His patience is not endless. In the middle of a rehearsal a few days later, Volpe hisses at Krause in a loud whisper: “Mariela has absolutely lost it. What’s wrong with her? She’s wooden. She sounds like she’s on daytime TV. She’s just lost it. This is a mess.”
Of the six students in the Good Boys cast, Mariela Castillo has by far the most difficult part, that of a forty-five-year-old upper-middle-class doctor and mother. Volpe gave it to her because “at her best, she is remarkable. There are few high school girls who I can even imagine in this role, but she is fully capable of pulling it off.”
Mariela is unlike her peers in several regards. She has plenty of friends at Truman, but her interests, relationships, and loyalties are mainly outside the school. She sings in a salsa duo with her sister, Thaimi, who is fourteen years older, and spends a great deal of time with family and friends across the Delaware River in New Jersey. She travels each summer to see her grandmother in Luquillo, Puerto Rico, a beach resort town east of San Juan. She is extremely close with her mother, a teacher in the Trenton public schools, and her father, a social worker and published poet.
Volpe considers Mariela to be “light-years” beyond the rest of the kids in her maturity. He doesn’t relate to her as a teenager; he has more success if he regards her as a young actress. “That, to me, is what she is. There’s something very adult about her.” But on this day, he is frustrated because, after a strong audition and weeks of good rehearsals, Mariela has stopped growing into the role. With just one week left before opening night, she is headed in the other direction: backward. Volpe can be unsparing when he needs to be. Brutally honest.
As soon as the rehearsal ends, he turns to Mariela. The rest of the cast, sitting with her on the edge of the stage, seems braced. It was obvious how bad she had been. “Mariela, I’m not going to get real down on you,” he says. “You’re already down on yourself. When you’re on, nobody’s better. When you’re off, everybody’s better. You already know that about yourself. And right now, you’re not good. Everybody’s better.”
Mariela’s declining performance has affected the rest of the cast. Zach is blowing lines for the first time in weeks. Everyone in scenes with her is off because she is either skipping chunks of dialogue or speaking them without conviction.
Volpe is not done. “Some actors can show up at seven P.M., dress, walk up onstage, and pull it off. And some have to get here at five-thirty and sit quietly and think and close everything out. Mariela, you’re in that second category. So whatever’s going on in your life—your boyfriend, your fight with your mom, your senior project, the book you’re reading—you’ve got to put that aside for now, all of it.”
Mariela looks straight ahead, right at Volpe. She does not argue or offer a defense. She looks upset, but doesn’t cry. No one cries at Truman rehearsals.
“I know how good you can be,” Volpe says. “I just need you to get there.”
Mariela nods. She has heard him, every word. “I’ll try, Mr. Volpe,” she says quietly.
• • •
Mariela is different from the other cast members in another significant way: academically. When I embarked on this book, I naively assumed that Volpe’s actors would probably be among the top students at their not-so-great high school, high achievers across the board. They are thespians! Immersed in theater. They could hold forth on Edward Albee and Adam Rapp. They knew the difference between August Wilson and Lanford Wilson. So I just figured that of course they would excel in the classroom.
But what I have learned is that they are not, on the whole, terrific students. 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. His students’ engagement in theater taps into their souls and spirits. It excites the parts of their brains that relate to language, movement, and musicality.
But of the six in the Good Boys cast, only Bobby is a truly gifted student. Courtney, perhaps, could be with a bit more effort. 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. Britney’s grades are solid, not stellar. Zach is up and down, and true to his nature, he has a tendency to overvalue his achievements. This is part of what makes him a confident, happy person. When I ask him how he has done on his SATs, he says, “Pretty good, a little above average,” but when he tells me the actual numbers, they are not pretty good, even by the standards of Truman, where students do not, in general, produce high SAT scores.
Among the six, Mariela is in a category all her own: special education. She could not even take theater classes until her senior year because her schedule was loaded up with remedial math and English and courses in study and life skills.
Her learning issues have a known cause: chemotherapy, administered in high doses, to treat childhood leukemia. She was diagnosed at three years old. The drug regimen diminished her ability to retain and sort large batches of information. It is a common consequence, written about in the medical literature under such titles as “Cognitive Effects of Childhood Leukemia Therapy” and “Disruption of Learning Processes by Chemotherapeutic Agents.” One such study, in the Journal of Cancer, states: “Childhood survivors [of acute lymphoblastic leukemia] exhibit academic difficulties and are more likely to be placed in a special education program. Behavioral evidence has highlighted impairments in the areas of attention, working memory, and processing speed, leading to a decrease in full scale IQ.”
