Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  I try to say something helpful, but what would that be? I’m sure your dad will come back? He’ll have to pay that money and you won’t have to move?

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll get through it.”

  I talk to Volpe’s students during rehearsal breaks and sometimes after school in the easy chairs in Room B8, the theater classroom, where they have a sense of comfort. I visit them in their homes and travel with them to the high school theater festivals where they feel like stars—an unaccustomed feeling for kids from Truman. It’s a sad fact that they have to go far from home for people to think they’re worth much.

  Courtney Meyer says one day, “I’ve overheard kids from other schools saying, ‘Do you know if the Truman kids are here yet?’ It’s like we were awaited. It’s totally different than back home, where kids from other schools consider us the lowest of the low. I hate to put it this way, but we’re considered, like, this shit school.”

  When Truman High is mentioned in the Philadelphia newspapers, it’s often in the context of Head Start programs, free school lunches, and other boosters to pull children up from their unfortunate circumstances. (That is, when it’s not about drugs, crime, or some flare-up of violence.) Sometimes I have to ask myself: Is this where I grew up? And it isn’t, really, except in a strictly geographic sense.

  Courtney talks about the acclaim Truman Drama attracts, the attention it gets from New York. It’s different from anything else in her life. “I wonder if I’m ever going to be part of something this big again. Realistically, I don’t know.”

  Courtney’s parents split up when she was four years old, and her father moved with his mother to a town two hours away, in the Pocono Mountains. Soon after, Courtney moved to her mother’s new boyfriend’s house. “That’s when my little sister came along.” But her mother’s new relationship didn’t last. “It went on for something like ten years, thirteen years, I’m not really sure, but we got to stay in the house. Her boyfriend was the one who moved out.”

  Courtney’s mother, who grew up in Croydon, has waited tables at Georgine’s, one of the better restaurants in the area, since she was seventeen years old. Her maternal grandmother worked there as well, “right up until the day she died.” As Courtney sees it, the Georgine’s waitresses are miserable in their jobs, but even so, she has recently started working banquets. She hadn’t planned on it; it just sort of happened. She figures, in her sardonic way, she is part of a dynasty: “third-generation Georgine’s.”

  Of the six cast members of Good Boys and True, Courtney is the most enigmatic and easily the most perplexing. She frustrates not only her teachers, but sometimes also her friends. “I love her to death, but I just don’t get her,” Bobby Ryan says. “She’s Croydon, and I feel like she’s gonna be Croydon till the day she dies.”

  A good reader and skilled writer, Courtney easily masters her schoolwork, except when she is indifferent to it. She did well in the one Advanced Placement course she took. She likes to use the word realistically, which I come to realize is a rationale—an excuse to not dream, or even plan ahead, because much of what she might want for herself, upon reflection, does not seem realistic. Halfway through her senior year, Courtney has yet to take her SATs, let alone think about college. She is acutely aware of her flaws. And too forgiving of them. “Yeah, everybody says to me, ‘Courtney, you’re so smart.’ But I’m very irresponsible. I’m impulsive. It’s terrible, to tell you the truth.”

  In ninth grade, Courtney worked the lights in a Truman production. The next year, Bobby Ryan, whom she had a crush on, convinced her to audition for Rimers. She blushes easily—“I could feel my face go totally red”—but felt that Volpe and Krause sensed something in her that would project onstage. “I think they liked my vulnerability,” she says. “That’s probably the main thing they saw in me.”

  The cast mate who became her longtime high school boyfriend was not Bobby Ryan, but Wayne Miletto, who in Good Boys plays the part of the football coach. It was an unlikely match. At Truman, Wayne is known as a straight arrow, Mr. Responsibility. He is not a prude, or judgmental, but he knows what he wants and lets nothing deter him. Courtney admired his self-discipline, which she felt she had in short supply. “Nothing can stop Wayne. He won’t let it,” she says. “He’s very strong. I’m sure he’s told you he never has known his father. His mom got another boyfriend and had another child. He handled it. He handles everything.”

  Wayne, a husky guy when I first met him, was even heavier early in high school. Courtney’s friends didn’t get it. They figured she would be with a cuter guy—as well as someone who went out on weekends and cut loose. Courtney prided herself on her unconventionality. “I like the different people. I like the complex people. I’ll pretty much date the ugliest person in the entire world if he can make me laugh and we have a good time. Looks were never important to me. My friends would be like, ‘How can you be with him?’ I would think, Do you hear yourself? You sound dumb. It made me more determined to be with him.”

  What was more problematic, especially back home in Croydon, was the fact that Wayne is black. He rode the school bus home with Courtney once, felt uncomfortable at comments directed at him, and told her not to expect him to ever do that again. A person she felt close to had a tattoo on his leg that said WHITE PRIDE. He saw a picture of Wayne on Courtney’s cell phone one day—it was her wallpaper—and asked, “Are you dating him?” “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m dating him.’ He went on to say things like, ‘Have fun getting AIDS. You’re so dirty. You’re dead to me.’”

