Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Volpe comes in right afterward. “My job is done,” he says. “Good Boys is a piece of art that you have created. It is a living, breathing thing, and you will remake it every time you do it. There are going to be mistakes. You have to know that. It’s theater. When they occur, you just have to keep on going and know that later, you’ll laugh about them.”

  He closes as he always does in these pre-performance talks. “I want you to go out there and have a wonderful time. I love all of you, and God bless you.”

  • • •

  The set is uncomplicated, just one piece that rotates on casters. In its various positions, and with the stage crew carrying elements on and off stage, it sets off the locker room at St. Joseph’s, Coach Shea’s office, Justin’s bedroom, and the sitting area at the food court where Brandon meets Cheryl Moody.

  A young math teacher at Truman helped select music—a melancholy, indie-rock sound track to play during transitions between scenes. The house lights dim at seven-forty, and Robby Edmondson queues up “Dare You to Move,” by the group Switchfoot. Zach walks to the front of the stage, alone in the spotlight, in khakis and a blue blazer with a St. Joseph’s Prep coat of arms affixed to the left pocket. At the very least, he looks convincing. He has a long monologue to speak—twenty lines of type in the script, delivered as he walks the stage and leads a tour of first-year students. If Zach were a less confident person, he might have been terrified, and in fact, the part did scare him in the beginning. He felt, he said, “pressure on my shoulders. I’m a lead. If I don’t do well, the show doesn’t do well.”

  He is the least experienced in the cast, a more recent project of Volpe’s. When he speaks casually, it’s in a strong Philadelphia dialect, like just about everybody else in Levittown. He muddles his vowel sounds, drops some consonants and even whole syllables. The word water comes out as wuhder. (I still say it that way myself.) The name of the city is Fluffya. In everyday life, you would not mistake him for a private school lad.

  He waits for the music to fade out, then begins: “We’ll start the tour here, and I’ll tell you a little bit about the school, and if anyone has any questions, I can maybe answer them, okay?” He points out the “quad” and the “field house” and refers to the “Ivies” and the “public Ivies,” where all these newbies will ultimately matriculate. He calls attention to the campus golf course off in the distance.

  The monologue sets the arc of the story. St. Joseph’s Prep holds itself in high moral regard and self-consciously grooms America’s future elites. Its graduates are monied, but believe in the concept of noblesse oblige. Brandon’s father, referenced in the play but never seen, is off somewhere in the Third World, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Part of the way though the monologue, Brandon Hardy explains that everybody at the school must play a sport. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” he says. “A sound mind in a sound body.”

  Volpe nudges me with his elbow. “Zach is on fire!” he says. And he is. As promised, he has brought the heat. His diction is perfect, his pacing not rushed in the least. Latin hasn’t been taught at Truman for nearly two decades, but he even pulls that off. As Zach gets to the end, Volpe says, “Wow. Wow.”

  Zach’s next scene does not go off without a hitch, and what occurs will repeat itself in each successive performance. He and Bobby are in the locker room at St. Joe’s, getting ready for gym class. As they talk, they take their shirts off. They are nicely built boys, lean and strong. The auditorium is not quite filled to capacity—as at most high schools, only the musicals at Truman fully sell out—but when the shirts come off, the noise level in the auditorium makes it seem like the theater is packed. The high school girls in the seats hoot and giggle. A few boys whistle. They keep it up for a good thirty seconds.

  Zach and Bobby handle it like total pros. They don’t smile or react in any way. They just freeze until the noise subsides—what else are you going to do when your audience acts boorish?—then pick back up with the dialogue. Bobby would recall thinking, They have to know that the rest of our clothes aren’t coming off, right? Even at Truman we can’t do that.

  • • •

  Opening night includes not one poor performance by any of the six cast members. Britney, as Volpe said would happen, fully finds her character only once the houselights dim and she is under the stage lights.

