It is a sort of first warning. If anyone has imagined his patience is infinite, they now know it’s not.
• • •
Most of the challenge of Spring Awakening resides in the sheer difficulty of the show itself. Volpe’s young actors could do teen angst and anger once they learned the music and got the hang of the story’s punk-rock spirit. But sexual awakening, the other thread woven through the musical, is more challenging.
Melchior, Luke’s character, is a recognizable figure from any era: the righteous young man, seized with intellectual passion, whose ardor migrates from his brain to his loins. He defends the academically faltering Moritz against their authoritarian teacher, explains the concept of sex to the other boys, based not on experience but on his deep reading about the subject, and makes arguments against the evils of the onrushing Industrial Age.
Wendla (Georjenna) is fetching, socially concerned like Melchior, but painfully and tragically innocent. As the show opens, her sister has just had a baby. “I’m an aunt for the second time and I still have no idea how it happens,” she tells her mother, who replies, “I honestly don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this kind of talk!” Melchior and Wendla like to meet in the forest and talk. He tells her that he worries over the future of the peasantry and fears that “industry is fast determining itself” against them. “Against us all,” she replies.
It’s maybe not the most suggestive courting language, but one thing leads to the next. They make love in a hayloft. On Broadway, the scene, as played by Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, is explicit. The script includes such directions as Melchior starts to unbutton Wendla’s dress. He gently reaches up her legs. Melchior reaches inside Wendla’s undergarments.
It cannot go that way at Truman. The easy thing for Volpe would be to just let everyone off the hook and allow them to play it as chastely as possible, but that is not his style. Georjenna and Luke, friends since grade school, get together one Saturday to try to get this scene right. Each of them brings a friend. They spend a good half of the time joking and talking. The rest of the time, they practice wrapping themselves around each other in ways that might seem convincing. The following Monday, they do the scene at rehearsal. Volpe is unimpressed. “I know you’re trying, but I’m sorry, this looks like two friends in the park on a Sunday afternoon.”
He tells them it has to “sizzle” and reminds them they are acting. Yes, the Truman version of this scene will be PG—or PG-13 at most. Fully clothed. Hands in proper places. But it can still convey something of the real thing.
“If you haven’t done it, imagine it,” he says. “That’s acting. It’s what we do here.” He makes a reference to the previous year’s musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. “After all, Georjenna ran around like a Texas cowgirl firing a six-shooter, and she had never done that.”
It’s a funny line. But everyone understands the point. Their director will protect them by staging the show appropriately; he’s never done otherwise. But they can’t be afraid of it.
• • •
A reporter from the Bucks County Courier Times, the paper whose columnist went after Rent, is expected at a rehearsal. He wants to write a story about Truman landing another pilot. The school district’s public relations director suggested the story on a list of other feature ideas she hoped might put Truman in a positive light. Krause’s response to this impending visit: “You have to be fucking kidding me.”
She fears a disaster. The reporter will surely Wiki the show and learn about its elements of sex and rebellion, abortion, sexual abuse, a little homosexuality, a hint of S&M—maybe without understanding that the Broadway version is not what will be produced at Truman.
Every one of these aspects, however, does remain in the play, if muted in some cases—even a whipping scene that Volpe dislikes and believes has “no theatrical purpose.” (To understand what it must feel like for Martha to be beaten by her father, Wendla asks Melchior to bend her over and lash her with a switch he picks up in the woods, which he does, hesitantly at first, then with some enthusiasm. In the revisions that Volpe and Krause sent to New York, they cut this scene; it is one of the few edits that the authors rejected.)
Volpe expresses no worry over the reporter’s visit. On the day he is to arrive, the rehearsal schedule includes “Totally Fucked,” which Volpe proclaims “no problem at all” because it is, after all, one of the best songs in the show. Why shouldn’t he get to hear a great number? This is a Volpe I did not know when I was his student—and who maybe didn’t exist then: the person who really gets a kick out of stirring the pot.
The reporter walks into the auditorium halfway through rehearsal and watches the cast go through about the last thirty minutes of Act 2. He’s missed “Totally Fucked,” which Volpe later acknowledges was a good thing, saying, “I’ve already got too many challenges with this show.”
It may also be that the reporter’s computer does not access Wikipedia. “What’s the play about?” he asks after the snippet of rehearsal he watches. Volpe gives him a pretty PG version of Spring—a bit about the music, a riff on the lessons that this era’s youngsters might take from those who lived in the nineteenth century. It’s not quite Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm he describes, but it’s cleaned up. Volpe will stand one hundred percent behind what he puts onstage, but he is not eager, as was done with Rent, for elements of an upcoming show to be cherry-picked and criticized in advance.
After the reporter leaves, Ellen Kelleher, Bristol Township’s PR chief, has a much more pointed discussion with Volpe and Krause. “I’m afraid this will be known as the abortion play,” she says.
“The word abortion is never even used,” Krause responds.
