. “They appreciated how he played that role, his craft, just how amazing he was,” Volpe says. “And the students knew L.J., they knew about him, and they respected his courage. It was overwhelming to me, and it was groundbreaking for this school and community.”
In the six years after Volpe produced Rent at Truman, fewer than 150 high schools—out of the more than twenty-five thousand with theater programs—have performed it. It is a startlingly low number considering the show’s immense popularity, especially with young audiences, who were so enamored of it that the term Renthead came into being to refer to devotees of the show who saw it dozens of times.
The high schools near Truman in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, in Bucks and Montgomery Counties—many of them filled with high-achieving students born to wealthy, educated parents—have passed on Rent. As sharp and sarcastic as Volpe can sometimes be, he is rarely judgmental. When I ask him why none of the close-by schools has staged Jonathan Larson’s musical, which won the Tony Award in 2006 for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, he doesn’t answer right away. Some of the directors at the local high schools are his close friends, and he seems to be trying to imagine their world. Finally, he says, “I think some of these other schools, they’re wealthier, and the families have more sophistication, but they really value their comfort. They’re almost too comfortable. They want that feeling of security and don’t want anything to rock the boat. A show like Rent raises questions about the world we live in, and they’re not interested in that.
“We are not comfortable at Truman,” he continues. “Maybe that’s a blessing, artistically. I don’t want to say that the people in this community have nothing to lose—of course they do—but they don’t live in these perfect little worlds. And I don’t think they look to Truman Drama to do shows that reassure them that everything is beautiful in the world. Because it’s really not, and they know that.”
Volpe, of course, has conditioned his community. People who no longer even have children at the school, or never did, call at the beginning of the year to find out what plays he is staging. “They want to be challenged, and I think they’re sometimes disappointed if we do something too predictable.”
He has created theater fans in places you might not predict. Late one afternoon, I stop to talk to one of the janitors I have come to know, an older African-American man who is buffing the front hallway. “What’s Mr. Volpe doing this year?” he asks me. I tell him a bit about Good Boys and True. He says he has seen most of Volpe’s work, sometimes in performance, or just by looking in on rehearsals. Rent was his favorite. “I saw the movie, too,” he tells me. “And the kid they had here, he was better than the one in the movie.”
I was pretty sure I knew which character he was talking about, but asked just to be sure. “The one who did the homo part,” he says, referring to Angel and L. J. Carulli. “I couldn’t believe how good that boy was.”
• • •
The public high schools in Bethesda, Maryland—Walt Whitman High and Bethesda-Chevy Chase—are academic hothouses that serve the cosseted classes inside the Capital Beltway: the children of government officials, diplomats, lawyers, scientists, and consultants. The schools are situated in Montgomery County, Maryland, a swath of suburbia that is both well-off and, in its politics, reliably liberal.
Our older daughter, Sara, attended Whitman starting in ninth grade, just after we had moved from a far more modest neighborhood in Philadelphia. It was a shock to all of us at first. Whitman would become the subject of a 2006 book called The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, though what I had first noticed at Whitman was what these driven kids were driving. We had to get used to teenagers zipping around the parking lot in their Mercedes and BMWs as we lumbered along in our twelve-year-old Volvo wagon.
When Sara joined the choir, we were required to fork over a substantial sum of money for her winter competition trip, which was to take place on a cruise ship floating between Caribbean islands. She had gone to majority-black schools in Philadelphia. At Whitman, sometimes derisively called “White-Man,” she noticed that among the few black students at the school, several spoke British-accented English; they were the children of some kind of African royalty.
I still had a Philadelphia sensibility—maybe even a Levittown sensibility, as much as I would not have wanted to own up to it—something in my DNA, some congenital chip on my shoulder that probably goes back to my parents’ working-class roots. So, yes, on some gut level, much about this slice of America where I found myself annoyed the hell out of me. The community, just like the wealthy enclaves near Truman that Volpe talked about, seemed too invested in its own comfort. We had places that sold “gourmet” hot dogs and “gourmet” empanadas and even gourmet treats for dogs. I said to my wife once, “What the fuck is wrong with just a hot dog?”
People were at once worldly—they read The New Yorker and took family vacations in Europe—and also shockingly inward-looking. In Philadelphia, starting in seventh grade, Sara had taken public transportation to the magnet school she attended and walked five city blocks between the train station and the school. We didn’t consider her commute on public transit to be heroic or extraordinary. It was what students in Philadelphia (and many other cities) had long done if they attended a school outside their neighborhoods.