  What she injects into the role is tart, pungent humor. She manages to both gently mock and support her sister at the same time—playing it in a way that would ring true to anyone familiar with sibling dynamics. When her sister suggests that maybe Brandon isn’t even having sex yet, and therefore can’t be the boy in the tape, Britney throws her head back in laughter. Of course he is, she says. He has a steady girlfriend. What does she think they’re doing?

  Mariela, on opening night, is simply towering—“a different actress,” Volpe says, from the one who had struggled in recent weeks. She has held little meetings with herself. Pep talks. She needed to perform at a level that would satisfy her director’s high expectations—and her own. Theater is what she does well, and she has no intention of doing it poorly.

  In one scene, a confrontation with Brandon, she must puncture his smug façade and shake the truth from him. It is an interrogation. “Who is she? The girl, the flesh-and-blood person you did this to?” she asks.

  Each word comes out like a little grenade. Fully and slowly enunciated. As the scene builds, the character played by Zach begins to backpedal and tries to explain. “Pardon?” Mariela says. I had never before heard that word—pardon—said so aggressively.

  Mariela’s whole body is rigid with anger. Though the script did not call for it and it had never occurred in rehearsals, it looks like she is poised to haul off and smack him—and not a stage slap, but one straight from her boiling inner core. “I don’t know what happened,” Volpe says later of Mariela’s transformation. “The part is so difficult, there were times I thought, I’ve just asked too much of her. It’s an unfair expectation. And then this. You saw it. Stunning, just stunning.”

  • • •

  To say that Courtney seemed perfect from the very beginning of rehearsals unfairly implies that she never got better. But she played the role of Cheryl Moody with such pitch-perfect subtlety that it was sometimes hard to discern improvements.

  There is a scene in which Elizabeth Hardy (Mariela) seeks her out at work, at the same food court where she had been picked up by Brandon. Elizabeth says she hates that Cheryl was “dragged into this” and asks what she can do. “You know, people say that—‘Is there anything I can do?’” Courtney responds. “But do they mean it?” She asks what Elizabeth has in mind. “Like reparations? For damages inflicted upon me by your son?”

  If there is such a thing as righteous sarcasm, that’s the note that Courtney hits. She has the smallest part as measured by lines of dialogue. But I found myself anticipating her scenes. As good as everyone else was, she sometimes seemed to achieve a superior level of intelligence and sophistication as an actor. As Volpe said from the very beginning, she was Cheryl Moody.

  There were mistakes, of course, and one near mishap. Krause gave Mariela a handbag suited for a wealthy woman doctor, which she was supposed to have over her shoulder in one scene when she enters the living room after returning from work. She walked on without it. Wayne’s hair had to have some gray in it to help make him look like an adult teacher, but the process went way overboard, and he looked like he had dipped his head in cake flour.

  Bobby believed deeply in the notion that a play renews itself every day, in rehearsal or performance. He was always open to new gestures, new ways to use the stage. On opening night, he jumps up on the bed in his room while making a point to Brandon. It was a very good idea. Justin is wired; it seems like something he would do. But the bed, built by Tony Bucci, is not exactly a bed; it’s just wood hammered together in the shape of a bed, with a plank where the box spring and mattress would be. A com
forter is thrown over the thing. When Bobby makes his jump, the wood groans—but miraculously, Bucci’s contraption does not come apart.

  • • •

  Volpe and Krause edited some of the worst profanities out of the dialogue. All but a couple of the fucks. The word cocksucker is said with just a hard c, the rest of it unspoken, so I don’t think most of the audience could have intuited what was meant. Some of the dialogue as written is so harsh as to be almost violent, so the editing makes a difference. It softens the play, and not in a good way. But after four decades, Volpe knows how to stay on the acceptable side of the line—even while presenting material that almost anywhere else would be received as offensive.

  The principal, Jim Moore, and the district’s superintendent, Sam Lee, are in the audience on opening night, and both come up to him afterward to offer praise and congratulations. As they walk away, Volpe exhales. “Okay,” he says, “that’s over with.”

