• • •
Zach Philippi has a line he delivers as his character Brandon Hardy’s comfortable world begins to crash in on him: “You know what I am, right? I’m a goddamn demigod.” That is a pretty good definition of Zach at Truman. He is an honored athlete blessed with a sunny temperament and an easy smile. In baseball, he plays shortstop and pitcher. In his senior season, he will be named first-team all–Suburban One, the sports league consisting of the biggest high schools in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, and he’ll compete in the Carpenter Cup with the area’s top high school prospects at Citizens Bank Park, the Phillies’ home field. Classmates vote him onto the Homecoming Court.
Everyone wants to be around Zach, and from freshman year forward, he’s just about always had a girlfriend. I happen to notice one day what a friend has posted on his Facebook wall: “If I could die and come back to life,” it says, “I would come back as Zach Philippi.”
His life is vexing in some other ways. His household includes two older sisters, both of them with babies who sometimes keep him up at night and make studying, to the extent he wants to do that, difficult. He cares for the babies at times, but has laid down the law at diapers. “I’ve done one, total,” he tells me. “Piss, not poop.” He feels within his rights to set limits. “They brought this on themselves. They can deal with it.”
No one’s status at Truman has anything to do with their parents’ occupations. People in Levittown have a job or they don’t, and that is about the extent of it. Thomas Philippi, Zach’s father, awakens at three-thirty A.M., six days a week, and thirty minutes later is behind the wheel of a sanitation truck for Waste Management, Inc. His route is “commercial municipal trash,” emptying dumpsters at schools, hospitals, retail establishments, and apartment complexes. He coached his son’s baseball teams from the time Zach was six years old all the way up to when he was eighteen, the year that Zach’s American Legion team captured the Pennsylvania state championship. His life is his work, his kids, and Zach’s baseball. When Zach first got interested in theater, Tom Philippi was not happy. “He would call him a fag,” Zach’s mother, Maureen, says. “He didn’t like it. I remember he kept saying, ‘Zach, you’re killing me.’”
Zach and Wayne Miletto have been close since grammar school. In one of my conversations with Wayne, I posit that one very minor benefit of not having a father at home is that at least there is no one to hassle him about his participation in theater. He smiles and says, “Yeah, except that Zach’s father used to get on me, too. He’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re going to prance around onstage.’ I just laugh at it, but it was harder on Zach, because that’s his dad.”
Bobby Ryan faced no such opposition at home, but as word gets around Truman that he is playing a gay character in Good Boys and True, a few kids attempt to give him a hard time. Between classes one day, one boy is especially persistent about it.
“What’s up, Bobby?” he says. “So you’re gay now?” Bobby at first just laughs. But the boy keeps at it, suggesting his involvement in theater will, or already has, made him gay. Bobby finally responds, “You know what? You’re a fucking idiot. I’m playing a character. You get that concept, right? It’s a play, dude.”
• • •
Bobby’s mother earned an online degree after her children got older and now works in accounting. His father was employed for many years at a manufacturing plant operated by Crown Cork & Seal, which makes beverage cans. After he got laid off, he took a dispatching job with Atlas Van Lines. By the time Bobby is a senior at Truman, his father is working as an electrician, “but he’s not trained as an electrician, so he works as an apprentice,” Bobby says.
This is a common thing in Levittown. Lots of people work hard at skilled jobs but lack something—a degree, a credential, sometimes a union card—that would give them better pay and more job security. “He never really went to college,” Bobby says, “so he’s bounced from job to job, but I don’t worry about it because he’s really smart.”
Bobby is smart, too, though not as academic as his older sister, a high school valedictorian and the rare Truman graduate to advance to an elite university. (She’s studying bioengineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.) He is a habitual procrastinator, a champion of the art form, whose approach to schoolwork is to get started at the last possible moment and give it just enough attention to stay on the honor roll. He actually got a C in theater one quarter because he didn’t do his Shakespeare monologue. “I’m not going to give him an A just because he’s a great actor,” Volpe says. “He didn’t do what he was supposed to do. Sorry. That’s the way it is.”
When he’s onstage in performances or even during rehearsals, Bobby feels like he’s in another realm entirely, a different state of consciousness. Everything else falls from his consciousness, like a computer screen going dark—but in a good way. “All the problems in the world, all my anger, my teenage angst, if that’s what it’s called, my insecurities. Nothing else makes that happen.”
He is a little luckless in romance at Truman. He got interested in Britney Harron—“me and Brit were talking,” as he puts it—but didn’t move quickly enough, and she ended up with a long-term boyfriend. He wanted to be with Courtney, but she became Wayne’s girlfriend. (Bobby does, however, end up going to the senior prom with Courtney after he “forks” her front lawn—uses plastic silverware to make a heart with his initials in the middle of it to signal his intentions that he wants to be her date. “I was honestly going to go by myself,” Courtney says. “Bobby or Wayne were the only ones I would have wanted to go with. But after I realized I was not going with Wayne, I came home from work one night and I see all this crap in my yard, and then I figured out what it was—and that it’s from Bobby. You can’t say no, right? It was the cutest way anyone was ever asked to a prom.”)
