Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Volpe sends them up onstage and does some rudimentary staging of how the finale might look. Mostly, it’s to get them singing and moving at the same time. He gives direction as Fleming plays and they sing. “Stop.” “Move.” “Slower.” He wants them to hit certain spots at particular points in the music and to form a stage picture at the end, with all of them visible and arranged in a pleasing shape. “It would be fabulous if Melchior [Luke] finds his spot on the word born. You know what I mean? Ryan, let’s start over and try that.”

  There are twenty-one of them up there. It will take some ongoing work. Carol Ann is still uncertain and skittish. She sounds terrific, but she sways as she sings. “Just try to stand up straight,” Volpe says.

  More than anything else, the rehearsal is a demonstration for the newcomers of what can be accomplished in even just one day of sustained focus. They sing the song one more time before breaking for the day. They hit their spots and form a sort of V onstage.

  “Voilà! Final stage picture. Standing ovation,” Volpe says. “It looks gorgeous.”

  • • •

  Volpe and Krause have to find some sort of work-around involving one of the show’s signature songs. Its title is “Totally Fucked,” which even on Truman’s stage is problematic language, though not a complete no-go. The song is a very funny number about an unfunny situation: Melchior has impregnated his girlfriend, Wendla. The real issue is not so much the title as the excessive and repetitive use of the word itself. “Totally Fucked” is a celebration, an ode to the granddaddy of all Anglo-Saxon four-letter words.

  It begins with Melchior singing, “There’s a moment you know you’re fucked, not an inch more room to self-destruct.” The sentiment is amplified, riotously, by all the rest of the boys onstage, who come in with: “Yeah, you’re fucked, all right, and all for spite. You can kiss your sorry ass good-bye.”

  And so on. As staged, it’s a teenage rant. The boys are hopping around, going crazy. Great fun and hilarity all around. You want to know how to get high school boys in a play? Put on a show where they can throw their heads back, put their arms in the air, and shout “Fuck” a whole bunch of times.

  Except that they cannot, exactly, play it that way. Volpe explains on the day the song is introduced, “We’re still trying to figure out a way to do it because we can’t say fucked, or we can’t keep saying it. So we’re thinking about how we’re going to get around that. We’re going to learn it first with fucked, and then we’re going to take fuck out.”

  Everyone is laughing. Volpe is laughing.

  Except Tracey Krause, who tells me, “I’m nervous about Spring. I want the principal’s signature on everything.” Volpe is far less concerned. It is part of what makes him and Krause a good team—one of them is usually available as a calming influence. “What Lou worries about, I don’t spend any time worrying about,” she explains. “What I don’t worry about, he’s frantic about.”

  They rehearse the song several more times, unedited, then Krause steps in with instructions on how they will proceed. She starts by going through a short history of the word as spoken on Truman’s stage, a local and highly specific etymology. How many times it was said in Rent. How many in Good Boys. How many in Blood Brothers, where the line “Go fuck yourself” somehow survived.

  “We can say it twice and still be PG-13,” she says, referencing the informal guidelines of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system. Krause is a trove of arcane factoids, most of them accurate. But how this one relates is not entirely clear, since high school theater performances do not get MPAA ratings. She says they will start with three fucks, then “lose one” later.

  Three of the boys, Melchior (Luke), Moritz (Tyler), and Hanschen (Colin), will say it when it first occurs in their parts of the song. After that, it will be sung with a hard f and nothing else. “So to review, we’re doing three fucks and that’s it,” Krause says. “After the audience hears it three times, we don’t have to keep saying it. They’ll get it when we say the hard f.”

  Everyone practices hard f’s—a chorus of “totally f! totally f!” Krause likes how that has gone. “Okay,” she picks back up, “from this point on, other than those three boys, you are never, ever, for any reason, to say the f-word in that song. Everybody hear that? Not on a closing night, not as a slip, never—and I’m not fucking kidding.”

