• • •
If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed,” Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote in a 2012 opinion article, changes must occur that have the effect of “bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals.” Think about that statement for a moment. The implication is that unless they are closely watched, educators would otherwise be like the children they teach—irresponsible and unaccountable.
As the father of three children who are now all the way through high school—thirty-nine years of combined K–12 schooling—I’ve gotten to know lots of teachers. Hundreds of them, in addition to the ones I had as a kid. Some good ones, some bad, most of them in the middle. But I have encountered very few teachers who seemed not to care.
No doubt there are some who become hopeless about their students’ abilities to learn. It’s possible that high-stakes testing and its consequences might shake them from lethargy or despair. But the collateral damage of this era of narrowed learning is far harder to measure and will be recognized, if at all, only years into the future. Our society may be less creative, and not just in the arts. To give just one example, the aesthetic appeal of Apple products—what sets them apart from the offerings of other technology manufacturers and has made Apple the highest-valued company in the world—has its roots in one man’s music training and another’s interest in calligraphy and typography.
In 2008, School Band and Orchestra magazine, a niche publication read by music educators and virtually no one else, published an essay by Jef Raskin. It was a piece of writing that had gathered some dust, as Raskin had died a few years earlier, at age sixty-one, from pancreatic cancer—the same disease that would kill Steve Jobs, his onetime boss and collaborator at Apple. The first Macintosh computer was Raskin’s brainchild, though Jobs ultimately got much of the credit for it. (Raskin was its “true father,” author Owen Linzmayer wrote in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company.)
Raskin played in his high school band—clarinet, trombone, and drums “with equal ineptitude,” he wrote. As he became more serious about music, he took up the piano, organ, and recorder. He studied music as a graduate student, performed professionally with orchestras and ensembles, composed music, and conducted. “Conducting opera, in particular,” he wrote, “was a fine introduction to the problems of managing creative and independent-minded employees.”
Raskin did not consider his later work in computer design at Apple to be a departure from music. It was, rather, a progression, a logical extension of his creativity and aesthetic sense. He was a visual artist, as well, and his work was exhibited in museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Was Raskin unusually brilliant? A genius? Yes, without a doubt. But if the public schools he attended had not offered arts instruction, he believed, he would not have fulfilled his potential. “If I did not study music,” he wrote, “there would be no Macintosh computers.”
Steve Jobs, too, gave credit to his arts training, which was just about the sum total of his higher education. He spent only six months around a college, not all of it actually enrolled—at Reed College in Oregon. He took a course in calligraphy, where he also learned about typefaces, and he talked about its impact on him and his company for the rest of his life. “I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” he wrote. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”
What gets taught in America’s public schools has always been a mixture of state and local preferences influenced by various passing trends. Global forces figure in. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 led to an overhaul of outdated science curriculums, funded in part by $1 billion from the federal government—big money at the time and one of the first major expenditures made by Washington for education, which had traditionally been almost solely a local concern. These days, our education system is more often compared with schooling in Asia—unfavorably. Children in those countries outperform our children, as nearly every story says. (When I used the search words Asian students outperforming U.S. students, I got a kind message from the ever-helpful folks at Google: In order to show you the most relevant results, it said, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 782 already displayed. Without the culling, Google produced a large number of hits: 6,900,000 of them.)
In 2010, high school students in Shanghai, China’s largest city, finished first in an international standardized test of math, science, and reading proficiency given to students in sixty-five nations. The United States finished between fifteenth and thirty-first in the three categories tested by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The world’s most populous nation, increasingly seen as America’s major world rival, had surprisingly outperformed South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong (the former British protectorate, now under Chinese control), the traditional powers in these comparisons of academic aptitude.
Not everyone in China, however, viewed this result as an unmitigated triumph. Some expressed concern that an emphasis on rote learning was smothering creative thinking and intellectual risk-taking. “These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an essay in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. “For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.”
A principal at a school in Shanghai that figured into the international testing was concerned enough about the stifling atmosphere that he instituted reforms to foster more creativity. One of his innovations: a weekly talent show.
• • •
It is complexity, not simplicity, that engages Mariela Castillo. She can hook into information, remember it, and manipulate it for artistic purposes when it has context and interest. Human beings, it is often said, are hardwired for narrative, and theater taps into Mariela’s brain circuitry in a way nothing else ever has.
Some students at Truman who were her classmates in the early grades of elementary school, when she was still in treatment, know of her childhood cancer. Few others do. She told me about it, but it’s not something she often talks about.
Volpe tends to deal with what is right in front of him: his classes, his upcoming production, writing the check to the catering hall to cover the deposit for the prom, planning the senior trip, proofreading the certificates of National Honor Society inductees. He keeps himself extraordinarily busy. He is close with his students, some more than others, but he does not probe them with questions. If they want to share, he listens. If they ask for advice, he gives it. He does not go to the guidance office and pore over their files to learn more about them. The starting point for Volpe is when you become his student. Sometimes I’m surprised at what he does not know. Then again, I’m a journalist and I ask questions for a living. (One of our children once said to my wife and me, “You know it’s not normal, right, how many questions you guys ask?”)
