Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Brandon Hardy’s parents are both doctors. It’s not clear what Cheryl’s parents do, but clearly something much lower down the socioeconomic scale. Courtney imagines her character as naive, and also somewhat socially isolated. She’s popular, perhaps, but closed off—she has no close confidante to help her assess reality. None of this is in the playwright’s script; Courtney is writing a backstory based on what she imagines and what she knows of real life. “Yeah, there was a sexual thing,” she says, “but every time people feel a sexual attraction they don’t jump into bed together. It has to be more than that. She goes in for a different kind of fantasy. She thinks if she sleeps with Brandon, that will get her out of the world she’s in and into his world. Yeah, that’s totally stupid. The audience can see that. It’s never going to happen—she’s not the same class as him—but she doesn’t see that until it’s too late, and she didn’t have anyone to tell her that.”

  L. J. CARULLI AS ANGEL IN TRUMAN’S 2007 PRODUCTION OF RENT.

  IT’S A PLAY, DUDE

  In the early years, as Volpe was learning and still getting started, one show—and one student—changed the program forever and set it apart from probably ninety-nine percent of the other high schools in America. Without this student, whose name was Michael Massari, Good Boys and True would have looked different. It might not have been possible, or at least not as credible and visceral. It is a play that needed to be cast from the full range of the school’s population, particularly the full range of males.

  “I really was a strange one,” is the first thing Massari tells me after I track him down in Florida, as if this were something that must be stated at the outset.

  Massari was a young man of disparate parts, not all of which fit together neatly. He was a vegetarian, perhaps the only one in Levittown at the time. (He volunteered the precise date of when he last ate meat—May 12, 1972, at fourteen years old.) A championship wrestler. A self-identified pacifist. A bicycle racer who went on long solo training rides in the mornings before school. A hard-hitting linebacker and captain on the football team who left the field and refused to return when a brawl erupted in his final high school game. “It shocked and saddened me,” he says. “I couldn’t justify going back out there.” He was even an honorary stoner. “My eyes are deep-set and kind of don’t open all the way, so they thought I was one of them.”

  Massari was also religious. His family belonged to a Baptist church, and he sang in its choir and believed in the doctrines. He founded Truman’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and friends could depend on him to get them home safely from parties because he did not drink. His rationale for vegetarianism came from Genesis: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”

  In the fall of 1976, Volpe announced his choice of a musical for that year: Godspell, a show that began as the late playwright John-Michael Tebelak’s master’s thesis at Carnegie Mellon University and opened with great success on Broadway in 1971. It is a distinctly 1960s take on the Gospel of St. Matthew, a sort of period piece within a period piece that was initially criticized for its flower-child vibe and hippie-dippie costuming.

  Massari had not previously been involved in theater, but was driven to seek a specific role—he wanted to be Jesus. “I knew nothing about theater, but I was drawn in when he picked Godspell, and I thought I had a little advantage because I connected with the material,” he recalls. “This wasn’t Hello, Dolly! It was stuff I was involved in intensely in every aspect of my life.” He particularly liked the persona of Jesus as imagined by the musical’s creators. “In Godspell, Jesus stirs the pot. He’s a rebel, and I was a rebel.” Other inducements were calling Massari to the stage, too. “I really liked the girls. It seemed to me there were always beautiful girls involved in drama, and they looked so good onstage when they were all made up.”

  Another lure was Volpe himself, his English teacher. “Intellectually, he just absolutely had a door wide open for those of us who were looking for that. Most teachers didn’t even know where to find that door. I wanted to be near him. That was a big part of it.”

  Volpe was at first shocked to find one of the school’s top athletes among those competing for parts, then delighted by Massari’s voice and natural ease. He put Massari through a short improv—told him that he had come downstairs on Christmas morning looking for a special gift he had requested. “I remember it so vividly,” Massari says. “I went through the motions like I was unwrapping it, and all the sudden he says, ‘It’s a pogo stick,’ and I started playing with it. I’m hopping around and he says, ‘You just broke your mom’s favorite lamp.’ I had no inner eye to know how good or bad I was, but I liked it right away, and Lou saw enough to know that even though I was green, I had something he could shape and mold.”

  Volpe cast Massari as Jesus, but right away, a major obstacle emerged: the wrestling coach. It was midseason; Massari had run up ten wins in his first eleven matches, and he seemed headed for a strong performance in the state tournament. Letters from college coaches landed regularly in his mailbox at home, holding out the prospect of scholarships. Everyone saw him as a wrestler, even if he saw himself as more than that. This was all occurring thirty years before the hit television show Glee popularized the notion—which even now is more an idea than a reality in most high schools—that a top athlete would participate in drama. Volpe was still a young teacher, not that far removed from staging Antigone in garbage bags and tinfoil. Wrestling was, at the time, a premier sport at the school, coached by a Truman grad who had gone on to compete in college. The coach’s brother was a school legend who wrestled at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  To make matters worse, Larry Bosley, the principal who had been such a partisan for theater, had already moved on. “The coaches were furious, and I would not have pressed it,” Volpe says. “I was so terrified of those people. But this boy wanted to be in the musical. I don’t know if he was a born-again Christian—we didn’t even hear that phrase much back then—but the religiousness of it was really motivating him. He was Jesus, and he would not be denied.”

