Bookmarked: Back to the old High School

The joke of the title of Michael Sokolove's captivating new book Drama High (Riverhead Books, for sale September 26) is that among the theater students at Truman High School in Levittown, there is very little drama. This isn't a book about a real world Glee.

It is, however, a deeply, and lovingly, reported work about the teacher, Lou Volpe, who over four decades has turned Truman into the nation's leading school for the production of challenging Broadway plays. It's a reminder of the power of teachers to shape the lives of our children, most particularly at a public school that serves families at the edge of poverty, and a fine portrait of young people, who defy even their parents to create forcefully relevant art in an unexpected place.

"Volpe," writes Sokolove, "is always subtly arming his students with qualities and skills that do not come to them naturally."

The writer knows this first hand. In the early 1970s, he was a student of Volpe's, part of a group the teacher had befriended and nurtured intellectually. It was just the thing he needed. After all, Levittown, Sokolove notes in Drama High, "had no Main Street or downtown, no culture, not a single thing of visual interest. Its poverty was of a particular kind—lack of imagination, color, zest."

Sokolove, who has returned regularly to Levittown since 2008, reporting for the New York Times Magazine and the Times' Sunday Week in Review on the state of the suburban working class, was worried Volpe wouldn't live up to his memories. "What if he was like one of those movies you loved 20 years ago and you watch it and think, 'why did I ever like that?' But Lou was more remarkable than I remembered him," Sokolove told me by e-mail. "He had become even more remarkable."

Broadway producers see Truman as a stepping-stone for licensing plays (a lucrative part of the theater industry): If Truman puts on a show, other schools will follow. In 2007, Truman was the first school in the nation to put on Rent; in 2010, Volpe selected Good Boys and True, a searing, somewhat controversial story about a high school football captain implicated in a sex scandal (he has filmed himself having sex with a girl without her knowledge) not yet produced by a high school. Volpe intended the production to make it to the national high school theater competition in Nebraska.

At these sort of events, the Truman kids stick out because of their working class demeanor—most successful drama programs are from well-funded, even elite, public schools that serve upper middle class suburban districts—and because of the challenging nature of the plays they perform. Sokolove told me this works to their advantage. "Some of Volpe's material is dark. It's complex. It's about frailty, doubt, failure, anger—all things that upper class parents assiduously protect their children from. Kids at Truman have seen a lot of stuff. So the material didn't frighten them. It did, however, give them a chance to work it out in a different way."

Sokolove said one of the things he most enjoyed about researching Drama High was getting to know the Truman kids; he spends the heart of the carefully constructed book telling the individual stories of the boys and girls who starred in Good Boys and True, each of them with economic, scholastic, or social challenges, each of them deeply attached to Volpe. They boys particularly, writes Sokolove, defy "traditional notions of high school sociology…They don't surrender anything—not their friendships, video games, the rough-and-tumble sports some of them play, or even their macho posturing. They still have all that, but it's like Volpe has issued them passports into the rest of their souls."

But what, post-high school, will happen to Volpe's kids? The Levittown of Sokolove's childhood was "solidly middle class." His peers went on to well-paying professions. As income inequality has widened substantially, Levittown has gotten left behind. Few Truman kids go to good colleges, in part because their parents—for financial or cultural reasons—don't send them to SAT prep or for tutoring or special camps (in fact, most of Volpe's students work, sometimes interrupting rehearsal). And college is expensive.

"The concept of being 'educated' is a luxury for Levittown kids, which is one reason why Volpe is such a gift," Sokolove said. "He gives them something unrelated to money."