Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  “I want you to know I did this for the show, not you,” Volpe tells Colin when he informs him that he was able to bargain the sentence down to lunch detention.

  The cast and their parents have been selling ads for the program. It’s not easy to get merchants to write checks, even for just $50 or $100. They get requests constantly—from school clubs, sports teams, volunteer fire companies, fund drives for kids sick with cancer. It’s endless. And there’s not much money in Levittown’s flattened economy. Volpe has even had to lower ticket prices. He used to charge $15 for shows like Rent, Les Mis, and Beauty and the Beast (the “power shows”) and $12 for other musicals. Since 2008 the top ticket price has been $10.

  A father of one of the cast members comes walking in with a big sheaf of ads. He hands the papers over to Volpe, who leafs through them, then separates two from the pile. He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t get upset, but just says calmly, “You have to know that I can’t take these, right?”

  The ads are from local strip clubs.

  The father is a former Volpe student and cast member who was a munchkin in a long-ago production of The Wizard of Oz. “C’mon, Lou,” he says, “you’ve got people in this show having sex, killing themselves, and you can’t take an ad from a tittie bar?”

  • • •

  Truman’s Spring Awakening has a couple of crises still to overcome. The first is Homecoming Weekend and its associated revelry—a bonfire, a competition between the different grades to build the best floats, sixty minutes of screaming in support of a perpetually losing football squad, and late-night parties following the officially sanctioned school events, all on a couple of cold, damp nights. Rarely have I seen Volpe truly angry, and never this angry.

  Some of the kids are already battling colds and upper respiratory infections. A Saturday rehearsal follows the Homecoming blowout, with a pit orchestra accompanying them for the first time rather than just Ryan Fleming on keyboard. It’s an important moment. But the cast is exhausted and bedraggled. Hacking coughs rise above the harmonies.

  They are to run through the whole show, both acts, twice—once in the morning and again after lunch. The musicians are on the clock, with their pay coming from the theater department budget. After they start out a little too soft, Volpe stops everything for a moment to remind them that the show must be powered by a hard-driving beat. He seethes through the morning session, then starts in on the cast. “In the beginning maybe it was partly the band’s fault. I wanted them to sound like Led Zeppelin and they sounded like Bread. But they fixed that. You didn’t fix anything.” (The kids don’t get the last part of that reference, but this is not the moment for anyone to say, “Who the hell is Bread?”)

  Poor Luke. He has the most important male role and has grown into it beautifully. When he is at his best, the promise of his stunning audition looks like it will be fulfilled. But he can be inconsistent and not always laser-focused. An earnest, enthusiastic kid, he wore his voice down to sandpaper by screaming at all the Homecoming events, and he was already sick.

  “Luke, really, I don’t want to bring you down, but you were so bad this morning I hope you got it out of your system,” Volpe says. “All I saw was a boy trying to act. There was no character going on anywhere in your body today. I wish I could say I feel sorry for you, but I don’t.”

  Luke coughs. Pulls a wad of tissues from his pocket. “And go to the doctor. Please go to the doctor.”

  The girls had arranged themselves in straight lines in some of their scenes, one of Volpe’s big peeves. “If you’re behind somebody, you’re behind somebody! I love it that you all want to be in the spotlight but you’re ruining the scenes. Are you getting that?”

  Volpe liked one number the whole morning, “Touch Me.” It’s a mellow song, so it fit the mood, “but unfortunately, this show isn’t called Mellow Awakening.”

  The cast couldn’t even execute proper stage slaps. Late in Act 1, Steven has a scene in which he slaps Tyler, but it looked like a love tap. Krause says, “If you can’t do any better, just slap him for real.”

  Volpe had recommended that the cast leave the Homecoming festivities just before the game started, so they would get enough rest—guidance that many of them disregarded. “I feel great,” he says. “I was in bed at nine-fifteen. But you don’t feel great, do you?”