In Bethesda, we encountered parents—parents of high schoolers—who would not allow their children to take the Metro (subway) with friends to visit the zoo or the Smithsonian museums. Another mother said to my wife, “You would let her do that?” These same types of parents might very well pay for their children to take a “service” trip to, say, Costa Rica, but those excursions were adult-supervised, so they gave some seeming assurance that children would not disembark at a wrong transit station, get lost, or encounter anyone that the trip planners did not intend for them to meet.
Neither of the Bethesda high schools has done Rent. Their upcoming shows for 2012—Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (from 1983), Anything Goes (1934), and The Music Man (1957)—are pretty much guaranteed not to shake anyone out of their suburban comfort.
Matthew Boswell teaches theater at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School as part of the International Baccalaureate progression of courses, a European-based equivalent of the Advanced Placement program. As taught by Boswell, it is a demanding course that many B-CC High students find to be among the most challenging they take over their four years at the school. He is no longer directing shows at the high school, and neither is his wife, who taught at the school and served as his assistant director. They stepped down when they star
ted a family.
When I talked to him recently, he said that concerns about what would be tolerated by school administrators and the community explain only partly how high school directors choose material. “My take is, there aren’t a lot of high school directors who last at the job more than five years or so,” he says. “Remember, it’s not their primary job—ninety-five percent of the time it’s an extracurricular activity—and the stipend given breaks down to about two dollars an hour. So what do most time-strapped drama directors do with the limited time they have to stage a show? They put on shows that they themselves have been in and know very well. And most of them know the oldies but goodies, though of course some are just oldies.”
Boswell did direct The Who’s Tommy, which is as edgy as Rent, at B-CC High. Some of the more visceral scenes—for example, when Tommy is sexually abused by the pedophile Uncle Ernie—he staged in a way that was more stylized than literal. He knew that would “appease the community” and allow him to do the show. But a director has to be on the job for an extended period of years, he says, to understand how to bring a school along and introduce more modern shows, and most directors don’t last long enough—let alone forty-plus years.
• • •
The decision to produce Rent at Truman did create opposition and a rare challenge to Volpe, though not from school administrators or parents. It came from J. D. Mullane, a columnist for the Bucks County Courier Times. Mullane praised Volpe as “a local legend” and noted the program’s groundbreaking accomplishments, but expressed concern over the play’s “heavy” topics. His main worry was about a couple of kisses that would take place. “Volpe has, oddly, left it up to student actors to engage in same-sex kissing—two boys and two girls—as the script calls for.”
Mullane had it in his mind that in the digital age, these kisses would be captured by cell phone and other video equipment and posted on the Internet, where the images would stay forever and inflict lifelong embarrassment on the actors involved. He feared, as he wrote, “high-tech harassment.” He also expressed concern that younger members of the audience would be adversely affected by the content of Rent. “What will an audience of suburban middle-aged parents with young kids in tow conclude?” he wrote. “Despite the tough content of Rent, there is no disclaimer for theater-goers, who may be expecting something along the lines of high school chestnuts like Oklahoma! or Bye Bye Birdie.”
It was telling how Volpe responded: He didn’t equivocate, apologize, or give even an inch. He went into the mode I imagine he was in when he confronted Tracey Krause’s abusive boyfriend in the Truman corridor. About the issue of same-sex kissing, which onstage was pretty chaste, he said, “I have the same feeling about a same-sex kiss as I do about an athlete patting another athlete’s ass during a game,” he said. (The newspaper substituted the word “buttocks.”)
Volpe also rejected the notion that he needed to issue any warnings about the content. “Parents know their children better than any high school theater director, and if they want to bring their children to this play, they will do that,” the column quoted him. “There are seven- and eight-year-old children who could watch this play and be fine, and there are seven- and eight-year-old children who would watch this and not be okay. And [the parents know] their children. It’s up to the parents.”
Mullane went to the show and pronounced it “excellent,” although he did not drop his objections. For those who would be attending the remaining performances, he wrote, “Don’t forget to send someone you love a backstage Hershey kiss, available the night I saw the show. As an announcer said, ‘These kisses are completely safe.’”
Mullane received a lot of letters after the column, most of them opposing his point of view. To his credit, he excerpted several of them. One letter writer, a member of the tech crew, wondered what was so much more threatening about Rent than some of Volpe’s previous productions. He wrote: “Sweeney Todd was about a barber who slit throats, and then his landlady baked [the victims] into pies. Parade was about a young girl who was raped and murdered, and a man who was blamed because he was Jewish and was lynched because of it. Guys and Dolls had the theme of gambling and drinking. Even Romeo and Juliet was about suicide.”
SPRING AWAKENING, WITH SOME OF THE AUDIENCE SEATED ONSTAGE.