  Massari didn’t consider his quest unreasonable, nor did he fully grasp how many steps down the ladder the drama program ranked from a powerhouse athletic team. “I figured, why shouldn’t I be trying different things? I do multiple things all the time.”

  Volpe arranged to alter the rehearsal schedule so his Jesus would miss only a small portion of each week’s wrestling practices. But when Massari informed the coach he wanted to do both, he was told that even if he did manage to maintain his prowess on the mat, he would be setting a bad example, as a senior and a captain, by not showing total commitment. “He laid this decision on me, and all I could think of is, I really want to wrestle. I’m good. I’ve got schools looking at me. But I want to do this other thing, too, and I know I can because I’m working out on my own, I’m in amazing shape, and I eat a lot healthier than anybody in the whole school.”

  Massari approached his guidance counselor for help, but already knew not to expect an ally. The counselor had recently tried to redirect him from his focus on English to more of a science and math orientation so he could take something practical, like engineering, in college. The wrestling coach had been on him to eat meat. “It was like everybody was trying to man me up,” he says.

  A meeting was scheduled to break the standoff. Massari’s mother came to school and sat down at a conference table along with her son, Volpe, and the guidance counselor. After a few minutes, the school’s athletic director entered with news: The coach was boycotting the meeting, “holding the line,” they were told. His rationale was restated: Massari could not be allowed to set a precedent. He had committed first to wrestling and was bound to it. “I offered to run extra laps on the smelly dirty track above the pool; anything they asked I would have done,” Massar
i says. “But he totally hard-lined it, so that was the end of it. I never wrestled again.” (Massari, in adulthood, was finally able to reconcile his two passions. He teaches theater at a magnet school in Florida and coaches at a youth wrestling club.)

  Volpe sat there, stunned by the whole scene. He had really been nothing but a bystander. The only way he could have changed the outcome was to have aligned with the coach and told Massari he could not play Jesus, but he was not about to do that. And even if he had, the hardheaded Massari would not have wrestled. “It was, like, my first big controversy,” Volpe says. “I was young. I actually had very little to say about it. He was just refusing to do what they wanted. I couldn’t stop him and I didn’t want to, but I can’t honestly say it was a fight I was looking for.”

  • • •

  As the years went on, Volpe assumed numerous additional roles at Truman. Senior class advisor. Sponsor of the prom and Truman’s chapter of the National Honor Society. When students went on class trips to Disneyland—to Europe, when Levittown was more awash in money—he went along. Virtually nothing of social or academic import occurred at the school without his involvement. With all these windows into the lives of students and the close attention he paid, he has become an authority on high school sociology. He knows what has changed over time and what will never change. A high school, he believes, is composed of “the three A’s”: the highly academic kids, the artists, and the athletes. “The athletes are always the center ring. That’s the hierarchy of the building. They are the ones who will inherit the earth. It has always been thus, and always will be.”

  Volpe tells me that when I was his student, I had been in the school’s center ring. I assure him that I definitely had not felt that way. “Believe me, you were. You and Bruce and Darryl and Don were all in that center ring,” he says, naming my three closest high school friends.

  The four of us were all varsity athletes—all bonded around Volpe—and we all became writers or editors. None of us participated in his theater program, which at the time existed on a smaller scale and attracted just two of the A’s—artists and the nonathletically inclined academic kids. I was a baseball player of meager talent but with enough know-how to play second base for the varsity team, and a somewhat more skilled basketball player who was too short (and slow) to amount to much. I got cut from the varsity squad in my senior year. The coach’s verdict utterly crushed me. I’m not proud of this, but it is likely that I cried harder and longer after being left off the team than at any time in my life, before or since. It was a death.

  Volpe, a day or so later, asked me if I would want to play the role of the shy younger brother in his upcoming play, Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn. In those days, he did not audition kids so much as entreat them. He did not present this offer as a salve; he knew better. But he understood I was hurting, and this seemed like an opportunity for both of us. I needed a distraction, and he needed an actor. I refused. As I recall, it wasn’t even a conversation.

  For many years, I regretted the narrow-mindedness of my decision, but I focused only on the most obvious aspect: If I had taken Volpe up on his offer, I would have more quickly become comfortable speaking in public and would never have experienced those lost-in-space moments, common to fearful public speakers, when all you can hear is the sound of your own disembodied voice. But that is just a practical, nuts-and-bolts regret. What I know now is that I would be a different person, or at the least a better version of myself, more rounded, more fulfilled, more in touch with myself and everyone around me.

  In so many ways, theater teaches the opposite of what I learned in sports, in which the model is that there is no self, no emotional landscape or core. Team sport is all about grit and team, about submerging self. To look within, to feel or imagine, is not encouraged. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of myself being up onstage. It wasn’t something my crowd did. As far as I was concerned, it was not an activity fit for a sports-playing boy.