  One thing about working with kids: They do stupid things, but also recover quickly. Some of them use the lunch break to take naps on the couches in B8, the theater classroom. The sick and weary are revived. Miraculously healed.

  The afternoon rehearsal is the opposite of the morning run-through—it’s tight and energized. Steven takes Krause’s advice and slaps the hell out of Tyler. Looking on from row eight of the auditorium, I feel like it snaps my head back a bit. Tyler is unfazed. It’s Truman theater—not for wimps.

  • • •

  The final hitch, the last hiccup before opening night, is Volpe’s concept for the set—his idea to project images onto big screens at the back of the stage. Julia Steele (“assistant director in charge of God”) and some of the girls had questioned him when he first brought it up, fearing the pictures might divert attention from the actors (i.e., them) and the show itself.

  Two months later, when the idea is translated into reality, it seems they had a point. The rented equipment arrives eight days before the show, in time for the last Saturday rehearsal. Robby Edmondson and Tony Bucci mount three big screens behind the existing set, which is minimal—the school desks and chairs in the class scenes and very little else. The setting is to be represented on the screens by a changing gallery of images, which Robby has been assembling since Volpe gave him the task in the summer.

  He programmed the images into the digital projection unit, and they start rolling as the morning rehearsal begins. A pregnant abdomen for the opening number, “Mama Who Bore Me.” Pages from an antique Bible. Two hands clasped. Pictures of forests you imagine to be in Bavaria. An ancient stone wall. An old church. Stained glass. A field of wildflowers. Lovers, embracing.

  The pictures evoke the action on the stage—some directly, others more abstractly. Volpe leans in my direction and says, “What do you think?”

  I tell him what he already knows: It’s bad.

  “I know,” he says. “We’re not watching the show, right?”

  Images are flashing on and off the screens with great rapidity. Krause says, “Do you think we’ll have to put something in the program to warn the epileptics?”

  Just a few of the individual images bother Volpe—a woman with heaving cleavage that looks like it belongs in Maxim; a kiss with too much tongue in the frame; a rainbow projected onto the screens timed to a gay interlude between two of the male characters, which he deems much too obvious. “Why don’t we just spell out G-A-Y?” he says.

  But overall, the pictures have been thoughtfully curated. Several of them are quite beautiful. There are just so many that the musical feels secondary to the slide show.

  As a student, Robby ascended to the highest level in Truman Drama: artistic collaborator with Volpe. He is adept with all the technology, but what animates him is thinking about how to use it to tell stories onstage. He likes his job running the lights at the pro hockey games, but it’s just that: a job, a way to earn his tuition money. He is at community college, soon to transfer to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “I don’t belong here,” he says of Levittown. “I want to do theater for the rest of my life, in New York.”

  He listened to the Spring Awakening sound track over and over to discern the “internal meanings” of the songs and culled the pictures (all in the public domain) from the Internet. He knows Volpe’s methods and has heard his maxims: “Go out there as far as you want, and I’ll pull you back in if it’s too much.” “Less is more.” Both axioms apply here, but the unfortunate thing is that Volpe has had to impose them so late. They talked all through the process, but ther
e was no way until now to see how it would look.

  “It just kind of sucks,” Robby says. “I’ve been at this since August. I went through, like, five thousand pictures. I don’t know if he understands that. But whether I like it or not, I have to do what he thinks is right for the show.”

  Volpe asks him to edit the pictures way down, so that the images don’t change more than once a scene. He says he appreciates all the work that went into it, still likes the concept, “but it’s too much right now.”

  Robby will spend a couple of days going back through all the images, removing about 60 percent of them. It makes a massive difference. Only the best and most telling images remain. At the dress rehearsal, the projections match Volpe’s initial concept—they are a stand-in for the set, not a slide show. “Gorgeous,” he tells Robby, invoking one of his favorite words. “I absolutely love it.”

