Drama High

by Michael Sokolove

  Some of the other schools performing on the Main Stage arrive with thick, glossy playbills that look like what you get in a Broadway theater—with pictures and bios of the cast and crew, along with their tributes to all the important people in their lives. Truman’s program is one eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of blue paper, folded in half. On the front is the name of the play, its author, and the date and place of the performance—Thursday, June 23, 2011, at the Lied Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln, Nebraska. On the middle two pages are the order of the scenes and the names of the cast members. On the back page is an advisory that the play contains mature themes, as well as the following note:

  Truman Drama is proud and honored to be presenting its fifth Main Stage show at the International Thespian Festival. Previous productions include Telemachus Clay, Equus, Pageant, and The Rimers of Eldritch. In addition, Truman has piloted productions of Les Misérables and Rent for Music Theatre International and in November will present a pilot for a school edition production of Spring Awakening, also for MTI.

  I say something to Volpe about the elaborate playbills of some of the other schools. “Oh, I think this is all we need,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

  Yes, it’s all they need. Five Main Stages. First high school to do Rent, and they’ll be getting to Spring Awakening when they get home. They don’t need any glossy paper, thankyouverymuch.

  The performance of Good Boys is at ten A.M. The theater is to open at precisely eight to give Truman two hours to mount the set, get in costume and makeup, and do sound checks. Robby Edmondson will have to get familiar with the lighting board. Tony Bucci has driven the rented U-Haul truck with the set from Levittown again, this time to Lincoln, about 1,300 miles and twenty-four hours on the road. On the morning of the play, he backs the truck up to the loading dock that leads backstage. The kids arrive at seven-thirty A.M. and sit in the rear of the truck as they wolf down a breakfast of bagels, pastries, and fruit.

  It’s cold, unseasonably so for Nebraska in late June. They pull hoodies up over their heads and drink hot chocolate. Courtney disappears for ten or fifteen minutes. “Where the hell is Courtney?” Krause says. She reappears looking like a dockworker, with a toothpick in her mouth, and explains that she has been on the phone. It’s really early to be talking to anyone back home—everyone figures she found a bench where she could lie down and get a little more sleep.

  Truman’s contingent is not big enough for a division of labor. Luke Robinson, Tyler Kelch, and a few others are along to serve as a stage crew, but when the door leading from the loading dock into the backstage area lifts up, everyone, including Volpe, climbs into the U-Haul and begins hauling stuff inside. Bucci and Wayne take charge of fastening the set together on the stage.

  A problem arises. There is always some kind of problem. Bucci turns a bolt on one of the casters—the wheels on which the main set piece turns—and it snaps. The rules of the festival are clear: The professionals backstage, permanent staff of this very large university theater, are not to lend a technical hand. It’s theater, right? Problems come up, and the high schools are supposed to solve them.

  With not a lot of time to spare, Volpe asks me to rush into downtown Lincoln, find a hardware store, and purchase a caster the same size as the one that broke. I’m not sure when I last felt this kind of pressure. If the main set piece does not rotate, it’s useless. What happens if it can’t be fixed isn’t clear. They can’t play a scene in what is meant to be a school locker room against a backdrop that looks like a living room. (Well, they can, and maybe they’ll have to, but it would look really stupid.) As Volpe puts it, “There are no work-arounds here.”

  I come running back in with the caster in thirty minutes’ time, thoroughly relieved and a little proud of myself, since I am not normally a handy guy in a hardware store. Alas, one of the pros backstage has taken pity and slipped Bucci a spare part, so my moment as a hero is brief.

  The cast members are dressed, milling about onstage, looking out into the vastness of the 2,200-seat theater. They take pictures of themselves and text them back home to their parents and friends. “How many stages the size of Truman’s would fit on this stage?” Volpe asks Bucci, even though he has been here many times before. Bucci say he figures at least three.

  Volpe looks into the empty balcony, a long way up. “If I ever had to perform in a place this big,” he says, “I would throw up.”

  • • •

  The cast last performed Good Boys in December. Six months have passed, a not insignificant period of time for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Volpe believes it has made a difference. When they began to rehearse again, “their added life experience, their love for each other, their rivalries, it all enriched it.”

  The performance in Nebraska is, without a doubt, even more powerful than those that came before. The tension and anger—the violent emotions suggested by the playwright’s words—are played right on the knife’s edge. The standing ovation at the end is as sustained as it was in Connellsville at the Pennsylvania festival, but with double the number of people on their feet.

  When Volpe talks to the cast backstage before this performance, it is his last time with them. He has not written anything down. It works best for him at these moments if he just speaks the words as they come to him. In a cramped dressing room, he stands between Tracey Krause and Carol Gross, the retired gym teacher, a close friend who volunteers at the school and takes every trip with Truman Drama. Next to Gross is Bill Hallman, another friend and the president of Pennsylvania’s Educational Theatre Association.

  “This is our final talk,” Volpe begins. “A few minutes ago, I looked at Tracey and I looked at Bill and Carol, and I wondered what I was going to say, and even then, I got emotional. I welled up. Because we will not be together, all of us, in this same way ever again. But I want you to know, when I see my students from the past, there is always that something. That memory I can pull out, and I know today is one of those memories.”

