Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  She had a boyfriend when she met up with Volpe that second time, but he was in Vietnam. Volpe was going to school during the week and selling home furniture on weekends at Strawbridge’s, one of the downtown department stores where he used to shop with his mother. (He had always had some kind of job since he was eleven years old and began delivering the Philadelphia Bulletin on his bicycle.) He was also in the ROTC, so two days a week he wore a military uniform to campus, drilled, and learned to fire a rifle. He kept his shoes shined and his brass polished. He expected ultimately to be drafted and serve—the war was in full swing, and he was nothing if not dutiful—but a high blood pressure reading kept him out of the military and Vietnam.

  Marcy and Lou went to a jazz concert together, and she had a great time despite her avowed dislike of jazz. They started spending more time together. She considered him the most handsome man that she had ever been with, the best dancer, the hardest worker. They were married on July 11, 1970, about a year after his graduation, in a morning wedding Mass followed by a reception at a catering hall in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Her bridesmaids wore dresses in lemon and lime colors. His groomsmen wore morning coats. “It was a morning wedding,” he recalls. “I think I insisted on that.”

  Marcy was not Italian, and Lily Volpe referred to her as “the American girl,” which she pronounced with a Sicilian inflection—“the a-MEHR-ugn girl.” (This despite the fact that her day-to-day English was entirely unaccented.) Marcy took pride in her ability to hold up her end of the conversation at social gatherings with her husband’s college friends and, later, with his faculty colleagues. She enjoyed the secondhand education she got from typing his graduate school papers.

  The newly married couple picked up an inexpensive painting at a yard sale—a blue-eyed, blond princess standing next to a dark, bearded prince—and hung it in their living room. It wasn’t a very good piece of art, but it was their own little joke. They were the prince and princess. Lou Volpe was, as well, gay, which he knew on the day he was married and, in fact, sensed long before he could give what he was feeling a name.

  • • •

  Volpe had spent his college years as an English major, reading novels and writing papers, which was exactly what he wanted to do—“I thought, This is great! I’m going to school and doing the thing that I love”—though hardly an approach tailored to job-seeking.

  The Vietnam War, however, had taken some young Americans out of the workforce, and the school-age population was still booming, so teachers were needed. He enrolled in a couple of education courses at Temple University the summer after his graduation, having taken none at La Salle, and was granted an “emergency teaching certificate.” The chairman of Truman’s English department recognized a passion and potential in Volpe and hired him in November of 1969, a few months after the school year started, to teach English.

  On his first day of teaching, Volpe was surprised to see sheep roaming in the field across the street at Booz’s Farm. As he got to know his students, he learned that many had never been to Center City Philadelphia, where the city’s restaurants, theaters, and museums were, all of twenty miles away. Their parents, in many cases, had been raised in city neighborhoods, but it was as if they had made a clean break, an escape.

  But Levittown, in other respects, was not so different from the tree-lined neighborhood in which Volpe was raised. He had not, after all, grown up above his father’s Rex Café in gritty South Philly, nor would he have wanted to. He sought his own kind of comfort. He was an adventurous reader and theatergoer, but less so an adventurous person. He liked the idea of being a conventional person, a schoolteacher and family man, and Levittown was full of people seeking conventional lives. “They wanted to be safe and protected and have a pleasant life,” Volpe said. “I totally got that and I never looked down on it.”

  His work ethic was set at the same high level as those relatives of his who put in murderous hours inside their taverns, pizza joints, and hoagie shops. That first year, he got in the habit of arriving at school by six A.M., a routine he would maintain for the next forty years. He liked the dimly lit corridors of the empty building, the peace, the promise of the day ahead. He would drink his coffee, go through lesson plans, or sometimes just read a book. “I was terrified, of course, but I knew there was something inside of me that wanted to give this knowledge to people, and I really believed I could do that,” he recalls. “As scared as I was, I loved it right away. Every single day in the classroom was like a celebration. It was just this wonderful feeling that I was doing exactly what I was meant to do.”

  His first students were in the vo-tech program—vocations and technology—and took half their classes in such disciplines as auto mechanics, carpentry, baking, welding, and hairdressing. Volpe figured if he made literature compelling enough, they would enjoy it. He never imagined he would turn any of them into scholars, “but I’d like to think I helped them in some way in the lives they went on to live.”

  Before he became a teacher, Volpe had no experience in theater—none. It is the great oddity of his career. He had never acted, never painted a set, never worked on a stage crew, never ushered or as much as sold a ticket. He loved the theater and talked about it with friends and with his mother. Voraciously read reviews and theater histories. But he was strictly a patron.

  A couple of months into his first year of teaching, he was headed home at the end of a day when he heard the sounds of a rehearsal in progress in the auditorium, which was just steps from his exit to the parking lot. He opened the door and took a seat in the back row, watched for a few minutes, then continued on his way. He began dropping in several times a week, staying longer, watching with a more critical eye. There is a particular moment he remembers vividly. The cast was rehearsing Camelot, the musical. The drama sponsor, a woman named Joan Mott, a “very nice person” and his colleague on the English faculty, was staging a scene and blocking the actors. “And I’m sitting and watching—and this sounds so self-confident—but I said to myself, Hmm, I wouldn’t do it that way. I wouldn’t have them there. I wouldn’t have them say it like that.”

