Drama High: Chapters 3-4

My interest is in learning how he became the person who built this vaunted drama program, who has endured four decades at a challenging school, who makes art that dazzles, stuns, outrages, terrifies, and delights people in a town that, without his presence, would be perfectly content with fare that runs the gamut from Bye Bye Birdie to High School Musical.

My interest is in learning how he became the person who built this vaunted drama program, who has endured four decades at a challenging school, who makes art that dazzles, stuns, outrages, terrifies, and delights people in a town that, without his presence, would be perfectly content with fare that runs the gamut from Bye Bye Birdie to High School Musical.

Not the prosaic biographical details, but beyond that.

Volpe gives his students only hints of his personal life—tells them about the show he just saw in New York, the purchase he made at the mall—so they have to imagine the rest, intuit it, figure out what it’s like to be Louis T. Volpe, high school theater teacher.

The central character, known only as the Man in the Chair, is a finicky, brilliant middle-aged man, a lover of the theater and of language.

He is charming and cultured and clever—but opaque.

“It was a cliché. We were living in a cliché.”

She was, as well, “tenacious, bold, and risky.”

Plenty of Philadelphians back then still called their neighborhoods by the name of the local Catholic parish.

And then you’d go to Mass, and they were parading around in their vestments, giving sermons about humanity.

Family pictures show Marcy at Sunday picnics on the grounds of the state hospital, always in a colorful summer dress and holding a cloth parasol.

Marcy was not Italian, and Lily Volpe referred to her as “the American girl,” which she pronounced with a Sicilian inflection—“the a-MEHR-ugn girl.”

He spent part of a summer at the drama school at Northwestern, where the program included a three-day-a-week, three-hour improv session with Dawn Mora, a venerated instructor.

Volpe obviously had innate talents that related to theater—an ear for language, a feel for pacing and for calibration of emotional pitch, an acute visual sense.

He was himself a striver, and he sought to instill that ethos in the school.

Volpe began to dabble in somewhat edgier fare, beginning with Pippin, a dark and existential musical inspired by the story of Charlemagne’s rebellious son.

As directed by Bob Fosse on Broadway, the dancing was raucous, and the themes—Pippin’s relationships with multiple women, his struggles with authority and the church—were overtly presented.

Volpe did not consider it gratuitous...but neither was it dated and musty.

And wasn’t it better to explore and work them out in a rockin’ musical than in some droning, hectoring lecture from their teachers or parents?

Over the course of the two years I spend with Volpe—at rehearsals and performances, in his classroom, around the school—it never stops feeling strange to walk the corridors of Truman High and encounter decades-old memories and even vestiges of old panics.

A few years after I graduated, a second high school in the district closed, and its student population was subsumed into Wilson.

Volpe always had a knack for imparting life lessons without being gross or embarrassing about it.

The classroom session that follows involves students prepping for a “night of theater” at Truman, not one of his bally-hooed productions, but just a one-act and a series of monologues that might, at most, attract an audience of a couple of dozen.

His mode of directing is to use a word, a nudge, a silence, a wise-ass comment, a digression from his own life or from something that happened that day at school—anything but an overt command—to coax the performance that he wants.

It seems sick, yes, I know it does...but it’s really an allegory about love, about how it can be ruined, that there are certain things that can kill love even if you don’t want it to. It’s a heartbreaking play.

Volpe is riffing, ruminating, enthusing.

I could not imagine that teenagers anywhere—and certainly not here, where so many of them were not that academic and read the Twilight series if they read at all—really wanted to listen to a man in his sixties rhapsodize about the plays of Edward Albee and the nature of love.

His answer seemed like a credo any educator could use.

A math teacher and baseball coach at the high school before becoming a principal at the elementary level, he is a big, gregarious man who talks very quickly, moves in an ungainly fashion, and gives the overall impression of having the metabolism of a hyperactive teenage boy.

A math teacher and baseball coach at the high school before becoming a principal at the elementary level, he is a big, gregarious man who talks very quickly, moves in an ungainly fashion, and gives the overall impression of having the metabolism of a hyperactive teenage boy.

His vernacular makes him sound like he has just awakened from the 1950s.

His answer seems supportive, if still a bit grudging.

Under the radar, and without a formal charter, he had transformed Truman into something like a high school for the performing arts.

The books are a reflection of one man’s catholic tastes—works by Shakespeare and Sondheim; David Mamet and David Hare; Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, Thornton Wilder, Yasmina Reza, Wallace Shawn, Horton Foote, Paul Rudnick, Athol Fugard, and on and on and on.

She lives in Croydon, a hamlet just south of Levittown along the Delaware River, which is frequently the butt of jokes among students in the local schools.

She figures, in her sardonic way, she is part of a dynasty: “third-generation Georgine’s.”

Of the six cast members of Good Boys and True, Courtney is the most enigmatic and easily the most perplexing.

They hold themselves apart from the overly dramatic “drama kids” they meet from other schools, the ones who dress eccentrically and seem to revel in swaying between the extremes of depression and elation, as if the spotlight is perpetually on them.

Elsewhere, the students have tangible advantages—better theaters, bigger stages, parents who buy them private voice lessons and put them in expensive theater camps.

The Truman actors embrace a similarly resolute approach.

“The thing you have to understand,” she says, “is that Truman theater is tough love. It’s no place for crybabies. You don’t get coddled. If you have something in your own life you can’t handle, you shouldn’t be there.”

Even within their bastion of privilege, Brandon is royalty—second generation at St. Joseph’s, football captain, the son of two doctors.

After Brandon can no longer deny that he is the one in the tape, his friend Justin confronts him with the theory that he orchestrated the whole episode as an elaborate subterfuge.

She exasperates him, as she does everyone who roots for her success, but he loves her mind and courage.

She’s popular, perhaps, but closed off—she has no close confidante to help her assess reality.