  Volpe is composed, but others are not. Bobby wipes away tears, then gives up and just lets them fall. Courtney says softly, “Stop. Please stop.” Volpe continues on.

  “You all came to this in your own way. Britney came right away. Wayne came right away. Zach was the last. But you all came at your own pace, and when you were ready. Is today the last time we’re going to be together? Physically, yes. In my heart, no.

  “I think that is the best payoff for being a teacher. You always have these memories. I can go back to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I can go back to Into the Woods. And I pull out these beautiful pictures. I can go back to Tracey going out onstage the night of her Main Stage show at this festival. I can go back to her fighting with her boyfriend before the show started. I have all that in my heart.

  “I just want to thank all of you, not only for this play, but for Rent, for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for High School Musical, Blood Brothers, for Theater 3 and for Musical Theater. I want to thank you for making me a better teacher. You did.

  “And I want you to know that you have become part of my life these last four years. If I see you tomorrow, if I see you next year, or even if I never see you again, I will see you for the rest of my life. I will. I mean that. I will see you for the rest of my life. When you go out there onstage in a few minutes, I don’t want it to be sad. I want it to be a celebration.”

  Nearly everyone now except for Volpe is crying. Courtney begs him again to stop, but he is not done. Good Boys and True, he says, was a “monumental accomplishment of art, of self-expression. You guys created it. You know what you’ve done. When I look back on my career, on my forty-three years of teaching, I will say this is the best work I have ever done. The very best work. You know me, all of you know me well, and you know I would never say that if I didn’t mean it.”

  He finally, at this point, begins to choke up. “How many students can have this? How many teachers can have this
? How many teachers last week packed their bags, picked them up, and drove home? And won’t see their students again until September? How lucky are we? I say to God, why did you pick me? Why did you pick Ms. Krause? Why did you pick Ms. Gross? Why are we the lucky ones?

  “Why did you pick us and make it so that our students are like our children? And you are. You’re like our children. I would kill for you. I mean that. That’s our blessing, and in a way it’s our curse. Because we have to say good-bye.”

  It is ten minutes until the curtain will rise. “All I can say is, Have a wonderful time when you go out there. And think of me. I want you to think of me. I don’t mean to be selfish when I say that. But I want you to know that you will always be in my heart, and I want to be in your hearts.”

  VOLPE AND HIS SON, TOMMY.

  I JUST WISH I COULD HAVE LOVED HER MORE

  One day, as I sit with Volpe in his living room, he turns the conversation back to his father, Thomas Volpe, the ex-Marine who owned the Rex Café in South Philadelphia for all those years, and to his own son, Tommy, whom he and Marcy named for his father. “The three best years I had with my father were the three years before he died, after we had Tommy,” he says. “After Tommy was born, it was like his world changed in one night.”

  He stops. “Wow, I don’t know where that came from,” he says. He jokes that he feels like he is on a psychiatrist’s couch. “It’s just that I regret not knowing him better. I didn’t know him at all. But after Tommy was born, he didn’t care about anything else. It was all about Tommy. He was a great fisherman, a deep-sea fisherman. Sometimes, first thing in the morning we would hear him pounding on the door, and he would say, ‘I want to see my grandson. I’m going fishing and I want to see him before I leave.’

  “We would say, ‘It’s six A.M.,’ but he didn’t care. He was almost obsessed with him. He talked about taking Tommy fishing. My father always had a garden. He got little tools for Tommy, and they went in the garden together. It was like Tommy was going to do all the things with my father that I was never interested in doing. And he would have, because he adored my father, and my father adored him.”

  Tommy was born in 1972, just a few months before I began in his father’s classroom. He is a teacher now in Levittown at an elementary school about two miles from Truman. He has become a gardener, though not a fisherman. The first time I saw him, he was asleep in his crib during one of those dinners where Marcy cooked pasta and we all talked about books. It was a different time, when teachers felt comfortable having students around without fearing they could fall under suspicion. (Palmer Toto, the basketball coach, once piled a bunch of us into his car and drove us to his favorite cheesesteak joint in South Philly.) Volpe had other groups—acolytes, I suppose we were. There were girls who formed an orbit around him, bohemian and literary types who were looking for a voice and a spirit to speak to them from beyond Levittown. I was part of a distinct group—“the four boys,” as Volpe still calls us. I don’t know if he would have “killed” for us, as he told the Good Boys cast, but we cared for him deeply and we knew he cared for us.

  One of the four, Bruce Martin, I met on the first day of seventh grade, at twelve years old. We found ourselves seated next to each other at a worktable in a metal shop class. The room smelled of metal shavings mixed with whatever grease was used in the lathes and other implements that I never learned to use. The teacher’s name was Harry Shears, his real name as far as I know. Bruce and I discovered that our older siblings, his sister and my brother, were friends. We were both middle children. We played the same sports and the same positions in those sports—at times, a test of our friendship in a way that his superiority in shop class was not. (Forty-five years later, we talk every week or so by phone, and our families vacation in the summers together.)