Bobby’s strength as an actor is comedy. He is high-energy and at times even manic in a Robert Downey, Jr.–like way. His body is so naturally kinetic that even when he is silent and nearly still he can make an audience laugh with just a slight gesture or facial expression. He spent his first two years at Truman watching Antonio Addeo, who was known to bring rehearsals to a sudden halt by breaking into impromptu, hilarious bits—including dead-on impersonations of Volpe—and Bobby reminds people of Antonio.
But Bobby is intensely serious about his craft. Volpe finds him especially rewarding, the kind of student who gives constant feedback—affirmation that as a teacher or director, he is getting through. Bobby doesn’t even have to say anything. “I see his mind turning in every conversation we have. He takes everything in that I’m saying—he listens, he really does—but he always has his own thoughts and his own insights into characters and scenes.”
To make Good Boys work—and to get it to Nebraska—Volpe is going to have to coax performances from actors of vastly different abilities and styles. Close as they are as friends, Zach and Bobby are not much alike in their approaches. Partly, it’s that Zach is new; this is just his second play. But it’s more than that. “Bobby thinks like an actor,” Volpe says. “Zach does not think like an actor. He’s getting there. I believe he will someday. But right now, he’s much more inclined to want me to tell him what to do and then try to carry that out.” What they have in common, Volpe continues, is “they are still boys. And they enjoy being boys. It’s what is so appealing about them, what makes them so likable and perfect for these parts.”
By perfect, Volpe means not just in their roles—but also in the impact that playing those roles will have across the school. Volpe is rarely overtly political, and almost never at school. He is a crusader only for theater. But he hates bigotry and closed-mindedness of all kinds. He never says he is going to do a particular play to open minds, but that is often a secondary consideration, and an important one.
He considers Zach “as close as you can get to the standard for what a macho male teenager is at Harry S Truman High School.” By playing a char
acter who may be gay and, at the very least, has been the recipient of oral sex from his gay friend, he believes that Zach is making a statement. “He is unafraid of this. People are going to see that, and Zach being Zach, it has an impact. He has a gay uncle who is out, and he’s close with him. Zach knew and dealt with gay before Good Boys and True, and it does not scare him.”
• • •
Zach is utterly comfortable with the exterior presentation and accoutrements of his character. When he pulls on his costume—navy blue private-school blazer, freshly pressed khaki pants, and Oxford cloth shirt—he looks just like the same revered young man he is at Truman, just cleaned up and transported to a leafy prep school campus. But the character he plays is dark and manipulative. His own self-doubts and character flaws cause him to inflict harm on others. The audience should not see it at first, but Brandon Hardy’s golden looks and charming manner are a façade. He’s not without sympathy, but he’s a fraud.
I watch afternoon rehearsals in the auditorium, usually sitting with Volpe and Krause about eight rows back. The actors walk in a few minutes after the final bell, and after a few minutes of conversation—often raucous, frequently profane—they put their cell phones in their backpacks and walk up onstage. Volpe rarely has big sit-down conversations with his actors. His notes are given after rehearsals to the whole group, or in offhand and often indirect conversations. He needs Zach to embrace being a character who is unlikable—something that does not come easily even to veteran actors.
“You’re a good person, Zach,” Volpe says as the six cast members sit on the edge of the stage after a rehearsal one afternoon. “You know that. Everyone loves you. You love yourself.” After everyone (including Zach) stops laughing at this little dig, Volpe continues. “It’s going to take time, I know it will, but you have to find the evil in this character. I know that’s a strong word, but think about what he has done.”
I sometimes listen to these moments, as a production is still in formation, and worry how Volpe is ever going to pull things together. To take on such edgy and controversial material and fail would surely be far worse than presenting a production of Beauty and the Beast that falls just a little flat. One is a disappointment, the other a possible debacle. But Volpe never seems concerned. “Zach is not the best actor in the world, and he knows that,” he says. “But there’s an elegance about him that fits this part like a glove, and he has such a dynamic sense of commitment. He’s like a bulldog.”
High school directors cannot, of course, search far and wide for talent. They work with whomever they find in the building. But what they have in greater measure than their professional counterparts is time, because they don’t have to pay their actors or rent rehearsal space. “People say, ‘Why do you have such a long rehearsal process?’ And it’s true that they could certainly learn the lines in a shorter time,” Volpe says. “But that’s not what it’s about. It’s the process of them understanding who they are in that play and who they are in that role.”
Volpe started rehearsing Good Boys and True in September, and it will not be performed at Truman until the week before Thanksgiving. The play begins with the Brandon Hardy character onstage by himself, leading a tour of (unseen) new students at his fancy prep school. It’s a monologue, not short, so for Zach to blow it would get the play off to a very poor start, and probably also spook the rest of the cast. Volpe knows where Zach needs to get to, starting with that first monologue. The character has to project entitlement, a whiff of corrosive self-regard. His smile, as he leads the younger boys around campus, should perhaps have a hint of a sneer underneath. He can’t immediately make himself detestable—that would ruin everything—but something in his manner must hint at trouble ahead.
