At the intersection of Green Lane and Mill Creek Road, the limo turned into the Truman High parking lot and was directed into the spot closest to the front door, the principal’s space. A sort of pre-theater buffet, cold cuts and soft drinks, had been set out for Mackintosh and his traveling party in the guidance office. Volpe scurried in briefly to meet the famous producer, but he had a cast to ready for a show and, in any case, was far too nervous to eat. As he would recall, “I was delirious. I was hysterical. I thought, How am I going to make it through this night? I was running all around, trying to keep the kids calm, but they were fine. I was the one who was a mess.”
Some of the other teachers gamely made conversation with Mackintosh, but the chasm was too vast. What were they going to say to him? How are things in Malta?
• • •
Levittown is not technically a city or any kind of municipality. The Levitt-built houses sprawl over three Pennsylvania townships—Bristol, Middletown, and Falls, as well as a tiny jurisdiction called Tullytown Borough—and the children who live in them go to one of three different public school districts. Truman is part of Bristol Township, referred to as the lower end of Levittown—a designation that applies both geographically and demographically.
Mackintosh had come to Levittown on a quest: to see if Volpe and Truman could stage his musical Les Misérables at a high enough level to persuade him to make it available to other high schools. Plays that get into the bloodstream of high school theater are lucrative sources of revenue for their creators and heirs—annuities that throw off income for generations without end. Mackintosh, of course, hardly needed the money himself. And he was known to be fastidious about not granting permissions until he could be confident his shows would be produced to a certain standard.
It was Steve Spiegel, then president of Music Theatre International, the leading licensing agent for Broadway productions, who made the decision on what high school would be asked to pilot the play. He needed someone who could collaborate with MTI to pare down the show, simplify some of the music and set, while still pulling off a production that would impress Mackintosh. Spiegel had seen some Truman High shows at festivals, and he had also traveled to Truman, which was not far from his home in Princeton, to see Volpe’s work. “I could have called any of twenty-five thousand high school drama directors,” he would recall. “That’s about how many there are.”
The party from New York took up two rows, front and center, on the sixth and final night of Les Mis at Truman. Mackintosh had not made the trip just to bless the production. It didn’t work that way. It had to please him. The Truman stage was small and primitive, the fly space above it nonexistent. Generations of Volpe’s students had heard him say, “If all we had was a bare stage with one light bulb, we could still do theater.” They had more than that, but not much more.
Michael Kammerer, a senior, played the reformed convict Jean Valjean, and he was among those in the cast who, at Volpe’s behest, had gone trash-picking for elements of the set. (“Any of you with a car, round up three people and go,” were Volpe’s instructions. “Get what you can, and we’ll sort it out when you get back.”) Kammerer had a rounded, soft look, but he managed to play Valjean with a degree of ferocity. He was typical of the students in Volpe’s productions in that his life had been composed of more struggle than ease, though his circumstances were more complicated than most. He had come out as gay in tenth grade. His parents were divorced. His father had remarried numerous times, so he had half siblings and stepsiblings in multiple states and one in the Philippines. His mother was also remarried—to a man who did not like to hear him sing show tunes—so he practiced his vocals in the garage or sometimes while cutting the grass, so the power mower would muffle his voice.
From the stage, Kammerer could easily identify Mackintosh’s group, about twenty people in all. They didn’t look local. He thought to himself: Here is this famous guy from New York, and he’s sitting on these awful wooden seats in our crappy auditorium. I hope he and his friends don’t get splinters in their asses, because that would be really embarrassing.
• • •
When I drive into Levittown, I come in from the south, up I–95, and I navigate a cultural divide of my own. I was born in Levittown, spent my whole childhood there, and was Lou Volpe’s student near the beginning of his now four-decade-long career. He was my teacher, mentor, and friend, and he was central to what I would become.
I live now in Bethesda, Maryland, among people whose levels of income, education, and importance are still a marvel to me. We’re less than a half mile from the National Institutes of Health, and my zip code has one of the highest concentrations of graduate degrees per capita in the United States. I’ve done well in my career, but within a couple of blocks of my home are two Pulitzer Prize winners. If I extended the radius another two dozen blocks or so, I’d take in numerous other Pulitzer recipients, as well as the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. People on the Listserv of our public high school are always posting off-topic queries that seem to me like boasts: “Our family is going to Bali for spring break; can anyone recommend a good dive shop?”
The Levittown of my youth, and of Volpe’s early years in teaching, was the great suburban dream before the invention of the dream’s antidotes—video games, cable TV, the Internet. Levittown had no Main Street or downtown, no culture, not a single thing of visual interest. Its poverty was of a particular kind—lack of imagination, color, zest.