  • • •

  The summer rehearsals stretch to six or more hours, with a break for lunch, which for most of the kids consists of grabbing a sandwich from one of the nearby convenience stores. Colin is late coming back one day and trips and falls running in from the parking lot. He hustles back up onstage, like nothing has happened, until Brittany Linebaugh says something like, “Yecch, Colin’s elbow is all bloody.” Someone else suggests that he clean himself up and maybe get a bandage.

  Krause says, “Let him suffer. He was late.”

  There is one area in which Krause claims superiority over Volpe: her understanding of Truman Drama’s impact on students. “The one thing I get better than him is the kids’ perspective, because I was one. I know what it’s like to be a student in this program and to be his student. I know how it changes your life.”

  One day during Spring Awakening rehearsals, a 2007 graduate named Keith Webb stops in to visit. It happens all the time. Former students settle into seats in the auditorium, watch until the end, then talk with Volpe and let him know what is new in their lives.

  A mixed-race kid, very handsome, Webb had played basketball at Truman before winning the part of Radamès in Aida in his senior year. He took a handful of college courses, but mostly has been working as an actor at the Sight & Sound Theatre near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which puts on a year-round schedule of Christian-themed shows, with titles like Behold the Lamb and Psalms of David, as well as a hugely popular Christmas production.

  The theater is a for-profit operation that draws eight hundred thousand patrons a year, most of them arriving by bus and paying $32 for a ticket. It provides that rarest of things for its actors: a steady paycheck. Webb describes it as a kind of gilded cage. He has a nice life, friends, a car. He doesn’t have to sweat his monthly rent check, and how many young actors can say that?

  He tells Volpe he is thinking about leaving and trying his luck as an actor in New York, but is unsure if it’s the right move. “I’m really comfortable where I am,” he says.

  Volpe is never a blurter, someone who speaks out of turn or inappropriately. But he is spontaneous. His opinions can seem to burst forth without a great deal of forethought.

  He nearly explodes at Webb. “You’re what? You’re comfortable? Keith, how old are you now?”

  Webb replies that he is twenty-three.

  “I’m sorry, but comfortable is not a word that I think should be in the vocabulary of a person who is twenty-three years old.”

  That’s it. They go on to talk about a few other students Webb is in touch with from his high school years. About the challenges of Spring Awakening. Webb gives Volpe a hug and walks back out to his car.

  When I call him eighteen months later, he is living in New York, getting work as an actor—mostly theater, a little film—and doing some modeling. He has been in several regional productions of New York shows, including a lead role in In the Heights. No big breaks yet, though he did get a callback after auditioning for a recurring part in the television show Glee. “I haven’t been comfortable since I left Lancaster, but I’m living an actor’s life,” he says. “Mr. Volpe was right. I’m too young to go for the safe thing. If you’re comfortable, then you’re doing something wrong. You have to be in it for the heart.”

  I ask Webb if he had made the move based on what Volpe said. “In a way, yes. I was leaning that way already. I knew what he would tell me, but I needed to hear it.”

  • • •

  Krause made the initial edits in Spring Awakening, changes intended to m
ake it more suitable for high school audiences and actors. In addition to seeing the show in New York, she had watched a DVD of it countless times. For three years she and Volpe had been talking about producing it at Truman, and how they would do it, so she is intimately familiar with his thinking. Even so, she says, “for him to trust my judgment [to make the initial cuts] was huge for me. He had never asked me to do that before.”

  After they sent the suggested revisions to MTI, Volpe met with Freddie Gershon and John Prignano in New York. They let him know that the cuts had been approved, with just a couple of exceptions, by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. Volpe was struck by the casual aspect of his visit. Gershon gave him a knickknack from his office, a deck of playing cards commemorating the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. He told him again what a great job he did with Les Mis and Rent and said he was not worried in the least that Spring Awakening would be another great success.

  In New York, they talked about the possibility of modernizing the setting—moving the children’s world forward from nineteenth-century Bavaria—to make it more accessible, but decided the very strangeness of that is an essential part of the show’s allure. Volpe also feared that such a change would violate Spring Awakening’s structure, which he considers “perfectly balanced, almost Chekhovian in that way. If you brought the time period closer to the rock score, you would lose that. We realized it should stay as is.”