  Zach’s mom sat halfway back in the auditorium with his dad, Tom Philippi, the “manly man,” as she described him. Tom had gotten to know Volpe after Zach began in theater. He talked to him sometimes at Zach’s baseball games, which Volpe regularly attended, along with the athletic events of his other theater kids who were on teams. Zach came home from school one day, and his father asked him if he had read about all the problems plaguing the Broadway production of Spider-Man. Zach looked at him and said, “You read about musicals now, Dad?”

  In the end, it was Zach’s mother who was most deeply uncomfortable with his role in Good Boys, enough so that Volpe and Krause heard about it. (Zach and Krause are related—second cousins.) They even feared she might try to pull him from the play. “At first both of them were like, ‘You’re gay now?’” Zach says. “Especially my mom, she didn’t want me to play a gay role. It made her pretty uncomfortable, but she got over it.”

  On opening night, his mother says she thought the play was very good, though she preferred the last Truman production Zach was in—High School Musical 2. His father says Zach was outstanding, with one caveat. “I thought he was a little bit too convincing, but I guess that’s a good thing.”

  • • •

  The 2010 Pennsylvania Thespian Festival takes place clear on the other side of the state, six hours away. A bus carrying Volpe, Krause, the Truman cast, and a couple of dozen other theater students leaves Levittown just after dawn on the Thursday after Thanksgiving, rolls west three hundred miles on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and pulls into the town of Connellsville, southeast of Pittsburgh. Over the next ten hours, they will watch performances by two other high school drama troupes, have dinner, sit through a two-hour musical, and attend a dance. I’m exhausted just being around it all. On the bus ride back to the motel, after eleven P.M., Volpe says, “We need our rest. I’m concerned about all of you getting the sleep you need.”

  Truman’s performance of Good Boys and True, which will determine if they continue on to Nebraska, is to take place at eight-fifteen the following night after another packed day of workshops, scholarship auditions, and performances by other schools. “If you’re in the play, get your sleep. If you are in a room with someone performing, be respectful and let them sleep.”

  My room is on the same floor with the kids. I’ve been around high school students on out-of-town trips where you can hear their revelry in the hallways and from adjoining rooms, but on this night, all I hear is silence—as if the guest rooms are populated by senior citizens who have turned in before the local news.

  The next morning, Zach, Britney, and Wayne perform monologues for a panel of judges awarding college scholarship money. They earned the opportunity by first winning an in-house competition at Truman. As I watch the scholarship auditions that morning, it seems to me they are at a level entirely different from that of most of the competitors from the other high schools. Their choices of material are more ambitious. And they perform them with a greater sense of control. In general, they do not seem as young—do not present at all like kids you often see on school stages, in grown-up clothes, who have dressed for the part but cannot quite inhabit it. I’m relieved when the scholarship decisions are announced later in the festival, and they are in accord with my observations. Zach and Britney are among a handful of students awarded small scholarships, just $100. Wayne, who performed a monologue from August Wilson’s Fences, wins the top honor and a grant of $500.

  One of the judges, a faculty member at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, later approaches Krause to ask if Wayne is planning to pursue acting. “He’ll get work if he wants it,” he says. “Especially with his look”—by which he means that casting directors do not have a big field of young, athletic-looking black males to choose from. He does suggest that Wayne could have had stronger “tactics” in his monologue—a more defined sense of his character’s objective.

  “Do you know what I mean by tactics?” he asks Krause.

  “Yes,” she replies, with a withering look.

  • • •

  There is no such thing as an old Levittown family, with the town having sprung up in the 1950s, but Krause’s family was there from the beginning. Her maiden name is Gatte, from her father’s side and the Italian part of the family. Her maternal grandfather, David Lloyd III, served on the school board. Both her parents are Truman graduates.