In Act 2, Wendla gets pregnant—of course she does; the basic facts of life have been kept from her—then is taken by her mother to the oily family doctor, who leads her to a back-alley abortionist. He botches the operation and she dies. Her gravestone will say that she died of anemia. The point of all this is the dire consequences that ensue when information is withheld from children. The show is a comment on sex—it’s powerful, it can’t be bottled up—but not on the issue of abortion.
Krause says some people in the audience may not even realize what leads to Wendla’s death. Musicals, especially one as raucous as this one, are not the most linear forms of storytelling. A person could easily miss it. Kelleher does not seem mollified. She’s just very concerned, she says.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t run away from the content, Ellen,” Volpe says. “That’s not what this program has ever been about.”
He tells her this in an even tone, but with a clear resolve. She smiles, looks resigned, gets up, and leaves. It puts me in mind of what Jim Moore, the principal, said: “He can do what he wants. He’s Lou Volpe.”
• • •
With four weeks left before opening night, the Mike McGrogan experiment ends. Volpe calls the cast to the front of the stage before an afternoon rehearsal. “I’m sure you already know this,” he begins, “but I’m going to tell you straight out. I talked to Michael this morning. I told him I was replacing him. He was very good about it. I’m replacing him with Steven, who will now play the male adult roles.”
Steven is Steven Dougherty, a junior who has been in past shows and was in the ensemble in this one. He is not the ladies’ man that Mike is and, though well-liked by the cast, is considered a little odd. Tall and thin, with short black hair and an angular face, he has a bit of a hunched posture and a lurching way of moving. Everyone considers him highly intelligent, but when a class doesn’t interest him, he won’t always bother doing the work. He’s not a kid who seems to care about chasing high school popularity.
When Volpe makes the announcement, Steven’s castmates applaud for him. He smiles and says, “Thanks for the birthday present. It’s my birthday today.”
Volpe told Mike that he hoped he would stay in the show, as part of the ensemble, bu
t that he would understand and respect whatever decision he made. Like the rest of the cast, Mike has already given up part of his summer and devoted about 150 hours to rehearsals.
As the rehearsal gets under way, he is nowhere in sight, at least not from the seats in the auditorium. About an hour in, Volpe gets a text from one of the girls onstage: Mike is in the wings, watching. Volpe walks up onstage and around the curtain to talk to him. About ten minutes later, Volpe comes walking back to his seat and Mike takes a place in the ensemble—where he will stay right through closing night.
Everyone but Steven is off book. He has a script in his hand, but he barely needs it. He knows the blocking. Knows most of the lines. He had observed and listened closely from the ensemble. The characters he must play—Herr Sonnenstich, the malevolent Latin teacher; the fathers of all four of the boys; the family doctor who hands Wendla off to the abortionist—are out of another era, authority figures at a chilly remove. Steven’s otherness serves the roles well. “Steven, you did well. Thank you,” Volpe says as rehearsal ends. The cast gives him another ovation.
With opening night beginning to come into view, the production has already started to gain momentum. Fleming and Tucci have worked their magic. Adelbert, one of the boys in his first Truman role, has one solo song. He has to hit some high notes. He’s not amazing, but he’s tuneful enough. “Sort of hard to believe, right?” says Fleming, who has been working closely with him.
The casting change accelerated the progress. It wasn’t Mike’s fault. He was, quite literally, miscast. As soon as Steven took the role, it was clear he should have gotten the part—not that he was a finished product, any more than the rest of them were. Volpe had to spend some time editing his mannerisms. A few days after he starts, Volpe asks him to please stop standing onstage with his feet splayed. “It’s like you have clown feet,” he tells him.
Steven says he finds it easier to stand that way. “I’m not interested in easy or in your comfort,” Volpe says. “That’s part of being an actor. Discomfort.”
A few days later, he notices another issue. “Maybe you don’t realize it, but you look like you’re chewing sometimes when you’re onstage.”
It turns out Steven is aware of this. It’s just something he does when he’s bored or nervous.
“Well, stop,” Volpe says. “Number one, you’re driving me out of my mind. And number two, your character does not chew, so therefore, you don’t chew.”
Steven had the misfortune of being elevated to the main cast at just the point when little things were starting to be noticed and corrected. Everyone else was getting the same scrutiny.
Volpe stops a scene halfway through.
“Luke!”
“Yes?”
“Do you have a beach ball or something in your mouth?”
“Uh, no. Why?”
“Because every time you say bourgeois, I hear boardwalk.”
Volpe gives the word its proper French pronunciation. Luke repeats it, pretty close to correct. They do it one more time and the word sounds just like Volpe said it.
“From now on, that’s the only way you say it, right? No more boardwalk.”
• • •
Volpe keeps asking, pushing, demanding. No detail is too small, no theme too big or too frightening. The work rate of the kids is impressive. They don’t take days off, don’t complain, don’t drift. If they give less than full effort or attention, they’re called on it, either by Volpe or one of their castmates. Excuses are not accepted. “Luke, your focus has been at best ordinary,” Volpe says one afternoon. “You like to have a good time. You’re a jovial, great guy. But you have to be Melchior every moment you are onstage, and Melchior is not a jovial guy.”