  The meeting in New York was flattering and made Volpe feel that he was being regarded more like a professional in the theater than a schoolteacher. But he was also daunted by the expectations. “We have this standard to uphold,” he said, “and we have to meet it, and yet this is such a different kind of show.”

  Good Boys and True was a surprising play to see on a high school stage but, in most other ways, a traditional story. It had a clear moral through line, expressed by the mother, who must make clear to her son how reprehensible his behavior was. Spring Awakening, by contrast, is anarchistic in spirit. The grown-ups are in charge but shouldn’t be. They’re vile. They hoard information and lord their power over children, to disastrous results. Along the way, a lot of really awful stuff happens. An unwanted pregnancy. A botched back-alley abortion. A suicide. Amid it all, there is plenty of humor, much of it bawdy. (For instance, a piano teacher and object of fantasy named Fräulein Grossenbustenhalter—“Miss Big Brassiere.”)

  The music in Spring Awakening bares the chaos of the adolescent soul as hormones rage and the emerging adult self goes to war against parents and all other forms of authority. The characters break out of their “nineteenth-century confines,” the production notes of the show state, “pull hand mics from their pockets, and rock out.” By mixing the time periods—the German teens rebelling to a musical beat still almost a century into the future—the show suggests that its themes are timeless, fixed over the course of generations and human history.

  “The part about power, with the grown-ups having all of it, I totally get that,” Colin Lester says. “It’s what I go through every day of my life. What I love about the show is it doesn’t lead you to just one place. There’s nothing that makes you feel like, This is what I’m supposed to think. It’s not like that.”

  Krause’s edits had mostly to do with language. The greater challenges were in the realm of staging and direction—for example, what to do about the number “My Junk.” It’s a great song, a hilarious scene. But it takes place as one of the characters is masturbating, a pretty common activity for a teenage boy, but not one you usually see onstage. “It was shocking in New York,” Volpe says. “Shocking.” The actor’s hand was inside his pants. “You can’t show that to a high school theater audience. There’s got to be a line. But you have to let the audience know what’s happening with this boy, or you lose the whole scene. It becomes pointless.”

  This was the essence of Volpe’s challenge. Bringing great theater to Levittown, up-to-date stuff rather than musty standards, also entails importing a whole lot of stuff that just cannot be staged at Truman or any other high school. Some of the scenes become more difficult to play than in New York, not less, and require more craft from the director and actors.

  The scene leading into “My Junk” unfolds as Hanschen (Colin) is behind a closed bathroom door in his home, reading an erotic story aloud. The story is ridiculous: “One last kiss . . . those soft white thighs . . . those girlish breasts . . .” His father calls out to him. “Hanschen, you all right?” “My stomach again, Father. But I’ll be fine.”

  With Volpe’s coaching, Colin would play it with a quavering voice that makes clear what is going on without the need for a graphic physical demonstration. His voice is perhaps a little over the top, but it has to be, because his hands, so to speak, are tied.

  In Truman’s version of Spring Awakening, a “transparent dress” (stage direction in the original script) becomes just a dress. A gun that Moritz puts in his mouth in the Broadway version will be seen, but just briefly before a blackout—Tyler never aims it at himself. The line “Roll me a smoke” is excised, because Truman students would interpret it as “Roll me a joint,” and references to drug use onstage are a clear red line.

  But the story is the story, and Truman’s version has to stay true to it. A couple of times, in the weeks he is rehearsing the show, Volpe brings up a high school production of Avenue Q that we had seen together. On Broadway, the puppets of Avenue Q are inappropriate. They’re dirty. In the high school version we attended, they were so sanitized that the musical lost its edge. “That’s what I can’t let happen here,” he says. “It’s my biggest fear. I have to make Spring Awakening something we’re proud to have on Truman’s stage, but I don’t want to lose the teeth of the play.”