Rather than a childhood of wonder, I remember long stretches of boredom, that dull ache when you wish that it were already the next day, or that you could be someplace else, or that the boys you wanted to play baseball with had been home when you knocked on their doors. Some afternoons, I would just plant myself on my father’s big overstuffed chair, a serially reupholstered splendor, its indeterminate color faded by cigar smoke, and listen for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin to land with its thump against the screen door. By age twelve, I was a devotee of the political columnist Mary McGrory and the muckraker Jack Anderson. I looked at the horse-racing results because I liked the names of the horses and at the ads for the burlesque clubs because I liked the names of the dancers (Cella Phane, Pearl Harbour, Bermuda Schwartz, and so on). My comprehension of the adult world came from reading Dear Abby.
Several of the earliest memories I can summon make me think I was trying to carve out a rugged, Huck Finn–like existence in spite of the place. We explored in the one small wooded area within walking distance, looking for the hobos rumored to have made encampments. Where they would have been hiding was never clear. We climbed trees, sometimes first hammering two-by-fours into them to use as steps. We fished in an algae-choked lagoon known as the Black Ditch (its official name was the more stately Queen Anne Canal), and when the water froze over in the winter, we played ice hockey, using tree branches as sticks. One day, chasing an errant puck onto a patch of ice warmed by the sun, I fell through a crack into the frigid muck and had to be yanked by my elbows back to the surface.
We seemed to get everything wrong. Our favorite tree for climbing was called the Big Oak, which I later found out was a maple. All the streets in Levittown began with the first letter of their sections. I lived in Violetwood on Vulcan Road, which was intersected by Verdant Road—VUR-dunt, as in green or lush, but I never heard anyone, even my parents, call it anything but ver-DANT.
I had an older second cousin in the Navy, stationed in Europe, whom I met only once in my childhood. He came to stay with us and left behind a bottle of Old Spice cologne in the upstairs bathroom I shared with my brother and sister. It stayed there for years, second shelf of the medicine cabinet—milky-white bottle with the iconic line drawing of a sailing ship, a totem of our exotic visitor. As a teenager, I spent summer nights coasting around on my bicycle with friends, often well past midnight, miles in every direction. We told ourselves we were looking to meet girls, but I think we were trying to get somewhere that didn�
��t look like everywhere else. We were not coming back to this town, any of us, once we left.
In the midst of this suburban void, my own flat Earth, I encountered Volpe. I was sixteen years old, and he was my eleventh-grade English teacher. Volpe was in his mid-twenties and just starting off in his career, but he wasn’t one of those hippie teachers who talked about the Vietnam War, whole grains, and yogurt. I don’t recall thinking of him as especially young, even in relation to the other teachers. He seemed fully an adult. He wore his jet-black hair stylishly long, but not too long, and you could tell he cared about how he looked and dressed.
My education to that point had been adequate. Levittown was a factory town, and the schools proceeded along a factory model of efficiency. We put in our shifts, and all the necessary information was drilled into us. It was the tail end of the baby boom in a heavily Catholic community, back when Catholics still listened to Rome on matters of birth control. My family, with its three children, seemed abnormally small. A family on a neighboring block had twelve children. It was routine for families to have five or six kids. Our class sizes were large—mid-thirties, sometimes close to forty—and many of our teachers were stretched to their limits just trying to keep us all from teetering over into chaos.
When I look back now on what first drew me to Volpe, I think it was just that I loved to hear him talk. He had a beautiful way of speaking—sentences and whole paragraphs just seemed to flow extemporaneously, organically. He seemed literary, to the extent we knew what that was, but not spellbound by his own voice. Just as naturally as his words poured forth, they stopped, and he asked what we thought. The class went back and forth like that day after day, and when the bell rang it was always a surprise and an intrusion.
Volpe’s most pronounced quality was passion. He was so madly in love with the material he was teaching that I was swept up. I wanted to read the books he assigned to see if I could get the intense pleasure that he did from them. In his class that year, we read The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Invisible Man, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises. He gave us entry-level Bellow—Seize the Day—and Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge. We read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Streetcar Named Desire. It was, at the time, the classic American canon, but also what Volpe felt like teaching and what he thought we would like.
I still remember the simple question he asked me not long after I started in his class. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a good writer?” I had just turned in a paper on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, a book I did not particularly like and definitely didn’t understand, but I had attempted to make some original point, God knows what, and Volpe applauded my boldness. And, in fact, no one ever had pointed out that I wrote well. I don’t think I had ever been expected to do much writing. I was an athlete, interested mainly (or solely) in whatever sport was in season. If I wrote well, I probably did so without any evident sense of pride or ownership.
In the spring we studied King Lear and Hamlet. Then about ninety of us, our three sections of honors English students, spent a weekend with Volpe and a couple of other teachers at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Connecticut. It felt like an incredible extravagance. Seeing two plays a day. All of us together at a roadside motel.
Volpe was married then, and he and his wife, Marcy, had just had a son. The following year, as we moved toward graduation, he would invite some of us for dinners at his home, and Marcy would serve up big bowls of pasta with garlic bread. It was a different era. We talked about books. It felt grown-up and fun. It was a step out from our barren world and into a more enchanting one.