The dark soul of this play comes more easily to some than others. Perhaps the angriest words in the angriest song (“And Then There Were None”) are sung by Tyler, right after Melchior’s mother has declined his character’s request for money so he can flee to America. “Just fuck it, right? Enough, that’s it. You’ll still go on, well, for a bit. Another day of utter shit.”
Tyler could pretty much sell this from the beginning, not because he is a despairing person—he isn’t—but he has an aspect that allows him to reach down to that level. Each of the cast members took their own meaning from the material. Tyler didn’t see playing a character who kills himself as uplifting, but he believed it was a useful role. “Look at what happens afterward. All the sadness, the people who miss him—if somebody was thinking about doing that, he would see the devastation it causes.”
To Georjenna, the show is a rumination on the struggles of life, something Truman students already know well. Their difficult lives may, in fact, make them better onstage. Our best actors, after all, often do not come from backgrounds of privilege and tranquillity. Volpe’s students have taken some knocks. They have experienced life. Their soulfulness, combined with spending a few years in his program, is potent. Georjenna doubts that the richer schools nearby—“fantasy lands,” she calls them—could do Spring Awakening even if they were allowed. They’d be too afraid of it. “We have something inside of us for this kind of theater,” she says. “It’s indescribable, but Mr. Volpe can touch it and bring it out of us.”
It took some longer than others to find their characters, but that’s why Volpe builds in as much time as possible, especially when the material is demanding. As the performances approach, the show sounds good, it looks good, and the actors have wrapped their minds and hearts around their roles. This is the point in the process when he always ratchets things up: the stakes, the bonding of the cast, the emotion. When it’s finally good, he twists it all a little tighter, hoping to make it great.
The cast, all twenty-one of them, including the ensemble, gather on the edge of the stage. “In August, when we began, this play was a possibility,” he says. “That’s all it was. Now it’s real. I opened that door for you. But you walked through it. You made that choice. You didn’t have to rise to the challenge, but you did. You’ve become so good that every mistake you make has a spotlight on it. In a couple of weeks, it will be gone. It disappears, and it’s a memory.”
“No,” Georjenna calls out. (Just as Courtney did in Nebraska.)
Kids do not much like finality. They don’t like to consider the end of things. This is one reason that teenagers are such natural procrastinators—there’s always more time. But the concept does focus their attention.
The last time Georjenna and Luke rehearsed the hayloft scene, Volpe pronounced it vastly improved. He told them how proud he was that they had given it more layers, made it more emotional, more believable.
Georjenna says now, “But we can make it even better. It’s like he says, we’ve gotten it to a good place, but now it’s up to us to go farther. I think the whole show can get better if everybody just takes more risks.”
I ask how she would define a risk. “Trying something you haven’t done before. Saying a line a different way. Adding humor to it, maybe. Just anything to make it more complex.”
Dozens and dozens of small matters still need attention. The hayloft scene, for example, has a whole tableau built around it—a stage picture, with other couples singing in their own romantic poses. Volpe likes how Adelbert has his head nuzzled against Julia’s neck, but cautions him not to do it in such a way that all his microphone emits is static.
Moritz’s last solo before he shoots himself is performed in front of a stand-up microphone. Ryan Fleming wonders why he meticulously lowers the mic stand after the song, observing that it seems like an unusual piece of housekeeping in the instant before committing this act. Volpe disagrees. He mentions an incident he knows about—a young woman, the daughter of a friend, who spent hours in her garage, straightening up each shelf, before throwing a rope over a beam and hanging herself. “Sometimes people tend to seemingly mundane details before committing suicide,” he says.
M
aybe this sounds macabre. Why is a teacher sharing this in the middle of a rehearsal, or at all? But the interesting thing to me, watching the cast, is how intently they are listening. Volpe spins out these kinds of digressions as they occur to him. They always connect to something. They’re quick, and he moves on. I’ve yet to look into the faces of any of these kids, who spend hundreds of hours with him, and think a single one of them wants him to shut up. Their teacher is more compelling to them than their friends are, which is no small feat.
He turns back to the show. The big thing he wants the cast to think about is pace. Everything about Spring is quick, almost violent. The music, the dancing, the story. It’s a cascade. He says they have to start thinking about the transitions between scenes. Whatever they think of as fast, they have to make it faster. There are no big set pieces to move around, no excuse for dawdling. “You lose the mood, you lose the play,” he says. “Am I worried about that happening? No. Is it something we have to pay attention to? Yes.”
• • •
Even in Truman’s no-drama drama troupe, stuff happens. It’s a high school. No week goes by that Volpe doesn’t have to deal with something on the periphery of the show.
This cast, in general, is more academic than the Good Boys group. It doesn’t have the same alpha figures among the boys or the girls. Colin is one of the school’s top students, but he is not a natural leader in the same way as some of the previous year’s seniors. Leading up to one of the Saturday rehearsals—which are crucial, because the cast gets all day to practice—he calls another student in a class an “asshole.” He is sent to the discipline office, where the punishment meted out is “Saturday school.” While the cast rehearses, he will do time in the library.
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