  Massari came along just a couple of years behind me. I somehow didn’t know him, even though his family lived in the same section as I did, just a couple of streets over. (Maybe while we were climbing the Big Oak, he was taking long training rides on his bicycle.) “What happened with Michael Massari changed the drama program completely,” Volpe says. “An athlete was in the show. It was unprecedented, and it was shocking.”

  Students, particularly determined ones like Massari, can make a difference. He was steps ahead of Volpe, leading his teacher on a path that, at the time, he would not have walked on his own. Massari was the first of many Truman athletes, male and female, to act on Truman’s stage. Most—though not all—of them kept playing their sports. They worked it out with their coaches, because as the shows got better and the drama program gained more status, there was pressure on those coaches to make accommodations. Massari’s decision to just bolt from his sport in response to his coach’s intransigence had not gone unnoticed; in future years, if a coach set himself up as an obstacle, he knew that he risked losing a member of his team.

  Volpe came to love working with the athletes. If he had a choice between equally raw kids, he usually preferred them. They possessed a sense of kinetics that translated to the stage. They showed up for rehearsals on time, had a sense of discipline and teamwork, and were not likely to wilt under pressure. The better they were in their sports, the more that Volpe found those qualities carried over to theater. About a quarter of the huge cast of Volpe’s Les Mis was composed of male athletes—football players, soccer players, wrestlers. “They all wanted to be in the show,” he says. “They were the guys on the barricades, in the vests. It was very macho.”

  What the athletes also gave him was an ability to reach into every slice of the school’s population, into every self-defined and self-limiting clique. He liked to say that he could run his program with fifteen kids if he had to. If they were all punk rockers with pink Mohawks and multiple piercings—maybe with one chess club geek thrown in—he could make that work. But it wasn’t what he preferred. “You hate to play off the popularity of one set of students, but when you get these very recognizable people at the school, the ones in the center ring, it validates drama to every other student. It creates a big gravitational pull.”

  • • •

  The three boys in Good Boys and True are the heirs and beneficiaries of Michael Massari. If you watched them walk down the school corridor together, you would figure they were buddies from the football team. They have a swagger about them. It is the signature style of a Truman Drama boy, a point of pride. “When we travel,” Courtney Meyer says, “the girls from the other schools are always excited to see us because we’re the only school that brings cute straight guys.”

  This is not strictly true. But it has become part of the Truman mythology, the ethos—that in every regard, its theater program is different. “We’re ass-backwards,” Robby Edmondson, the lighting director, observes. “Here, the cool kids, the popular kids, whatever that means, are the theater kids, and the football players are the ones trying to be cool.”

  Just the presence onstage of boys like Zach Philippi, Bobby Ryan, and Wayne Miletto challenges traditional notions of high school sociology. And for the boys themselves, their immersion in theater, and with Volpe, is liberating. They don’t surrender anything—not their friendships, video games, the rough-and-tumble sports some of them play, or even their macho posturing. They still have all that, but it’s like Volpe has issued them passports into the rest of their souls.

  In his own high school years, Volpe had been protected by his football-playing friends, his fellow altar boys from Maternity Blessed Virgin Mary. At Truman, it’s like he’s repaying a debt. His students don’t know this—they know precious little of Volpe’s biography or his life outside the school. Volpe himself doesn’t talk about the parallel, and I don’t know the degree to which he is fully conscious of it. But a couple of generations later, he is giving those same kind of bo
ys a gift. “The only word I can use to describe it is powerful,” says Philippi, who came into Truman theater two years after his friends Ryan and Miletto. “I’ve danced onstage. I sang onstage. It totally changed me. There’s more parts of me than I realized before.”

  Bobby, Zach, Wayne, and the other boys who take to the Truman stage do not sit around having long discussions about the nature of masculinity in America at the dawn of a new century, but they couldn’t act the roles in the shows that Volpe favors without encountering some basic questions: What does it mean to be a male in America? What are the boundaries? How will you regard yourself and how will others regard you if you seem to cross those boundaries?

  Michael Massari, of course, had not totally upended the social order at Truman. Nor can all that transpires in the wider culture—from Stonewall to Will & Grace to Brokeback Mountain to Glee to a U.S. president declaring his support for legalized gay marriage—change every mind in Levittown. By virtue of its demographics, Levittown—older, whiter, less educated than the nation as a whole—is a late adapter, not an early one. It is well fortified against new ideas. It is part of what makes Volpe’s accomplishments all the more surprising.

  The age-old question—can a boy access his softer and more artistic side and still be a genuine boy?—still has currency in corners of the high school and within some of the families. “Oh, there are some kids who are diehards,” Volpe says. “I’ve had boys say to me, ‘I’m not a fag, so I’m not taking your class,’ or ‘I’m not trying out for your play.’ And I say fine. No problem. I’m not here to change the world.

  “But there are many other students who were hesitant or even critical, and they give it a try and tell me later, ‘I loved it! I wish I had done it earlier.’ And those are some of my favorite moments as a drama teacher. Maybe that kid was in the back of the ensemble and he wasn’t even good, or he was an abomination. I don’t care. He was onstage and he was having a ball, and I’m absolutely thrilled because I’ve taken that kid to a place he never imagined and may never be again.”