Volpe asks Robby if he knows her. “Yeah, she’s quiet, has a group of friends, good kid. I think she’s just kind of shy.”
“There’s nothing we have to worry about?”
“No, I don’t think so. If she makes a commitment, she’ll follow through on it.”
• • •
The boys, as Ryan Fleming had predicted, are a cause for concern. Luke Robinson had been terrific. Two other holdovers, Colin Lester and Justin McGrogan, are solid in their auditions and have already excelled in previous shows. Tyler Kelch is going to be in the show—he has serious musical and acting chops—but is dissatisfied with his audition. “Two weeks ago I could hit all those high notes,” he says as soon as he finishes singing. “I don’t know what happened. I lost, like, a whole octave. I guess my voice changed again.”
“You were fine,” Fleming says.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Okay, enough, Tyler,” Krause says. “Stop being such a drama queen.”
Beyond this core of four boys, it’s a crapshoot. It will all come down to who walks through the door and how they perform. Volpe’s choices are often from the gut. “I love his face! It’s so expressive,” he says after the audition of Adelbert Lalo, a senior who has never even auditioned previously. “I can just see him in this show.”
Adelbert is no Carol Ann, in terms of out-of-the-blue talent, so he raises no red flags. I ask Fleming if Adelbert can sing. “Not really, but I think I can probably get him there,” he says. He gives the same verdict on another newcomer, Jonathan Earp-Pitkins, who is also destined to be cast.
The last boy chosen is Mike McGrogan, a senior and the older brother of Justin. He has not been in previous shows. Confident to the point of overconfident, he has already enlisted in the Marines and will report after graduation. He is on the wrestling team. His singing is mumbled and atonal. Everyone auditioning also reads lines, and Mike’s acting is not much better than his voice. There is one nonsinging role in the show for a male (and another for a female), and Volpe wants to put him in it.
“I don’t think he’s castable,” Fleming says.
“Not even in the nonsinging role?”
“Not really.”
“I think he is,” says Volpe, who always figures that, given several months, he can turn an athlete into a thespian.
Fleming just rolls his eyes.
• • •
The source material for Spring Awakening is a once-banned German play of the same name, written in 1891, about adolescents trying to escape the bonds of their abusive parents and oppressive religious authorities. The characters in the musical have names like Ilse, Gregor, and Hanschen. Their spoken dialogue is stilted—“What do you think, Wendla? Can our Sunday School deeds really make a difference?”—but we are just to assume this is how Bavarian teens talked back in the day. Their true feelings come out in the songs, a mix of melancholy folk/pop and hard-driving, punk-infused rock.
The play, by the long-forgotten German playwright Frank Wedekind, seems like an unlikely vehicle to be turned into a Broadway show, but then again, who would have ever imagined a big blockbuster being made out of the Book of Mormon? Or a beloved musical based on a barber who slits the throats of his customers and bakes them into pies? Spring Awakening did not match the commercial success of those hits, but it was a critical triumph, winning eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. (It was nominated for eleven Tonys in all.)
The energy, raucousness, and pure weirdness of the show called out to Volpe. Newspaper headlines on reviews from some of its regional productions give a hint of its rebellious heart: “Teen Angst Runs Wild”; “Love, Sex, and Death: Spring Awakening Packs a Punch.”
Reviewing the Off-Broadway opening in 2006, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote that it is “disorienting to find nineteenth-century German schoolboys . . . yanking microphones from inside their little woolen jackets, fixing us with baleful gazes, and screaming amplified angst into our ears. It is also exhilarating. When was the last time you felt a frisson of surprise and excitement at something that happened in a new musical? For that matter, when was the last time something new happened in a new musical?”
Six months later, upon the show’s Broadway opening, Isherwood’s review focused more on the coming-of-age aspects of the story: “In exploring the tortured inner lives of a handful of adolescents in nineteenth-century Germany, this brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill, and quite a bit of the terror to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls sometime around the age of thirteen, well before most of us have the intellectual apparatus in place to analyze its impact. Spring Awakening makes sex strange again, no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age, in which celebrity sex videos are traded on the Internet like baseball cards.”