Volpe knew nothing about Mariela’s leukemia until I told him about it. He was aware, of course, that she was in special ed. “But I don’t pay any attention to the special education side of her because I don’t ever see it,” he said. “It doesn’t color my relationship with her in any way. Maybe I could be faulted for that. But I have never given her any accommodations or expected less of her, even in class, and I don’t think I should. With me, she is absolutely brilliant. She is one of the best actresses we’ve ever had here.”
So, to Volpe, in the week before the curtain goes up, Mariela’s struggles in Good Boys and True are strictly those of an actress who is not fully finding her character, and he is frustrated about that. She has one aspect of the part down cold: the coiled ang
er of a mother who finds out her son has been involved in something awful. In some ways, this is the most difficult aspect of the role; it demands that Mariela portray a wealthy, professional, and mature woman, accustomed to control and decorous behavior, whose world has just been upended by her own child.
One of Volpe’s favorite things to tell his young actors is that “less is more.” Embrace the silences. Calibrate. Understand that restrained is usually better than expansive and that unhinged almost never works. But now Mariela seems to have learned that lesson too well. At a certain moment, her part calls for seething, spitting rage. He wants her to simmer, then boil over—to “build up to an explosion.” On an emotional scale of one to ten, she needs to reach a ten. “Maybe you even need to go beyond that,” he says, “if that’s possible.”
The range of this part is exactly why he chose her. “But she just can’t get there,” he laments. “She’s underplaying the anger. There’s not going to be enough arc to it. I think she’s going to give a good solid performance, nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s not going to be a hundred percent complete development of the character.”
Along with Zach, Mariela has the most lines. Her character is the conscience of the drama, the voice of the playwright. “It’s such a central part,” Volpe says. “She’ll be okay, but if that’s all she is, our overall performance is going to be just okay, nothing more.”
Mariela knows she is struggling, so when Volpe calls her out in front of the cast it is not a surprise, nor does it anger or embarrass her. “He’s the teacher, I’m the learner,” she says. “I have to consume everything he says and try to do what he’s asking.”
It’s nothing more than constructive criticism, she tells herself. She knows how to take that very well. Her parents are demanding. She’s heard a lot worse at home. She is in the habit of writing notes in her own journal after Volpe reads from his Book of Tears. After he talks to her that afternoon, she writes: “More emotion. Try to get to a 10.” That night and for several nights afterward, she will spend hours in her room at home practicing lines and trying to hit what seems to her the right pitch. She is much too sophisticated to think it is just a matter of screaming—anyone can do that. Her voice has to tremble. It has to build. Her body has to be held a certain way. Like everything that takes place onstage, it has to be believable.
She tries it all kinds of ways. Different rhythms. Loud to soft. Soft to loud. How, in this situation, would a mother talk to her son?
“Mariela, are you all right?” her own mother calls out more than once.
“Yes, fine,” she shouts through a closed door.
TRACEY KRAUSE, VOLPE’S ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AND FORMER STUDENT.
VOLP, WE’RE GONNA BRING THE HEAT!
A dress rehearsal looms, to be followed by two evening performances in the Truman auditorium and then, finally, a performance at the Pennsylvania State Thespian Conference—where judges will assess whether Truman’s Good Boys and True is worthy of being one of five selections, nationwide, for the Main Stage in Nebraska. As showtimes grow near, anxiety levels increase. Volpe keeps losing things. “Where are my keys? What did I do with them?” he demands during a break in one of the final rehearsals.
“Here,” Bobby says, handing them over. “You just asked me to move your car, remember?”
He loses his pen. He misplaces his reading glasses, the ones attached to the Dollar Store string. The school’s audiovisual coordinator, Tony Bucci, another former Volpe student, walks up behind him one day in the auditorium and sweetly attaches a little reading light to his Book of Tears so he can see it when the lights go down. Volpe somehow promptly loses it.
Courtney keeps flashing her middle finger at various cast members. It has become her primary mode of communication. Bobby becomes more manic. Solid, dependable Wayne tries his best to keep everyone in line. He is the coach in the play, and of the cast.
Volpe brings up Nebraska. He is still going back and forth, sometimes pretending it doesn’t matter and at other times letting the cast know what it will take to get there. “I don’t care if we go or not,” he tells them. “It’s political to some extent. You have to understand that. And who knows if they’ll like the content of this play? We can’t control that. It’s really out of our hands.”