Mariela is a perfectly fluid reader, but numbers trip her up. She has been taught what is sometimes called tic-tac-toe math, a different way of figuring algebra and other higher-level math for learning-disabled students. “I can get the right answers,” she explains. “But what takes other people an hour takes me three or four hours.”
Theater is where Mariela feels capable. “I’m not supposed to be able to remember things, but I found out that when I’m doing a play, I can memorize dialogue,” she says. All the stages of a production come clear to her in a way nothing else ever has. “In theater, everything is staged and organized. It goes in order and fits together. I’ve seen how Mr. Volpe is so brilliant at that, and it’s helped me organize my life in the same way.”
As with anyone who has acted successfully, the experience gives Mariela both a thrill and a jolt of confidence—but for her, it confers an additional meaning and benefit. “Being onstage makes you feel like you have so much power, because you’re persuading the audience you’re someone you’re not. You have them in the palm of your hand. I really needed that. It makes me be able to look at myself and say, ‘Here’s something I do well.’ I never felt that way before.”
• • •
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.
“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic, told the online magazine Salon in a 2012 story on the declining status of the artistic classes in America. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities.”
Jonathan Lethem, the novelist, lamented in the same story, “These days everything has to have a clear market value, a proven use for mercantile culture. Well, art doesn’t pass that test very naturally. You can make the art gesture into something the marketplace values. But it’s always distorting and grotesque.”
In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.”
She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores.
Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.”
Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.”
So far, forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed on to what is called the Common Core set of standards. Under its guidelines, by fourth grade, students will devote half their reading time to nonfiction, including historical documents, maps, and other “informational texts”—even such materials as train schedules and recipes. By twelfth grade, 70 percent of reading is to consist of nonfiction. The intent is to reflect “the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.”
In defending these new standards, David Coleman, president of the College Board and one of the architects of the Common Core, seemed to equate reading and writing that is not purely fact-based with self-indulgence. Speaking to education administrators in New York state in 2011, he said, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.” In the same speech, he said, “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
Coleman is a classicist who studied at Oxford and a former consultant for McKinsey & Company who clearly enjoys his role as a provocateur. There is plenty of truth in what he says—people often don’t give a shit about what you think—though I’d argue that a young person might first encounter that bit of wisdom by reading fiction.
Defenders of Coleman and the Common Core argue that nonfiction reading need not be dry and that high school students might, for example, read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, narrative histories by authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin, or nonfiction stories in The New Yorker by, say, Malcolm Gladwell. But our education system is two-tiered in unintended and damaging ways, and the new standards and emphasis on accountability often make it more so. Where students are most in need of help is where the most stripped-down, deadening material is put in front of them. 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.
I witnessed perhaps the ultimate in bloodless curriculum while researching a magazine story several years ago—a robotic teaching method known as Direct Instruction. I. M. Terrell Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, is perched on a hillside and surrounded by interstate highways. The area is called the Island. The only other thing on the Island is a housing project of more than fifty two-story apartment buildings, from which Terrell draws its entire student body. Using thick “presentation books” that scripted each word, teachers at the school signaled commands by snapping their fingers, clapping, or pounding on a book or desk, so the lessons were fast-paced and rhythmic. In a fifth-grade “reading for comprehension” lesson, students read a short passage and then were prompted to mine facts and define vocabulary words. In one of the lessons I watched, the word drain occurred in a chunk of text.
“The part of a sink that the water goes down is called a drain,” the teacher said, reading from her script.
Her students then repeated, “The part of a sink that the water goes down is called a drain.”
She then asked, “What is the part of a sink that the water goes down?”
“A drain!” the students shouted.
Few middle-class parents would stand for their children’s being subjected to this method of teaching. Thomas Tocco, who was then the superintendent of schools in the city of Fort Worth, told me he was persuaded to try Direct Instruction because research showed that it worked—i.e., it acted like rocket fuel on test scores—and, basically, because he was desperate. “We had too many kids who were just nowhere in terms of reading,” he said. The state of Texas was soon to toughen its test requirements, and Fort Worth was in danger of having as many as seventy schools classified as failing. “If that were the case,” Tocco said, “you wouldn’t have been able to sell a cemetery plot in this town, let alone a house or a business.”