  What ultimately undermined the relationship was something Courtney did. “Like I told you already, I’m irresponsible,” she says before going into the details, which by high school standards are utterly prosaic. She hooked up with another boy. “The kid I was with was totally drunk. It should never have happened. I messed up and I ruined something that was really good. It became a huge deal at school. Everybody thought I was such a bitch. I went through this period of time where I was just a blob who came to school.”

  Truman is sort of the no-drama drama troupe. Of course some of the students attracted to it have problems; they’re in high school. At Truman, they are without privilege and—it is easy for them to feel—without prospects. But Volpe’s stage is not a place for them to work out their personal issues. They hold themselves apart from the overly dramatic “drama kids” they meet from other schools, the ones who dress eccentrically and seem to revel in swaying between the extremes of depression and elation, as if the spotlight is perpetually on them.

  The Truman troupe can be arrogant about these distinctions they make, but their pridefulness is an ingredient of their success. Elsewhere, the students have tangible advantages—better theaters, bigger stages, parents who buy them private voice lessons and put them in expensive theater camps. It’s a lot to compete against. What Volpe’s kids have is an ethos.

  Stephen Sondheim once said, “It never occurs to me to write a song just for the pleasure of writing a song. It has to be an assignment.” The Truman actors embrace a similarly resolute approach. At the drama festivals, they decline all invitations to play theater games at the lunch table. What they do instead is eat lunch. Truman Drama is a workplace. You throw off your troubles as best you can, square your shoulders, and reach within. “At other schools, it’s kind of the misfit kids who do theater,” Courtney Meyer says. “Some of them are strange, and personally, I love strange. I really do. But most of us in Truman theater are—I don’t know what the word for it is—normal, I guess.”

  Bobby Ryan amplifies her point: “We’re not typical theater kids, and we don’t want to be typical theater kids.”

  The culture of Truman theater and the weight of Volpe’s four-decade legacy has its drawbacks—and not just that some of the kids from other schools might resent their air of superiority. Volpe’s kids can sometimes be too hard on themselves. When Courtney was in the grip of her turmoil over Wayne, in e
leventh grade, she decided she could not participate in that spring’s production (a rare light selection designed to attract a big box office, High School Musical 2). She did not want to bring her personal drama to rehearsals and to be around her former boyfriend every afternoon and feel that everyone was always looking at her.

  This, of course, is a particular high school syndrome: the feeling that if you’re in some emotional distress, other people are always focusing as intensely on your problems as you are. But Courtney felt it proper to spare everyone else her pain. It was not what Volpe counseled her to do, or what he wanted her to do, but she couldn’t be talked out of it. “The thing you have to understand,” she says, “is that Truman theater is tough love. It’s no place for crybabies. You don’t get coddled. If you have something in your own life you can’t handle, you shouldn’t be there.”

  • • •

  The author of Good Boys and True is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a versatile playwright and TV writer who in 2011 was commissioned by the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark to rewrite parts of the troubled, $100 million Broadway musical after it had been savaged by critics. (And after numerous actors involved in the high-flying show had come crashing down and suffered injuries.) Aguirre-Sacasa had been a writer for HBO’s acclaimed Big Love, a drama about a polygamist Mormon family. In 2011, he signed on as a coproducer and writer of NBC’s Glee.

  The son of a Nicaraguan diplomat, he set Good Boys in a world he knew well: a posh suburb of Washington, D.C., and an elite high school he called St. Joseph’s Preparatory School for Boys. The two characters at the center of the story, Brandon Hardy (played by Zach Philippi) and Justin Simmons (Bobby Ryan) are best friends. Even within their bastion of privilege, Brandon is royalty—second generation at St. Joseph’s, football captain, the son of two doctors. Justin is the first of his family to attend St. Joseph’s, a nonathlete and more on the school’s social periphery. He has not come out as gay, but his sexuality is an open secret.

  Brandon seems to have left the sex tape, his secretly recorded session with Cheryl Moody, in a football teammate’s locker—accidentally on purpose, as it is said. He wants it to be discovered in order to validate his masculine credentials, an important consideration at an all-boys school when your best friend is gay and he has given you blow jobs—including once at the St. Joseph’s pool, where they fear classmates may have witnessed them.

  Not only do Brandon’s teammates see the tape, but copies are made and circulated at other high schools and around the community. TV news crews descend on St. Joseph’s to cover the episode and question what kind of warped values the school must be incubating. After Brandon can no longer deny that he is the one in the tape, his friend Justin confronts him with the theory that he orchestrated the whole episode as an elaborate subterfuge. After all, if the great golden boy Brandon Hardy is seen by his mates having sex with a girl, then he could not possibly be gay. “Christ, what did you imagine?” Justin asks. “One scandal—a better scandal—replacing another?”

  Good Boys, though wordy in parts, is nonetheless a great play for high school actors and audiences. Three of the six parts—the two boys and Cheryl—allow high schoolers to play high school–aged roles. The other three—the football coach (Wayne Miletto), Brandon’s mother (Mariela Castillo), and his mother’s sister (Britney Harron)—demand that students portray adults. The subject matter—the power and peril of sex, secrets and lies that spin out of control—speaks to high schoolers. A great many teenagers, after all, feel themselves to be just one mortifying misstep from being found out for something—by their parents or friends or by anyone who can see too deeply into their true selves. “It’s universal, doing something really regrettable that comes back to bite you in the ass,” Bobby Ryan observes. “Either you’ve been in that situation or you know someone who has.”