  The next day, he asked Mott if she needed any help with the musical. No, not on the creative end, she said, but would he want to help with ticket sales and other administrative tasks? Eager to deepen his involvement at the school, and never afraid of putting in more hours, Volpe readily agreed. At the end of the school year, Mott left the faculty to move to a farm in Maryland with her husband to raise chickens, and Volpe applied to be assistant drama director. “I thought, Oh my God, she’s buying a chicken farm. I guess she really, really doesn’t want to be in education anymore.”

  Applying to be the assistant drama director was a classic rookie teacher’s mistake. There was such a job on the books, but no one had filled it for years. If it paid anything at all, it would have been pennies per hour. If you did the math on what the drama director got paid and figured in all the hours required, it probably did not amount to any more than two bucks an hour.

  One day that summer, Volpe came back into his house from running errands and Marcy handed him an envelope from the school district. It was from the principal. “Dear Lou,” it said, “Congratulations on your appointment as drama director.” The letter went on to express confidence that he would do a terrific job and take the program to great new heights. Volpe thought, They’ve made a mistake. I don’t know the techniques. I don’t know the nomenclature. I don’t know anything that I haven’t seen from a seat in the audience or read in a book. No one else, though, had applied. He became the school’s drama director by default.

  In his first year, he considered the vast array of material he could choose from—all of Shakespeare, of course; one of the very serious Eugene O’Neill dramas; light fare from Neil Simon; old standards like Our Town and Arsenic and Old Lace. He finally decided: We’ll do something classic. We’re going to do Antigone, but we’ll do it very modern.

  The set
was all white—white pillars, white ramps, white everything. It looked like some kind of soap commercial gone terribly wrong. He costumed the actors in green plastic trash bags. Their armor was sculpted out of foil, Reynolds Wrap purchased at the local Acme supermarket. (At least no one would be able to say the new drama director didn’t stay within budget.) Just one performance was scheduled. The “saving grace” was that no more than fourteen people came to watch. “It was the biggest disaster in theater, all of theater. I couldn’t tell you what made me do it that way. When it was over, people did that thing where they clap, but very slowly. No one would look at me. Not even Marcy. Everyone averted their eyes.”

  Volpe had no choice but to get some training in the theater or endure further humiliation. He attended productions at other local high schools and made friends and mentors of their drama directors. He took classes anywhere he could find them—back at La Salle, at Temple, at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

  He started with basics—classes that made him go through exercises like picking a penny off the floor and accounting for every part of the multistep process to hammer home the lesson that every movement onstage has a purpose. He spent part of a summer at the drama school at Northwestern, where the program included a three-day-a-week, three-hour improv session with Dawn Mora, a venerated instructor. “We had to create three different characters from three generations—a child, a middle-aged man, and an old man. They had to have a background, a life, and we had to show them to her. She wanted to see everything about them. When you were finished, you were soaking wet.” He learned about acting from Mora, but more so how to teach it in an atmosphere of “complete trust and honesty. She accepted nothing less.”

  Volpe obviously had innate talents that related to theater—an ear for language, a feel for pacing and for calibration of emotional pitch, an acute visual sense. But it was untapped and entirely untrained. From the day he started as drama director, “I knew what I wanted to do on the stage, but I didn’t really know how to get there. I had to learn balance, harmony, order, design, composition. I had to learn that all good theater is a process and you must go through it totally or an element will be missed somewhere, and the end result will be nothing more than mediocre.”

  There is a difference between people who strive and those who merely work hard. Levittown was full of hard workers, hourly wage-earners who eagerly stepped forward for overtime shifts and spent what extra money they had to repave their driveways, build rec rooms, or buy RVs. The community in its early years was a destination; it was full of people who felt they had arrived. Three years into Volpe’s tenure as head of the drama program, a new principal took charge. Larry Bosley was a smart man, ambitious for himself (he later became a superintendent) and for the school. He was himself a striver, and he sought to instill that ethos in the school. He told Volpe that great high schools had great theater programs that put on big, showy musicals, and that’s what he wanted. Bosley directed a little more money into the program and made sure Volpe had an assistant as well as the energetic support of the music and visual arts departments.

  Volpe’s first musical, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, ran for three performances—a Friday and Saturday night with a matinee in between—of nearly packed houses. The next year, Volpe did Bye Bye Birdie and again nearly sold the performances out.

  One way that high school theater bears some similarity to professional theater, or any kind of show business, is that ticket sales matter. The more money you take in, the more that you have to pour into future performances. Bosley wanted shows that stretched over two weekends so word of mouth could promote the last two shows. Volpe agreed, and he also liked the idea “because the kids have that week in between where everyone they know is patting them on the back and telling them how great they are. They put so much into it; it’s nice if it doesn’t end so fast.”