Near the end of my visit to Terrell, a sign in a third-floor corridor caught my eye. It said WRITER’S GALLERY. I wandered over to see what the children of Terrell Elementary had written. Would I learn what it was like to live on the Island, to strap your backpack on every morning and walk up the hill to this place? But there were no stories on the wall. Instead, in neat rows, were the certificates of students who had passed the Fourth Grade Spring Benchmark Writing Test, a section of the Texas state exams.
• • •
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. That if put to the test, the humanities fail. Certainly, the current system can seem rigged to produce that result. An effective test-prep class—one that drills students repeatedly on the kinds of questions they will encounter on a specific test—can, in a given year, send test scores skyrocketing. No music, theater, visual arts, or literature class will ever be able to compete with that.
There is nothing, however, soft about Volpe’s theater classes and drama program. Even though theater is part of the “arts,” an airy term, the time students spend with him is actually the least abstract part of their day—certainly less theoretical than a math, science, or history class. With each production, they set an incredibly high goal and go about building something. The process is more like work than play, and at the end, they are left with a tangible thing, as close to perfection as they could make it.
Much of what I observe in Volpe’s theater program fits comfortably within the muscular language of education reform, with its emphasis on problem solving, high standards, “reaching for the top,” and accountability. More broadly, scientific research does exist that supports the value of teaching the arts and humanities—and the perils of de-emphasizing them.
Children who get sustained musical education have long been assumed to reap educational benefits in areas other than music. For years, the notion was unproven, somewhere in the realm of received wisdom or suburban myth. (“Put them in music and they’ll ace algebra!”) 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. Instruction and practice in music can “fundamentally shape” brain circuitry and enhance performance on a wide range of tasks, including reading comprehension, Nina Kraus, a Northwestern University neurobiologist, said in a presentation at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Much of the research on cognitive benefits of arts education focuses on a concept known as “transfer”—the brain’s ability to map information acquired for one task or set of tasks and put it to use for some different purpose. Creative thinking is high-order reasoning that requires memory storage and the ability to understand context. Theater training—as well as music and the visual arts—takes place in what educators call “language-rich environments.” The theory is that the whole multistep process required to create art expands the brain’s capabilities.
A major study from 1999, backed by the MacArthur Foundation, tracked outcomes for large cohorts of high school students, divided between children who received extensive arts education and those who did not. One part of the study looked specifically at the impact on students involved in theater. Between ninth and twelfth grades, their reading levels increased at a rate of 20 percent more than a cohort of similar students—as measured by academic ability and socioeconomics—who were not getting arts education. The authors theorized that the theater students benefited by spending time “reading and learning lines as actors, and possibly reading to carry out research about characters and their settings.”
In 2011, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, first established in the Reagan administration, highlighted current scientific research and issued a call for greater emphasis on arts education. “The brain prioritizes emotionally tinged information for conversion to long-term memory,” the authors wrote, citing music and theater education as examples of disciplines with the potential to “cause an actual change in the physical structure of neurons.”
But the presidential panel’s report, “Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools,” gingerly stepped around some policy issues. 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. “In this climate of heightened accountability, some believe that schools will give instructional time only to subjects that are included in high-stakes testing,” it states.
Some believe that? Does anyone seriously believe otherwise? 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. According to the authors, arts instruction has declined by 49 percent since the 1980s for black children and 40 percent for Latinos. In New York City, public schools in the bottom third in graduation rates (less than 50 percent) offered the least access to arts education—“fewer certified arts teachers per student, fewer dedicated arts spaces, [and] fewer arts and culture partnerships.”
The source for the New York statistic was a 2009 report by the Center for Arts Education, which stated: “In New York City, the cultural capital of the world, public school students do not enjoy equal access to an arts education . . . Where the arts could have the greatest impact, students have the least opportunity to participate in arts learning.”
California’s Education Code, the set of laws and regulations that govern K–12 education in the nation’s most populous state, calls on all schools to offer courses in four arts disciplines: music, visual, theater, and dance. But a study funded by the Ford Foundation and other private donors found that nearly 30 percent of California public schools provide no courses at all in the arts. Sixty-one percent had no full-time certified arts teacher.
School administrators in California reported two barriers to teaching art, neither of them surprising: inadequate funding and high-stakes testing that requires them to focus on mathematics and reading to the near exclusion of all other subjects. The presidential commission noted that the research in California and New York was conducted in 2010. “The situation is undoubtedly bleaker now,” they wrote.