ARE YOU ALL FROM THE KNITTING CLUB?
The Spring Awakening cast assembles on a morning in early August for the first day of rehearsals. It is blistering hot outside. Most of the boys are wearing shorts, the style that falls to their midcalves. The girls wear tank tops. Volpe shows up in a purple polo shirt and white shorts. “Nice legs, Volp,” says Colin Lester, a senior and Bobby Ryan’s heir as the troupe’s resident wise guy.
The kids take seats in the auditorium, spreading themselves out in the first several rows of the center section. A few minutes after nine A.M., Volpe delivers his sort of first-day mission statement. He tells them that being selected for a pilot is both an honor and an obligation. Can they fail? Well, not exactly. MTI is not ever going to say the show was terrible. But the company executives will all come down from New York, and if it’s not to their liking, it might be the last time they set foot in Levittown.
Many of the students go immediately from rehearsal to late-afternoon shifts at their summer jobs. When school starts in a few weeks, rehearsals will move to the afternoons. Students will have to juggle the show with their homework, some will still be working, and some of the seniors will have college applications and essays to begin. Volpe knows how quickly it all happens. He needs to get their attention—but not paralyze anyone. He didn’t mention, for example, that they can expect the show may be reviewed by Broadway.com and possibly other national websites and theater publications.
“Remember, because this is a pilot for Music Theatre International, the show is going to be seen by a lot of people—people outside Truman, outside Bristol Township,” he says. “They want to be able to sell it to other high schools. They have entrusted us with this, and all of you should be very proud of that. But in the end it doesn’t change anything that we do. We come in here every day and we work and we trust each other and try to make this the best it can possibly be.”
Any musical is a spectacle, a great outpouring of music, dance, and drama, staged with propulsive forward momentum, infused with appropriate measures of wit, comedy, and tragedy, all orchestrated to come together as a single piece, a story that coheres. Spring Awakening has its own particular challenges. The music is by no means easy, but Fleming believes it is within the cast’s capabilities. The show’s split context—an imagined punk-rock universe layered over nineteenth-century Bavaria—is its point of greatest interest and, for the actors, its most formidable aspect. They have to live in one time period and emote in another.
“We’ll have all these pieces, all this stuff we’re doing,” Volpe says that first morning. “You’ll think, Oh my God, this play is never going to come together. It’s so big, it’s so grand. And then eventually it does. I don’t know how exactly. That’s the magic. It becomes a play, and then it becomes our play. We start with this show called Spring Awakening, and over time, we make it our own.”
They start by learning “The Song of Purple Summer.” Significantly, it is the last number in the show—a fixed point, something in the distance they can see. “I want you to just think about this one song, not all of Spring Awakening,” he says. “That’s too overwhelming right now. This is a baby step.”
Rehearsals, especially in the beginning, will go slowly. They might even seem tedious, he cautions. They’ll master one thing, move on to the next, then backtrack. One step forward, one step back. Because “The Song of Purple Summer” is the finale and the whole cast sings it, they all are involved throughout this first rehearsal. Fleming sits in the front row of the auditorium with a keyboard in front of him, teaching the parts.
Baby step or not, this song involves some of the most difficult harmonies of any
song in the show. The more the cast struggles, the more quietly they sing. Fleming suddenly stops. “Guys, you are really making me nervous. If that’s all the sound our three lead boys can make, we’re in trouble. This is the time to make mistakes, but I can’t correct them if I can’t hear you.”
The girls are better, but only marginally. Carol Ann’s innate talent is not matched by any previous training—no singing in church, no vocal direction whatsoever until this moment. The harmonies trip her up, and she stumbles on where to come in. “Can you do it again, the beginning?” she asks. A few minutes later, she says, “Where are we at? I’m totally confused.”
It’s understandable. She has never done this before, and yet she has been given the part of Ilse, perhaps the most vocally demanding of the female roles. Her voice is being counted on to soar above, to carry lesser voices. She laughs uncomfortably after one of her slipups. “Sorry, my laugh is really horrible,” she says to the girl sitting next to her, Brittany Linebaugh, a junior and a veteran of two Volpe musicals.
Brittany sometimes has her own moments. By Truman Drama’s demanding standards, she is considered a little drama-y, given to “crying faucets,” as Volpe says, when things do not go her way. But she is an acknowledged talent, a wholesome-looking blonde with a powerful singing voice and a big stage presence.
Brittany puts a hand on Carol Ann’s shoulder and rubs it gently. “It’s cool,” she says. “We’re all family here.”
• • •
A couple hours into it, “The Song of Purple Summer” doesn’t sound half bad. You can tell the cast feels a sense of accomplishment.
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