  Darryl Hart’s background was not at all like mine. His parents were Southern Baptists and religious fundamentalists, unusual at the time in Levittown. He was forbidden to dance or attend movies. The fourth member of the group, Don Snedeker, was also, in his own way, an outlier. His father had died in an auto accident, and his one sister was considerably older, so it was just him and his mom at home in a town where two-parent families with lots of children were the norm. He sometimes took the train to Manhattan with a different set of friends to shop for music and clothes—an unheard of level of sophistication in our world.

  Don would spend most of his adult life in Costa Rica. He taught English at a university, married, and had a son. He practiced yoga long before it was fashionable, and was probably in the best shape of us all. In 2009, he collapsed and died after a tennis game. He was fifty-three.

  Bruce became an editor, first at The Philadelphia Inquirer and now in the financial industry. Darryl is a professor of social and religious history, an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and still a religious conservative—though not always predictably so. The most recent of his more than twenty books (he publishes as D. G. Hart) is a denunciation of the evangelical movement’s involvement in American politics. His blog, ostensibly about matters of theological thought, is peppered with references to the Philadelphia Phillies and The Wire.

  When I take a step back and consider this group of friends and where we came from, I think we were unusual. We were more outwardly directed than the town we came from. More open-minded, more questing. The four of us gravitated to Volpe for a reason. We were restless, and there was never a question that we were getting out of Levittown. “Our senior prom song was ‘We May Never Pass This Way Again,’” Darryl recalls. “Every time I heard it that night, I thought, I sure as hell hope not.”

  What would we have been without Volpe? It’s impossible to say. Different, for sure. He helped connect us to one another. However close we were, we became closer. To the extent that we developed in the same ways—became interested in the same things, have parallel sensibilities—he had a lot to do with that. He gave us a shot of intellectual courage, a love of words we could never shake. If I had never encountered Volpe, I suspect I would be a lawyer like my father—no tragedy, but not what I think I was meant to be.

  Because of his background, Darryl may have been the most changed by Volpe, and maybe the most in need of him. We sat for hours one afternoon in 2011 in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, the most time we had spent together in many years. “I oftentimes was intimidated in his class,” Darryl says, which I never knew or would have imagined. “I think this is where my religious background was a factor—the idea that God’s words come to us inerrant. That there are truths, and you don’t interpret them. It was hard for me to accept that meanings could be variable or contested. It made me uncomfortable. I felt ham-fisted at times, unable to keep up with you and Bruce and Sned [Don Snedeker], because those discussions came more naturally to you. You weren’t hung up on trying to find one right meaning.”

  Like so many of the Volpe students I talked to, Darryl could remember a specific moment of enlightenment. The stories are uncannily similar. Volpe bestowed praise—based on a particular thing a student had written, said, or acted onstage—and it resonated for life. His words were not just something a student liked hearing; he or she needed to hear them at that moment. They went right to a place that no other teacher, and no parent, had touched. In Darryl’s case, he had written a paper on the novel Deliverance and social Darwinism, the kind of thing a high school boy would grasp on to. “I don’t think I had a clue,” he says. “But Lou found things in the paper to comment on that made me feel he was genuinely intrigued by my ideas.”

  He recalls Volpe telling him, “Darryl, you’re really smart.” From the perspective of four decades later, that may seem a self-evident and unnecessary thing to say to someone who had the brainpower to go on to Harvard Divinity School and then to Johns Hopkins for his Ph.D. “But no one had ever told me that before,” he says. “I didn’t get it at home. I remember in third grade, coming home with straight A’s on my report card, and my pare
nts, being fundamentalist Christians, said, ‘Be careful. Don’t be too proud. You’ve got to be humble.’ So they didn’t slap me down, but they made me remember where my world was. It was a good lesson, I think, but it limits you some.”

  None of us participated in Volpe’s nascent drama program. Darryl and Bruce played on the basketball team; Don, the aesthete among us, played soccer and tennis. But we were boys who liked to think and talk about elements inside the literature he put in front of us—relationships, emotion, conflict, ideas. “I’m bookish,” Darryl says. “That’s who I am. Without stating it overtly, I felt Lou was saying to me, ‘You can go somewhere with this. There’s a part of the world where people care about this stuff, and you can fit into it.’”

  As an academic, Darryl has the keenest memory of what Volpe actually had to say about books. He has kept some of the notes from classes. He remembers once telling Volpe that he was binging on Kurt Vonnegut novels, “going through a Vonnegut stage.” He recalls that Volpe offered a note of caution, or perhaps even a mild reproach.

  “Cynicism,” he said, “is romanticism turned sour.”

  • • •

  Volpe’s favorite book, we all knew, was The Great Gatsby. So it became our favorite book. It’s a cliché, yes. You love the book your favorite teacher loved. And it is Gatsby, which everyone loves. But even now when I reread it, I’m amazed at how current it feels, like it was written yesterday. Tom Buchanan could be a Duke lacrosse player, Gatsby a Wall Street derivatives dealer whose life story unravels at the same time his deals do. I have always identified most strongly with Nick Carraway, the keen observer and narrator, a man both detached from and immersed in the events of the book. Of course I would. Nick is the storyteller with incomparable access to his story.