  The whole dress rehearsal gives everyone a huge confidence jolt. The cast is healthy. The show rocks forward at an urgent pace, one of Volpe’s primary goals. “It has all fallen into place,” he says to them. “It was a difficult show to do, a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But you’re there. You should be looking forward to having a lot of fun this weekend. You’ve worked so hard, and now it’s time to reap the rewards.”

  • • •

  On opening night of Truman High’s Spring Awakening, the sign in the parking lot at Cesare’s Ristorante says WELCOME MUSIC THEATRE INTERNATIONAL. I smile when I see it—it’s so small-town—but it also fills me with pride for my old English teacher, Mr. Volpe. Levittown is far removed from any notion of success. Its moment in the vanguard was a half century ago; its last good times were in the 1980s. And yet Volpe and his kids perform at such a level of excellence that the world takes notice.

  Drew Cohen, president of the company and second-in-command to Freddie Gershon, has made the trip from Manhattan, along with John Prignano, MTI’s senior operations officer. They are seated at a big round table that includes two agents who work overseas for MTI—one who licenses shows in Australia and another in the United Kingdom. They figure that Spring Awakening will be attractive to high schools in their sales territories and want to see its debut at Truman.

  It is Prignano’s second time at Cesare’s. (No more cold cuts in the front office; Krause now arranges proper pre-theater dining for visiting dignitaries.) A former dancer who grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, he refers to the restaurant’s tomato sauce as “gravy,” as it is called in many Italian neighborhoods and families. “It always makes me so happy to see a Lou Volpe show,” he says. “It’s one of the best parts of my job.”

  We drive over to the high school and arrive about thirty minutes before curtain. The parking lot is filling up. You can feel a buzz, a sense of nervous anticipation. I’m nervous.

  The atmosphere around Volpe and Truman Drama is always a mix of the sacred and profane. (The work is sacred; everything else, not.) On show nights, he and Krause traditionally have dinner together in B8 late in the afternoon while the cast is getting in costume and doing makeup. It’s just takeout, nothing special, but it’s their moment together. Volpe shows me the texts he received when he let the kids know he was eating and where he could be found if anyone needed him. One says, “OK,” the second, “Whatever,” and the last, “Fuck you.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful how they express their love for me?” he says.

  The throng waiting to enter the theater is a mix of Truman students and parents as well as people from the community whose children are long past school age. People I have not seen in decades are among them: a local pastor and his wife who are the parents of childhood friends of mine and rarely miss a Volpe production; an old neighbor from my section of Levittown; a friend from my graduating class, now teaching at a high school up-county, and another regular on show nights.

  Some of the students here are from neighboring high schools. The cast did “cuts” from the show at a school assembly during the week—a preview, essentially—and it created a buzz and an explosion of Facebook posts. Word went out beyond Truman.

  Backstage, a few minutes before curtain, Volpe tells the cast, “People out there are excited. I’m excited, because I can’t wait for them to see this play. We have people who have come to see this from New York, and that makes it special and exciting. But the main thing is that you have created this together, and that’s what you will remember forever.”

  He takes a look at Tyler, whose hair has been frizzed out and tinged with purple. “Perfect,” he says. “You look like Beethoven on acid.”

  The play begins with Georjenna alone in a spotlight, singing the difficult “Mama Who Bore Me.” It’s a pure solo. Not much orchestration. She would never, like Zach, say, “I brought the heat, Volp!” but she accomplishes the same thing—she nails a difficult opening and sets everyone else at ease.

  Volpe momentarily puts his head in his hands during a number halfway through Act 1, as Carol Ann and Julia sing the unsettling “The Dark I Know Well.” He is overwhelmed by it. Later, he says, “It actually gave me chills to think how far they had taken that song. It is one of the most difficult songs, emotionally, that I have ever asked high school students to do.”

  At intermission, he walks into the room where the cast gathers backstage and says, “Could it be any better?” He describes their pacing and transitions as “liquid.”