My father, a lawyer with a small-town practice, was the only college-educated adult I was aware of among all the parents of my friends and classmates. He had a second-floor walk-up office in the neighboring town of Bristol. My mother was his secretary, and they ate lunch together every day at a local diner, each with a copy of the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News spread out in front of them. On Sunday nights, they bowled. They hovered—happily, I’d say—between the hardscrabble Philadelphia neighborhoods they came from and a more cosmopolitan life they aspired to. When their monthly book group met at our house, I sat at the top of the stairs in my pajamas and eavesdropped. They read some popular psychology—Eric Berne’s Games People Play sticks in my mind, because my father still quotes from it—and bestsellers like Leon Uris’s Topaz. At home, we would occasionally get a knock on the door from a neighbor, and my father would step outside to talk, then drive off to bail someone out of jail.
Not long after I left for college, my father became a judge and my parents moved up-county, out of Levittown, across the Route 1 divide—and I didn’t have many occasions to go back. But I talked (and later e-mailed) with Volpe every couple of years, and I followed his growing list of accomplishments. His productions kept being selected for the Main Stage at the International Thespian Festival. Only a handful of high school productions each year are judged worthy of this honor, so Volpe’s drama troupe was like a college basketball team that keeps making it back to the Final Four—except that Truman was nothing like the big powerful teams that qualify for those repeat visits.
As well-regarded as Volpe’s program had become, the Les Mis experience and the visit from Cameron Mackintosh catapulted it to a whole new level. When the show was over that night, Mackintosh was called up onto the stage, where he accepted a bouquet of flowers, took a bow, and said to the more than eight hundred people packed into the auditorium, “This is why I do what I do. It’s not for the blockbusters. It’s for this—to get theater into schools and into all levels of culture.”
To everyone’s shock, he did not jump right back into his limo and hightail it back to New York. He stayed for the cast party in the school cafeteria. Michael Kammerer was talking to friends when Mackintosh approached. The famous producer told him he was good in the role, even if his voice did crack once or twice in the higher registers. The two of them laughed, as if they were professional colleagues. Kammerer thought to himself, How many real actors would want to be in this conversation?
The whole cast felt as if they were in a dream. No one, in their experience, chose to come to Truman. And here they had put on a show, and Cameron Mackintosh, the most powerful man on Broadway, was celebrating with them, shaking their hands, telling everyone that they had been “brilliant, just brilliant!”
After Les Misérables, Music Theatre International came calling again (not for the last time), and in 2007, Truman became the first high school to stage a production of Rent, a show most high schools still will not touch because of its subject matter: AIDS, addiction, homosexuality, and homophobia. Allan Larson, the father of the late playwright Jonathan Larson, made the trip to Levittown and sat in the same unimproved auditorium and on the same wood-plank seats as Mackintosh had.
• • •
Three years after Truman’s staging of Rent—and thirty-six years after my own high school graduation—I was asked to give the commencement speech at Truman High. The high school my own children attended held its graduation ceremonies at Constitution Hall, near the White House. Built in 1929 by the Daughters of the American Revolution, it is a grand, historic venue, but one that I never liked for that purpose because it was just a rented space; it wasn’t theirs. My own graduation had taken place on the high school football field.
Having grown up in a place I was dying to escape, then landing in one where I sometimes feel like an imposter, hardly makes me unique. Mobility, reinvention, identity: These themes are central to the American story, and, in fact, were threaded through the literature I read in Lou Volpe’s classroom. (I had particularly liked Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, not generally considered a terrific book. But Carrie Meeber got out! Out of her prison of a hometown in rural Wisconsin, into the clamor of big-city Chicago and ultimately New York. That it all ended badly for her did not make much of an impression on me.)
On the night of Truman’s 2010 commencement, I parked across the road in the open field we knew as Booz’s Farm, where my mother used to buy tomatoes, sweet corn, and melons from a stand at the intersection. Bloomsdale (Hollywood) was right down the hill, and the parents and siblings of its graduates walked by on the shoulder of the road on their way to the ceremony. I was led to a seat on a stage set down on about the ten-yard line, with the Blue Ridge section of Levittown—Butternut Road, Balsam Road, Bittersweet Drive—just behind me.
My mother had died about eight months earlier, and my eighty-four-year-old father, in a natty seersucker suit, sat in a reserved section with the school board president, an old friend. It was a cloudless seventy-five degrees. The sun was still in the sky, the humidity blessedly low. I felt happy, and oddly at home.
I had been told to speak for no more than five minutes, though three minutes would be better, which seemed perfect to me. At my son’s high school graduation a week earlier, I had listened as a self-important cable news commentator droned on for thirty minutes about the future of the media in a digital world. At Truman that night, I passed along some gentle guidance, advising the graduates not to let go of cherished possessions that might seem childish now that they were passing into the adult world—their baseball gloves, skateboards, stuffed animals, favorite books. Thinking of the many hours I spent coasting around Levittown, talking with my friends and plotting our futures, I said they should hang on to their bicycles—or if they didn’t already have one, buy one. I said something about how everyone should have a passport, which even as the words left my mouth seemed too exotic.
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