If they are not selected, he says, they could all go to New York together, which he had done many times with groups of students—take the train, stay a night, see a couple of shows. It would be fun and a lot cheaper. “We’ll have a great time. But if you want to go to Nebraska, keep in mind we are going to be judged on everything, and I mean everything. Blocking, lights, scenery, wardrobe, props, sounds you may make backstage. They are very, very picky.”
Volpe and Krause spend much of the dress rehearsal focused on the play’s nonverbal aspects. It’s a reminder that theater is the original visual medium, elaborate playtime with costumes, makeup, and scenery—an exercise in tricking an audience, as much as possible, into believing that what they are seeing is real. Archaeologists have traced the beginnings of theater back as far as 2500 BCE, to the ancient Egyptians and sacred plays involving the myth of the god Osiris and his wife Isis. (The themes of those early Egyptian dramas are not unfamiliar even now—immaculate conception, resurrection, and a whole lot of violence.)
Tracey Krause, Volpe’s assistant director, becomes even more profane, if that is possible. “Where’s the fucking remote?” she whispers as a scene opens and Mariela, in her living room, sits down with Britney in front of a television screen to watch a copy of the tape to see if the male in it does, indeed, seem to be her son. She is supposed to pick up the remote off a coffee table, but it’s not there. (There’s no TV on the set—she’s just supposed to point the remote in the direction of the audience, which will get what’s going on: She’s looking at a screen!—so the absence of a remote sort of wrecks the effect.)
In another scene, the issue is Courtney’s hair, which is all wrong, according to Krause. “It should be in a braid. She works in a fucking food court.”
Also, Mariela needs a handbag of some sort. Without it, she doesn’t look fully dressed. Krause has something at home; she’ll give it to Mariela before opening night. Britney’s outfit seems just right: a long skirt and loose-fitting blouse that make her look appropriately bohemian. But her hair is a problem, too. Volpe makes a note to get her a headband to keep her bangs out of her eyes. He also decides that he doesn’t like the big trophy on the desk of Coach Shea, the character played by Wayne.
“Whose idea was that?” he says.
“Yours,” says Krause.
“Whatever. It’s totally distracting. We need to lose it.”
Volpe talks a lot about “stage pictures,” the way actors arrange themselves in scenes. He hates when they stand in a straight line across the stage, because nobody does that in real life. Even when this cast gathers to listen to Volpe’s notes, I am always struck by how naturally they compose a picture you would want to look at. It seems an indication of how bonded they are, onstage and off.
On this night, while Volpe reads from the Book of Tears, Bobby, Mariela, and Zach sit on chairs they have pulled forward, Courtney sits cross-legged on the hardwood stage in front of them, and Britney and Wayne stand in the back, not directly behind the chairs, but on the flanks. They look like a publicity poster for the play.
It has been far from a flawless dress rehearsal. The most notable flub was Zach skipping a line of dialogue; not a big deal, and Bobby smartly covered for him—except that as Zach walked offstage, with his microphone still live, he uttered, “Fuck! My line.”
“Zach, there’s nothing I need to say about that,” Volpe says. “You know it can’t happen again. Ever.”
Mariela had made a wrong turn exiting the stage in one scene, then sort of U-turned and scampered off in half-light. “Sorry,” she says when Volpe brings it up. Overall, her performance was much better, and she seems
headed again in the right direction. But the play felt a little flat. That was not unusual for a dress rehearsal, in Volpe’s experience, but also no cause for great optimism. At a low moment in the first act, he leaned over and said to Krause, “We can forget about Nebraska. If we’re no better than this, we’ll get hooted off the stage at the state festival.”
He is not occasionally without his own drama. When has Truman Drama ever been hooted off a stage? Never. To the cast, he is more encouraging. “Was that great?” he says. “No. Was it even as good as some of our rehearsals? I’m not going to lie to you. It wasn’t. But am I worried? No, I’m not worried.”
• • •
On opening night at Truman, the cast gathers three hours before curtain. Zach has his game face on from the moment he walks into the auditorium, like he is first man up in the order and about to dig his spikes into the batter’s box. He shouts, “Volp, we’re gonna bring the heat!”
Sandwiches are ordered and consumed. Robby Edmondson’s tenth-grade sister and heir apparent, Lindsay, puts microphones on the cast and does sound checks. Mariela sits by herself, earbuds in, looking intense but not nervous. Volpe told her she is someone who needs to find a quiet space, one within herself, and she has taken it to heart. Bobby, as usual, is noisy and a little scattered. Krause looks at him backstage, still in his street clothes as others are already dressing.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” he says.
“No, we don’t. Put your fucking clothes on.”
About twenty minutes before curtain, Wayne gathers the cast and crew in a small room across a corridor from backstage. Robby Edmondson says a short prayer, then everyone locks arms and moves together in a circle as they chant, “Love you. Love you. Love you.” Wayne has imported the tradition of this “love-you circle,” as they call it, back from his summer drama camp.
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