  Courtney Meyer appreciates that the play feels real. “They weren’t just holding hands and going to the school dance together. People our age, where we’re from, we get that. The choices you make have big consequences.”

  Aguirre-Sacasa has said that his drama first presents as a whodunit and evolves into a “whydunit.” The plot partly tracks his own life. “The irony is, I did play football,” he said in a 2008 interview. “And I definitely knew I was gay, and there was definitely no talking about that. There were no ‘out’ students; there were kids who seemed effeminate. I guess I was maybe one of them. I was living a straight life, playing football—and then doing plays. So I didn’t feel like that much of an outsider, except that I knew that I was fundamentally different from most of my classmates.”

  For all its focus on sexuality, however, the play is as much about class, privilege, and power, subjects virtually unexplored in America’s classrooms, as it is about sex. Cheryl Moody is a public school girl who works in a dreary mall job to earn money for college. She has goals, but you sense it is no sure thing she will attain them. As Brandon approaches, she is on lunch break, reading a textbook and eating french fries—which he leans over and samples without asking. When he introduces himself, she says, “I know who you are.” She has been to his high school games and knows he is the vaunted captain of the St. Joseph’s football team.

  He takes advantage of her, in large part, because he can.

  • • •

  The Truman stage is the one place Courtney does not put limits on herself. She can twist a one-syllable word in a way that seems to give it layers of meaning. She approaches building a character, the art of constructing a story beyond what the playwright has written on the page, as if she is writing fiction, and she thinks her way through parts as well as any actor Volpe has ever had. “You have to think of who your character is, who her friends are, if she has a good relationship with her parents or not, what motivates her,” she says. “The script gives you some idea, but you have to figure out the rest of it yourself. Then everything you do onstage, the way you say your lines, how you move, is based on that.”

  Courtney finds the experience of acting almost impossible to describe. Some of what she feels seems to her almost contradictory. Onstage, she sees more deeply into herself, but not in a way that is narcissistic. The self-focus actually connects her more deeply with other people—the other actors, people in the audience, even the fictional characters in the plays. Life in Croydon does not often uplift her. Taking the job at Georgine’s felt like a death sentence. But theater is not an escape. In some ways, it is the opposite of that—it brings her closer to the true self she thinks she might be, or could become. “When you act, it’s like you have so many more ways of seeing, and more parts of you are alive than in real life. Everything you are comes out.”

  When Courtney read for the part of Cheryl Moody, Volpe knew immediately he was right when he figured she was the one for the role. “I was like, Oh my God, here she is already. There was such a mix of loser/fighter/feminist/teenager in the reading. As she developed the role, it only got better. Her character was never sentimental, and it could have been. She was so intelligent and yet so victimized. She didn’t want sympathy; she wanted justice.”

  Volpe has been Courtney’s teacher and director for three years. She exasperates him, as she does everyone who roots for her success, but he loves her mind and courage. “She crosses every social boundary in the building, and that is very rare,” he says. “She can talk to the really smart kids, to some of the very tough white kids, to the minorities. She has friends who are going to great colleges and are straight and narrow and do just what their parents say. And she has friends that smoke pot every weekend. She is honest and she is totally nonjudgmental, which is amazing for a kid who is eighteen years old.

  “She really is one of the best high school definitions of a feminist I’ve known. She commands a lot of respect for that, but she also gets a lot of whispers down the hallway and name-calling. She deals with it. She doesn’t let it bother her.”

  Volpe does not like to typecast his actors
, though in high school it is sometimes unavoidable. His actors are young and can draw from only limited life experience, so sometimes he has to reach for an actor who he knows will have some understanding of her character. It provides something like a head start in the role. And even professional actors borrow from their own lives. It can’t be the only attribute an actor brings to a role, but it doesn’t hurt.

  Uta Hagen, who originated the role of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway in 1963, would later write, “Martha is the daughter of a professor whom she adores; she lives in a college town; and as the play opens, she and her husband are returning from a faculty party. I am the daughter of a famous professor whom I adored; I was raised in a university town; I did attend many faculty parties. Consequently, those things were real to me and directly usable for that particular aspect of my work on the part.”

  Courtney is able to make the initial misstep of Cheryl Moody’s—going off with Brandon—fathomable. “She understands what it means to be seduced by a beautiful young man,” Volpe says. “She allows her character to believe the lie. Her voice has so many tones to it. She can be seductive and naive all in one sentence.” At one point in the play, Cheryl Moody is confronted by Brandon’s mother, who comes to apologize, but also to try to understand how a young girl could have had sex with a boy she had just met. Cheryl responds, “Mrs. Hardy. Have you seen your son? Do you realize what he looks like?” The mother says that, yes, her son is handsome. No, Cheryl replies, “he’s sexy.”

  In building the character, Courtney decides that the most important thing is to make it about more than just a physical attraction. “I don’t want to play her as just a slutty girl,” she says. “There are millions of slutty girls. They’re not interesting.”