Drama High: Chapters 5-6

It might not have been possible, or at least not as credible and visceral.

Massari was a young man of disparate parts, not all of which fit together neatly.

Other inducements were calling Massari to the stage, too.

To make matters worse, Larry Bosley, the principal who had been such a partisan for theater, had already moved on.

In those days, he did not audition kids so much as entreat them.

Massari’s decision to just bolt from his sport in response to his coach’s intransigence had not gone unnoticed; in future years, if a coach set himself up as an obstacle, he knew that he risked losing a member of his team.

Maybe that kid was in the back of the ensemble and he wasn’t even good, or he was an abomination.

In one of my conversations with Wayne, I posit that one very minor benefit of not having a father at home is that at least there is no one to hassle him about his participation in theater.

“All the problems in the world, all my anger, my teenage angst, if that’s what it’s called, my insecurities. Nothing else makes that happen.”

Zach is utterly comfortable with the exterior presentation and accoutrements of his character.

The actors walk in a few minutes after the final bell, and after a few minutes of conversation—often raucous, frequently profane—they put their cell phones in their backpacks and walk up onstage.

One is a disappointment, the other a possible debacle.

He needs a clean sheet of paper, no extraneous marks.

As we talk, he projects an uncommon self-assurance; not a high school boy’s bluster, but a quality deeply ingrained.

Once the apotheosis of suburban constancy, Levittown is now an example of those same suburbs coming apart at the seams.

He is a sophisticate, a weekend denizen of New York’s theater district, a clotheshorse.

The role has some intriguing elements—Maddy is kind of hippie-chick bohemian set against her sister’s two-doctor bourgeois household—but as written, it is the weakest in the play.

The role has some intriguing elements—Maddy is kind of hippie-chick bohemian set against her sister’s two-doctor bourgeois household—but as written, it is the weakest in the play.

They are thespians!

Volpe’s program is like a laboratory for the concept of multiple intelligences, the idea that people learn in different ways, that a person’s ability in one sphere does not always predict or preclude performance in another.

Wayne reads haltingly and with great difficulty, but true to his steadfast nature, he works around it—he is always the first one to memorize his lines and be off book, because it is far easier for him than having to read them.

Artists and others involved in the humanities are sometimes the first to declare that the value of what they do cannot be measured.

They know it is intrinsic to what makes us human—who are we without our greatest paintings, poems, music, and literature?—but are sure that none of it can easily be put through the filter of economists, social scientists, and educational theorists.

Under the Common Core rubric, students in, say, Chicago’s tony northern suburbs might read New Yorker pieces—on the South Side, they’ll get train schedules.

Hollander’s essay and the comments of Lethem and Plagens cede ground and seem to grant that art and literature are too soft to withstand scientific examination.

But an expanding body of research—social science that looks at the performance of cohorts of students and brain science that uses imaging to look at the firing of neurons in response to stimuli—supports music’s benefits.

Even some of President Obama’s most ardent supporters in Hollywood and New York’s creative corridors would not be able to read it without stumbling over language that is couched in politics, if not outright hypocrisy.

Drawing on a range of research studies and surveys, the report does go on to delineate the sorry state of arts education in America: Schools identified as “needing improvement” and those with the highest percentage of minority students are the ones most likely to eliminate arts education.

“If their very livelihood depends on it, what do you think they’re going to do?” says Mariale Hardiman, a longtime principal and now an assistant dean for interdisciplinary studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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.

The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 led to an overhaul of outdated science currículums, 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.

Without the culling, Google produced a large number of hits: 6,900,000 of them.)

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.