The reviewer also notes the “almost insurmountable difficulty faced by the actors, adults mostly in their twenties meant to represent fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in disturbed thrall to the transformations of impending adulthood.”
But that is one challenge Volpe does not face. His actors are adolescents. He has a different hurdle, and one more daunting: How on earth will he put the words, songs, and themes of Spring Awakening on a high school stage? I had not previously seen the musical, but after I read it and listen to the music, I say to him, “What the hell, Lou? How are you going to pull this off?”
“I know,” he says. “What am I doing, right?”
But I think he’s just responding to my prompt. He’s not worried at all.
Another one of those headlines on the reviews said, “Spring Awakening: Hell, Yeah.” Which is pretty much Volpe’s attitude. It’s the kind of show he loves. Edgy, exuberant, a little dark. Most important of all, it speaks to his kids.
VOLPE WITH ALLAN LARSON, FATHER OF THE LATE PLAYWRIGHT JONATHAN LARSON, AFTER OPENING NIGHT OF TRUMAN’S RENT.
THE EDGE OF THE KNIFE
Do I sometimes wonder about the appropriateness of the material Volpe brings to the Truman stage? Yes, but mainly in terms of how others will regard it. My wife, Ann Gerhart, is also a journalist—she writes and edits at The Washington Post and is the author of The Perfect Wife, a biography of Laura Bush. As parents of school-age children, we shared certain predispositions. One was to let our kids read or watch just about anything, at whatever age, as long as it had content and intelligence. We found violence more disturbing than sex. I used to joke that it was the Disney Channel I considered pornographic, because of its banality.
Ann’s mother managed a theater in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and her father was a sax player and the longtime post–Glenn Miller leader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. From the time she was a little girl, her parents took her to the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, and other New York clubs, where she would listen to the music and the road stories of her father’s fellow jazzmen until closing time.
My parents didn’t make much of a distinction, either, between art for children and adults. If we could understand it, we could see it. I was fifteen years old when I sat in a movie theater with my parents and caught a (too-brief) glimpse of Cybill Shepherd’s bare breasts in The Last Picture Show, just before she plunges off a diving board and into the water. (When I recently looked back at this iconic scene on YouTube, I was surprised to see that it is actually more humorous than erotic; just before going off the board, Shepherd throws her panties and scores a direct hit onto the snorkel mask of a boy looking up at her from the pool.)
Ann and I once took our then thirteen-year-old son, Bill, to a live performance by the comedian Wanda Sykes, a favorite of his. It was profane in the extreme, but the political and social satire was smart and pungent, even more so than we had seen from Sykes on television. Other patrons shot us disapproving looks; I was half afraid that child welfare authorities were going to burst in and take him away. But he loved the show, and unless I have
missed something along the way, it did him no damage.
Each year, Dramatics magazine, the publication of the Educational Theatre Association, sponsor of the big summer festival in Nebraska, publishes a list of the musicals and dramas that were most frequently performed in America’s high schools over the previous year. It’s a telling list, in part because it doesn’t change all that much from year to year.
The musicals on the 2011 list, from one to ten, are: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast; Little Shop of Horrors; Seussical; Thoroughly Modern Millie; The Wizard of Oz; Hairspray; Guys and Dolls; The Music Man; Bye Bye Birdie; and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
And the straight plays on that list: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Our Town; Almost, Maine; Alice in Wonderland; You Can’t Take It with You; The Crucible; Twelve Angry Men; Twelfth Night; Romeo and Juliet; and Arsenic and Old Lace.