These shadings are what set Truman Drama apart. Volpe never doubts that his kids can grasp the complexities that he sees in their roles and deliver performances worthy of the program’s high ambition and its legacy of excellence. “Just wait and see,” he says of Zach. “He’s going to be very good. He may be great.”
• • •
Volpe’s challenge with some of his actors is to get them to project, to come out of themselves and show anger, sadness, joy, bewilderment, dismay—whatever the scene and part demand. Others need to be reined in, but he is always careful about that. He never wants to make an actor self-conscious or cautious. From his courses at Northwestern and elsewhere, and from studying the legendary acting coaches like Constantin Stanislavski, he knows the principles of restraint and control.
Stanislavski wrote that an actor should try to imagine an artist undertaking a “delicate pencil sketch.” He needs a clean sheet of paper, no extraneous marks. No smudges or spots that would mar the drawing. The same principle applies in acting, he instructed. “Extra gestures are the equivalent of trash, dirt, spots.”
Volpe translates such lessons in a much more concise way for his student actors. “You go out there as far as you want, and I’ll stop you if it’s not right,” he tells them. It’s his way of inviting them out onto a ledge but assuring them he won’t let them fall. As for extra gestures, overacting—any trash, dirt, or spots—he can clean those up in time. Bobby Ryan, more than most, takes this to heart. “I have, like, a deal with Volpe,” he says. “I don’t want any guidelines in advance. I just want endless possibilities. I take it as far as I want, and if he tells me I’ve crossed the line, I don’t question it. I know he won’t say that if it’s not the case.”
Good Boys is a serious drama, at times relentlessly so, but Bobby’s character is not without comic elements. As a gay outsider at a traditional boys’ school, Justin Simmons masks his pain with laughs. When Bobby looks at the script, he notes a scene in which the stage direction says, Justin is electric in this scene. He doesn’t really appreciate the explicit direction, even from the playwright, but the notation does tell him something. “He’s got emotions going in all directions,” Bobby reasons. “He deals with it by being funny and outrageous. I look at my part as controlled energy. The character might seem out of control, but as the actor I’ve got to be totally in control.”
While Good Boys is in rehearsal, Bobby and Zach spend a lot of time together away from school, just like always—they play video games and Ping-Pong, work out, talk about school and girls. They talk about their parts, sometimes even ad-libbing lines that are not in the script. Both of them believe that what they are to each other offstage makes playing the parts far easier. Their friendship is not casual. It has an intensity to it. They have had a lot of good times, but also heated fights. “We trust each other. I don’t see how you could do these parts without that,” Bobby says. “We both know that we’re not gay, but the similarity to those characters is that we’re really close.”
As senior year begins, Bobby and Zach have been at odds over a girl whom Zach used to date. “I started talking to her,” Bobby explains. “We wound up losing our friendship over it for a little while. Being in Good Boys brought us back together.” (I come to realize that when Bobby says he is “talking” to a girl, it means they have actually gone beyond the talking phase.) Onstage, they work to figure out how to play both the anger and the tenderness that exists between their characters—and how physical to be. There are times in the play when it seems that one of them might throw a punch, and others when it looks as if they might kiss.
Bobby says he’s not sure himself what they might do. “Every time I’m onstage, it’s like a clean slate. Volpe always says he’s seen Sunday in the Park with George, like, a million times, but every time it’s different. I totally get that. As an actor, every time you go out there, you create something new, and sometimes you don’t even know what it’s going to be.”
• • •
Volpe, it seems to me, is always subtly arming his students with qualities and skills that do not come to them naturally. Wayne Miletto likes control and routine. That is how he is going to power himself through life, almost certainly with great succ
ess. But adults know that life frustrates meticulous planners and makes a mockery of control, so onstage, that is what Volpe takes away from Wayne.
My first encounter with Wayne, who plays the role of the coach in Good Boys, takes place a month before rehearsals begin. A big, solidly built guy with a barrel chest, he greets me at the front door of his family’s Levittown rancher, extends his right hand, and says in a deep baritone, “Nice to meet you. I’m Wayne.” My first impression is that he seems like he’s about thirty-five years old. As we talk, he projects an uncommon self-assurance; not a high school boy’s bluster, but a quality deeply ingrained.
Wayne’s home life, like that of so many of the Truman kids I meet, has not been serene. All over Levittown and the smaller, nearby communities that feed into Truman, it isn’t usually poverty I observe, but rather the steady, low-simmering tumult of economic and family instability. People lose jobs, move, get married and unmarried, get sick, fall behind on bills, have more kids. Once the apotheosis of suburban constancy, Levittown is now an example of those same suburbs coming apart at the seams. “When I was five, my uncle down the street was having trouble with his house, so my mom offered him ours,” Wayne tells me. “And then we moved into a house with my other aunt and uncle. After that, we moved into Brittany Springs Apartments. I was going to Catholic school, but after we moved, my mom took me out of that.” When I ask him about his father, he says, matter-of-factly, “I’ve never met him.” He lives with his mother and two younger sisters, including one born just ten months ago, from his mother’s current relationship.
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