  • • •

  Volpe’s students like doing plays that feel relevant to them and that they know are off-limits to other schools. Their own lives, in so many cases, are not ordered or pretty, and Truman theater lets them consider disordered worlds that are not their own.

  Most of them, though, are drawn at first to Volpe’s program for the same reasons that have always attracted kids to high school drama: They want to be onstage. Their friends are already participating. They suspect they have singing or acting talent, or someone told them they do. They are shy or awkward and hope drama will help them emerge from a shell.

  Tyler Kelch is small and wiry, a bundle of nerves and self-doubt. He’s quirky. You can’t always tell if he’s trying to be funny or if he’s just being himself. One day when he has a cold, he goes through an entire rehearsal with a big tissue box hanging from a string around his neck, like a pendant. He likes acting, he explains, “because it’s good not to have to be me for a couple of hours every day. I’m a really insecure person. I have, like, zero confidence, so I like being onstage pretending to be someone else.”

  He is in part a techie, the kid who likes to take cameras and phones apart to see how they work. “My other favorite part of being onstage is wearing a microphone and being under lights. It’s, like, the coolest thing ever.”

  The historical aspect of Spring Awakening appeals to Tyler, particularly seeing the things that do not change as time marches forward. The teenage characters in Spring “have the same hang-ups we do,” he says. Many of the controversies and concerns expressed in the show—sexuality, abortion, teen suicide—are entirely current. “It’s just interesting to think about when you consider the original play was written in, like, 1890-something. I’m pretty sure nobody in the audience is going to feel like it didn’t give them something to think about.”

  The boys’ first scene has them sitting in Latin class as they are terrorized by their instructor. The teacher walks from desk to desk, demanding precise pronunciation and shouting directly into the ears of students who do not get it right. He is a despot, far more brutal than any educator is allowed to be now.

  One of Volpe’s primary jobs is to bring his students context they do not have. In reh
earsal one day, he tries to make them understand how having a teacher like this might feel. “I went to a Catholic high school, and I remember the priest would walk around the classroom, just like in this scene, and you could feel him coming up behind you,” he says. “And you didn’t want him to stop and make you be the one who had to answer the question. Until he passed your desk, you couldn’t breathe. You felt like you were going to suffocate. That’s how I want you to be. Even as you’re sitting, I want to see your whole body tense up.”

  Mike McGrogan, the wrestler and future Marine, is playing the teacher as well as all the male adult parts. (It’s the way the play is structured; a junior named Marilyn Hall is playing the female adults.) He is struggling to catch on, to get to that essential place where he will begin to construct a character who is not himself. Onstage, he seems like, well, Mike McGrogan—a big guy with a scruffy black crew cut and not a great deal of affect. He has the bearing of someone a bit older, which may be the quality that made Volpe want to put him in the role, as well as a reputation as one of the school’s Lotharios. Some of the girls in the cast gravitate to him. Krause, at one point, asks him if he is still with the twenty-three-year-old Brazilian woman he was said to be dating.

  “Date?” he says. “I don’t date girls.”

  He reminds me a little of Zach—the aura of the Big Man on Campus. But he is not as invested in Truman Drama or as receptive to direction. Volpe tries his best to prompt him. “You have to show your dominance. You’re invading his personal space,” he tells him on how to play a scene with Moritz, who is faltering in the Latin class. Mike stands a little closer, but nothing in his voice or body changes. “Think of the worst, meanest teacher you’ve ever had. How is your wrestling coach when he’s mad?”

  Krause gets involved. “You know why I hate this teacher?” she says to him. “It’s just a job to him. He’s just in it for the money. He doesn’t like kids.”

  Mike nods. He plays the scene again, a little better. He is a nice kid with a lot of responsibilities. “You know, he’s got, like, two or three jobs,” Krause tells Volpe. He misses a rehearsal one day to drive his grandmother to a doctor’s appointment. He misses another on a day he has to get a physical for the Marines. Everyone is rooting for him, but it’s not clear what will happen. He is a challenge to one of Volpe’s core convictions—that as a high school director, he can make any athlete into an actor.