  Volpe began to dabble in somewhat edgier fare, beginning with Pippin, a dark and existential musical inspired by the story of Charlemagne’s rebellious son. As directed by Bob Fosse on Broadway, the dancing was raucous, and the themes—Pippin’s relationships with multiple women, his struggles with authority and the church—were overtly presented. “Now everybody does Pippin,” Volpe says. “It’s safe and tame by today’s standards. But it was controversial then.”

  He toned the show down some, but the subject matter was the same. Volpe did not consider it gratuitous or overly sexualized, but neither was it dated and musty. Its themes—a young person searching for his place in the world, pushing boundaries, rejecting the established order—were ones he would come back to again and again. What could be more appropriate and compelling for high school actors and audiences? And wasn’t it better to explore and work them out in a rockin’ musical than in some droning, hectoring lecture from their teachers or parents?

  Some of the faculty, though, were not thrilled. “A few teachers were furious, and they let me know it,” he recalls. A mother who attended the play with her high school daughter complained about it in a memorable letter to the local newspaper. “I thought I was going to see Pippi Longstocking!” she wrote. But Pippin did sell tickets. And even those who had problems with its content could see that Truman Drama was getting better and Volpe—as the letter hiring him seemed to too optimistically predict—really was taking it to new heights.

  • • •

  Over the course of the two years I spend with Volpe—at rehearsals and performances, in his classroom, around the school—it never stops feeling strange to walk the corridors of Truman High and encounter decades-old memories and even vestiges of old panics. Any sighting of a mathematical equation on a blackboard still makes me queasy. When I glimpse a periodic table through the open door of a chemistry classroom, it looks like no less of a jumble.

  The lunchroom brings back other memories, including the day in eleventh grade when I walked in wearing a pair of bell-bottoms with wide pastel stripes—pink, green, blue, orange—along with platform shoes purchased from a store called the Wild Pair, and one of the school’s prettiest and blondest cheerleaders looked me up and down and said, “You’re kidding, right?” I said, Yes, I’m kidding. My classmate David Uosikkinen, who would become the drummer for the rock band the Hooters, wore platform shoes; I apparently believed I could pull off the same look.

  A ball field at one corner of the school calls forth the end of my senior year and my last honest-to-God fistfight, a scrap with a football player named Richard Harrison, a perfectly nice guy I’d known since first grade, during a daylong game of team handball—a rough sport made even more brutal by the fact that we didn’t actually know the rules. It was my very last day of twelfth grade; what were they going to do, suspend us?

  Some obvious things have changed at Truman, starting, somewhat oddly, with the name of the school itself. When I attended, it was called Woodrow Wilson High School, its name since the doors opened in 1959. A few years after I graduated, a second high school in the district closed, and its student population was subsumed into Wilson. In order not to ruffle feelings and to give the impression that a “new” institution was being formed out of these merged schools, the Bristol Township School Board, a body of faithful Democrats, gave the school the name of a more recent Democratic president, Harry S Truman. It took me a while to get used to calling my old school by its new name.

  Truman can be a rough place. One day when I pull into the school’s parking lot, all the usual spaces are taken, and I find myself in an unfamiliar section where a space is set off by a sign that says RESERVED FOR PROBATION OFFICER. It is one of many little reminders that I am not in Bethesda anymore; I’m back home.

  Volpe’s informality with his students is a way of relating that some teachers at the school do not believe they could maintain without losing authority. When order and peace prevail at Truman, it is because the administration and faculty keep a tight rein—or at least that’s what the adults running the show believe.

 
The seniors have a tradition of going out to breakfast en masse one morning in the spring. In 2012, they show up for school late after this event, about nine A.M. They have the book thrown at them. Their parents are called and lunch detentions are handed out, along with Saturday school for those with previous infractions. “I need to get out of this place before it strangles me,” says one of Volpe’s students, a girl ranked fifth academically in the senior class. “They’re making such a huge deal of this. We weren’t doing anything mean or destructive. We were at a diner, eating eggs!”

  I would never have described Volpe as a tough guy. In my mind, the teachers who fit that description were the football coaches with the burr haircuts and quick tempers. But it turns out that he is a very tough guy. It’s the only way he could have survived at Truman, particularly for four decades. He knows what he wants and does not easily back down. He has not been beyond dispensing or at least threatening a little street justice in the school corridors.

  When Tracey Krause was Volpe’s student in the mid-1990s, she didn’t get parts at first because Volpe wasn’t sure he could depend on her. Later, after she had found a place in his program, Volpe discovered that her boyfriend had been physically abusive to her. He went looking for him between classes. When he found him, as Krause put it, “Lou jacked him up”—Levittown-speak for grabbing someone by the collar and lifting him off his feet—“and told him it was going to stop right then and there. He did it right in B Hall. And that was the end of it. Lou scared the shit out of him.”

  The composition of the neighborhoods that Truman draws from has changed in some small ways. A number of students at Truman have the last name Patel, a common Indian name and one I never heard in my days in Levittown. Truman also now includes a sprinkling of Hispanics among its 1,600 or so students—from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Central America—whereas in my day I was aware of just one, a girl from Honduras, who would marry a good friend of mine.