These are for the most part great shows. Well-deserved classics. You can’t go wrong doing Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, or even the brilliant John Waters, creator of Hairspray (first on film) and the midnight movie classics Polyester and Pink Flamingos. But the list, taken in total, is more than a little vanilla. The Music Man and Guys and Dolls date to the 1950s, Our Town and Arsenic and Old Lace to the late 1930s. The Wizard of Oz was first performed as a musical in 1902. To give an idea how static the list is, the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You first appeared on it in 1939, not long after the play concluded its Broadway run. In the seventy-four years since then, it has never fallen off the list.
Students participating in these productions will sing and dance and reap the great joys of high school theater. They’ll bond together and deepen friendships. But they will encounter none of the crosscurrents of current social debate, and their shows will feel urgent only insofar as the students are personally involved in them. No one would tolerate a science curriculum that glossed over the discovery of DNA, or even a high school football team that ran the old single-wing offense and never threw a forward pass. But high school theater programs that draw material mostly from bygone eras are regarded as somehow quaint.
The most current work on either list, Almost, Maine, is a pleasant but innocuous mélange of stories about love and romance in a fictional New England town. Reviewing the Broadway production in 2006, The New York Times warned that the show could leave audience members with “the cloying aftertaste of an overly sweetened Sno-Kone.” Volpe directed Almost, Maine at Truman in 2009. Some of his kids hated it and wondered why he had inflicted it on them. “The worst thing we ever did,” Bobby Ryan says. “I mean, what was it about?”
Volpe chooses to look back fondly on Truman’s Almost, Maine because of the set, which involved lots of Christmas trees and snow. “When the lights came on, even I gasped,” he says. And the show itself? “It was a little twee.”
Volpe has done some Disney. And Shakespeare. And lots of Sondheim. “It’s a balance,” he says as we talk about his choices one day. “I don’t always go looking for the most modern pieces. But what you cannot do is pretend that the history of theater goes from Macbeth to Death of a Salesman and then straight to Beauty and the Beast. That’s such a disservice.” The Phantom of the Opera, he notes, is still running on Broadway after twenty-two years. “And that’s fine. It’s entertained a lot of people. But I’m not in the entertainment business.”
One day I spend some time by myself in Truman’s auditorium, just looking at all the banners on the walls, which commemorate each of Volpe’s productions since 1972. The plays from the very early years look like they are drawn from the Dramatics magazine list. After that, they diverge from typical high school fare. Looking at them, you get a sense of Volpe’s evolving tastes and, over time, his greater sense of confidence and boldness. Up there from the 1970s and 1980s are The Wizard of Oz, Bye Bye Birdie, Oklahoma! and Grease. From the ensuing decades: Pippin, Hair, The Who’s Tommy, and Blood Brothers. The banners from the early 2000s memorialize a couple of Sondheim shows—Sunday in the Park with George and Sweeney Todd, as well as Parade and Pageant—and the two previous pilots, Rent and Les Mis.
Many of the nonmusicals dwell on those edge-of-the-knife subjects that, as Courtney Meyer put it, made people uncomfortable, including Equus, The Rimers of Eldritch, Telemachus Clay, and Gruesome Playground Injuries, a two-person play that was chosen for Nebraska. Volpe is by no means the only high school director to do these musicals and dramas, but he is probably the only one to do all of them. Taken together, they demonstrate his quest to bring students the most demanding theater they can fathom.
Volpe spends a lot of weekends at the theater in New York. When he loves something, he immediately thinks, Can I do this? Can my students handle it? Can my principal and my school board handle it? “Honestly, I never ask permission,” he says. “My mother taught me that it’s always better to ask for forgiveness. The way I feel is that if I’m going to do a show, then everyone has to trust that I’m not going to embarrass the building or the school district. They have to know that it’s going to be of the highest artistic quality, and it’s going to help my kids grow up a little bit.
“I’ve had criticism, some of it pretty harsh, but I knew that was going to happen when I chose certain plays. But I’ve never done anything that is gratuitous, that’s shocking just for the sake of being shocking, and I never would. That’s not theater. It’s pornography.”