  As if the cast needs any more of a lift, Christy Altomare, the actress who played Wendla in the touring version of Spring Awakening, walks in right behind Volpe. “You guys are amazing!” she says. “You’re doing everything right. Every choice you’ve made is the right choice.”

  Volpe always tells the kids “it’s theater,” meaning something will always happen you don’t expect. Lines missed, props missing, a costume change not made. It’s part of being an actor. You don’t panic; you just find your way back.

  Part of the way through Act 2, you can hear a noise, almost a growl, that seems to come through one of the microphones. It is brief, not that loud, and not obvious what it is. Later, we learn it was Carol Ann. Her challenge was beyond the relatively simple matter, say, of a dropped line. She has a fever and flu symptoms. She vomited into a trash barrel, then ran back onstage. Perfectly timed. Didn’t miss a line, a scene, or a song.

  She was not among those who wore themselves out at Homecoming, and as she said later, “I don’t go to parties, I don’t drink, I don’t do any of that, and I’m the one who got sick.”

  Carol Ann put any initial doubts about her dependability (based only on her being an unknown) to rest. She is, if anything, sicker for the next show, but performs. Her voice elevates the show, in solo and harmony. “If she doesn’t go on, I have no idea what we would do,” Fleming says. “For her to be that sick and carry on—amazing. I could maybe tell a little difference in her voice, but no one else would notice.”

  As the curtain comes down on opening night after “The Song of Purple Summer,” that very first number they learned in the beginning of August, the crowd rises to its feet. The cast takes its bows to a loud and long standing ovation. When it subsides, Volpe asks the MTI executives to come up onstage and thanks them for “entrusting” the show to him and Truman High.

  Drama people are, of course, dramatic by nature. But John Prignano is genuinely overwhelmed. “I am so moved,” he says, his voice trembling. “This is beyond anything I thought I would ever see.”

  Drew Cohen, the MTI president, says that Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik were reluctant at first to make their show available to high schools. They wanted it in front of young audiences, but feared it could not be done with its integrity intact. When they asked MTI who could direct it, “we immediately told them that Lou Volpe would be the only one we could ask to take this on.”

  He thanks the Truman cast and Volpe on behalf of the high school directors and the young actors who will now get to do Spring Awakening. “We must also comm
end this community for being so open-minded,” he says—the only time I had ever heard those words applied to Levittown.

  Jesse North, the national editor of the website Broadway.com, watches from a seat in the second row. The following day, he posts an online video about what he calls the “boundary-pushing theater” he witnessed at Truman. It was, he says, “so much better than any high school production I have ever seen.”

  • • •

  To this cast—to any Truman cast—the words that matter most are Volpe’s. The ovations subside. The theater empties. He gathers them backstage.

  He tells them how proud he is that the performance pleased the people from Music Theatre International. That they would come to Truman from New York, he says, “is like icing on the cake, but what matters most of all is this production, this piece of art that we made. Spring Awakening, all of us being together for these last three months, changed my life, and it changed your life. We can say that. It always does. You are not the same person as when we began.”

  The show was a challenge, he says—maybe the most difficult material ever attempted by Truman Drama. But they got there. The audience saw the show, not the struggle. He tells them that their performance could not have been better. It far exceeded any expectations he had when he took on the show.

  “It was,” he says, “totally Truman.”

  VOLPE STANDS ON TRUMAN’S STAGE AND LOOKS OUT INTO THE AUDIENCE AFTER THE CLOSING-NIGHT PERFORMANCE OF GODSPELL, HIS FINAL TRUMAN MUSICAL, ON MARCH 9, 2013.

  EPILOGUE

  Volpe’s calendar was marked with the dates of all that he presided over at Truman High—his fall and spring productions, prom, the senior class trip, and various other traditions added in over the years, like an annual holiday formal for students. These events carried him forward, year after year, decade after decade. The milestones in his own life came up with less predictability and often took him by surprise. A door would open, revealing a path forward he had not anticipated.