  A student of Volpe’s in the mid-1990s and a cast member in his first Main Stage (Telemachus Clay) at the theater festival, Krause often seems like a woman in search of her own sitcom. Willfully inappropriate, she plays the tough-talking Levittown chick, a teacher too wise to the ways of teen misbehavior to take any shit or give much sympathy. She is so out there that it takes me a while to realize how versed she is in theater, how effective a teacher and director she is, and how deeply Volpe relies on her. I go one night with her to Cesare’s Ristorante, a white-tablecloth restaurant that attracts a crowd of regulars—politicians, police brass, merchants, and just longtime residents. Her parents dine here religiously on Friday nights, and she informs me that our dinner must be put on their tab. “It’s the way it has to work,” she says. She’s not even sure the staff here would let her pay.

  Krause had the typical Levittown childhood. She spent time with her friends, rode around in cars, hung out at the mall. In the summers she went to the beach at the Jersey Shore. She says she was caught up in the swirl of high school life, “gossipy” and unfocused. As a high school sophomore, she traveled with Volpe and other students on a theater trip to New York. She had never been to a Broadway show, or even to New York, which is but seventy miles north, an hour by train from Levittown. “It changed my life, just opened my eyes in so many ways,” she says. “Just the spectacle of it. The excitement. The show itself. My eyes were like saucers.”

  Now she chaperones those same kinds of trips with Volpe. “Nothing’s changed,” she says. “Only very rarely do we take a kid up there who’s been to New York before, unless it was with us. They react just like I did—those saucer eyes. It’s my favorite thing, watching them have that experience.”

  The show she saw on that first trip was Falsettos. She keeps the playbill in a binder at home, with the programs from the sixty-plus New York shows she has seen since. The programs from shows in Chicago and London are in a separate binder. Krause being Krause, she has another totem from Falsettos—a tattoo on her right ankle that is a replica of the cover art on the playbill from Broadway. The original illustration, a line drawing of five dancing men, was done by the late artist Keith Haring. When Krause went to college in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, she discovered it was Haring’s hometown. It seemed like karma. So she got the tattoo.

  A hell-raiser as a Truman student and a rebel as a member of its faculty, Krause sometimes refers to herself as “Miss Bitchy,” which is sort of a joke and sort of not. Even students who become close to her are sure that in the beginning she hated them. That is not strictly true, but you do have to earn her affection. She keeps the
cell phone numbers of dozens of students in her own phone, a practice discouraged by the administration. “They don’t like that I do that,” she says. “But when a kid’s in trouble or some kind of crisis and they need to reach him, then they like it a lot. They come to me and say, ‘Tracey, can you help?’”

  She tells me about education courses in college in which professors advised future teachers that they had to win respect from students before they showed much of their own humanity. “They said, ‘Don’t smile till Christmas.’ How stupid is that? I’ll smile the first day if I want to—or if I don’t like my class, they might not see me smile the whole year.”

  A divorced mother of two, Krause dresses stylishly, though her skirts are sometimes on the short side and her blouses a little snug. I love being around her because I can never be sure what she might say. One day, she clues me in on some school gossip that involves her and makes reference to her surgery. I ask what kind of surgery, already suspecting the answer, and she says, “You know, the breast augmentation.” Well, I know now.

  Her energy level is staggering. She teaches all day, spends countless hours with the theater program, coaches her kids’ soccer teams (she used to coach the sport at Truman), runs half marathons, has an active dating life, makes frequent visits to the tanning salon, and finds time to jet off to Las Vegas for occasional weekends to visit her best friend.

  “I hate crazy girls,” I hear her say more than once, even though there is always plenty of drama swirling around Krause herself. Sometimes it has to do with her romances, but more often, with some beef she is in with the administration or some colleague. Her passion and heightened sense of justice do not make it easy for her to keep opinions buttoned up. She tells me that many people assume that what bonds her and Volpe is their shared love of theater, which is true—but only to a point. “The main thing we have in common is that right is right and wrong is wrong,” she says. “I’m telling you, Lou and I have more balls than anybody in the building.”