Volpe has built up a storehouse of trust over four decades. If he unintentionally offends, he does get forgiveness—or at least enough forbearance to keep on going. In 1997, when he staged The Who’s Tommy—the phantasmagoric tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard—the school board president walked out after Act 1. Volpe, who watches his musicals from a folding chair set against the back wall of the auditorium, saw her grab her coat and pocketbook and charge right past him and out the door. “I thought to myself, Oh my God, there goes my job.”
A few days later, he got a letter from her saying she appreciated all his great work, but found it disgraceful that the show glorified drug use. Volpe wrote back and said that he only wished she had stayed for the second act, which he considers a condemnation of drug use. “I thought, What a shame. She missed the whole point, but you have to stay for Act 2 to get it. We wouldn’t go out there and glorify drug use. It’s wrong, and it would be such a cliché.”
But part of the “brand” of Truman Drama is that it is daring. It’s out there. “He has a reputation to uphold for trusting his students and challenging them,” Tracey Krause says. “He can’t start giving them Guys and Dolls.”
I ask Volpe if in choosing material, he enjoyed testing the limits. He laughs. “Oh, did I leave that part out? Of course! I love the idea of going as far as I can go and not going any further. I love to look in the faces of the kids when they are thinking, Oh, we do this? We make art at this level? People write about us?”
Students who come through the program feel sophisticated in relation to the rest of the high school universe, a rare thing for a Levittown kid. “I love it when they come back from college and tell me, ‘We’re doing Angels in America in class, and when I told the professor that I read that in high school, he said, “You read Angels in America?”’ But why not? What is it about that play that shouldn’t be read by a person who is sixteen or seventeen years old?”
One other factor, not inconsiderable, figures into Volpe’s choices: He has to keep himself interested. (If forced to do Arsenic and Old Lace, he might himself want to take poison.) Maybe some other high school directors would choose not to do Good Boys and True because it has only six parts and therefore limits student participation. But Volpe had seen it Off-Broadway and wanted to direct it.
His favorite Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park with George, is about the artistic obsession of the painter Georges Seurat and the price he paid for it. I ask him why he loves Sunday in the Park so much. “The short answer,” he says, “is I am Georges.” He quickly adds,
“Not nearly possessing his genius, not at all.”
Volpe identifies with the main character’s tortured perfectionism, his anguish over details no one else would ever notice, his joy at creating art from a blank canvas. (“Look, I made a hat where there never was a hat,” from the song “Finishing the Hat” in Sunday in the Park is one of Sondheim’s most famous lyrics.) “The musical has this ability to open me up and make me take a good, hard look at myself,” he says. “My joys, sorrows, failures, triumphs. It’s brutally honest and yet painstakingly loving. I’ve seen it countless times, and it never changes or loses its power to move me.”
The show was critically acclaimed, but didn’t initially catch on with Broadway audiences. “If I could, I would do every Sondheim musical,” he says. “And I’ve tried. I’ve done my best. We’ve done West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd. When we did Sunday in the Park with George, which is very rarely done, I don’t know how many people totally loved or understood it. Maybe it was a selfish act, but I loved every second of it.”
There are, of course, some plays he cannot produce at Truman. Take Me Out, which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2003, is a favorite of Volpe’s and bears some resemblance to Good Boys and True in the way it explores versions of masculinity. But some of the scenes include frontal nudity as the characters, professional baseball players, talk in a shower room, and even Volpe cannot put that on a high school stage.
Floyd Collins is a small musical that Volpe wanted to direct at Truman. Based on a 1925 cave-in at a Kentucky coal mine that left a man trapped, the show is really about the media circus that ensues as rescuers try to reach the man and his fate becomes a national cause célèbre. “I saw it at the Harold Prince Theatre in Philadelphia and thought, I have to do this show. The setting is the 1920s, but it’s the O.J. trial.”
Volpe scheduled the musical, but after he held auditions, his musical director told him they were headed for a debacle. The music was harder than Sondheim, and they didn’t have enough kids with the voices and musicality to pull it off. “I had to let it go. But I was furious about it, just furious. I was like a child.”
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