Nowhere in the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in the first term of President George W. Bush, does it say to slash arts education. Nor does President Obama’s Race to the Top program—a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grants to states that meet various educational benchmarks—make any such recommendation. But the federal initiatives are centerpieces of a decade-long trend of increased emphasis on high-stakes testing—meaning tests with consequences that fall on educators.
In almost all cases, the tests measure strictly math and reading skills, so even science and history have been de-emphasized. Study after study shows that the leanest curriculums are being offered in the highest-poverty areas, despite ample evidence that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Many educators believe that the Race to the Top, with its strictly defined inducements and penalties, will do even more to constrict curriculums than No Child Left Behind.
In more than a dozen states, student performance on standardized tests accounts for 50 percent of a teacher’s rating. Across the nation, test scores figure into educators’ compensation. So when school administrators pare down curriculums and teachers teach to the test, it is usually not out of ignorance—but is a matter of professional and financial survival. They have been, as it is said in business, “incentivized” to do so. “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. “Everything they put in front of the kids is going to look like the next standardized test they’ve got coming up.”
• • •
If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed,” Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote in a 2012 opinion article, changes must occur that have the effect of “bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals.” Think about that statement for a moment. The implication is that unless they are closely watched, educators would otherwise be like the children they teach—irresponsible and unaccountable.
As the father of three children who are now all the way through high school—thirty-nine years of combined K–12 schooling—I’ve gotten to know lots of teachers. Hundreds of them, in addition to the ones I had as a kid. Some good ones, some bad, most of them in the middle. But I have encountered very few teachers who seemed not to care.
No doubt there are some who become hopeless about their students’ abilities to learn. It’s possible that high-stakes testing and its consequences might shake them from lethargy or despair. But the collateral damage of this era of narrowed learning is far harder to measure and will be recognized, if at all, only years into the future. Our society may be less creative, and not just in the arts. 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.
In 2008, School Band and Orchestra magazine, a niche publication read by music educators and virtually no one else, published an essay by Jef Raskin. It was a piece of writing that had gathered some dust, as Raskin had died a few years earlier, at age sixty-one, from pancreatic cancer—the same disease that would kill Steve Jobs, his onetime boss and collaborator at Apple. The first Macintosh computer was Raskin’s brainchild, though Jobs ultimately got much of the credit for it. (Raskin was its “true father,” author Owen Linzmayer wrote in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company.)
Raskin played in his high school band—clarinet, trombone, and drums “with equal ineptitude,” he wrote. As he became more serious about music, he took up the piano, organ, and recorder. He studied music as a graduate student, performed professionally with orchestras and ensembles, composed music, and conducted. “Conducting opera, in particular,” he wrote, “was a fine introduction to the problems of managing creative and independent-minded employees.”
Raskin did not consider his later work in computer design at Apple to be a departure from music. It was, rather, a progression, a logical extension of his creativity and aesthetic sense. He was a visual artist, as well, and his work was exhibited in museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Was Raskin unusually brilliant? A genius? Yes, without a doubt. But if the public schools he attended had not offered arts instruction, he believed, he would not have fulfilled his potential. “If I did not study music,” he wrote, “there would be no Macintosh computers.”
Steve Jobs, too, gave credit to his arts training, which was just about the sum total of his higher education. He spent only six months around a college, not all of it actually enrolled—at Reed College in Oregon. He took a course in calligraphy, where he also learned about typefaces, and he talked about its impact on him and his company for the rest of his life. “I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” he wrote. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”
What gets taught in America’s public schools has always been a mixture of state and local preferences influenced by various passing trends. Global forces figure in. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 led to an overhaul of outdated science curriculums, 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. These days, our education system is more often compared with schooling in Asia—unfavorably. Children in those countries outperform our children, as nearly every story says. (When I used the search words Asian students outperforming U.S. students, I got a kind message from the ever-helpful folks at Google: In order to show you the most relevant results, it said, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 782 already displayed. Without the culling, Google produced a large number of hits: 6,900,000 of them.)
In 2010, high school students in Shanghai, China’s largest city, finished first in an international standardized test of math, science, and reading proficiency given to students in sixty-five nations. The United States finished between fifteenth and thirty-first in the three categories tested by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 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. “These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an essay in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. “For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.”
A principal at a school in Shanghai that figured into the international testing was concerned enough about the stifling atmosphere that he instituted reforms to foster more creativity. One of his innovations: a weekly talent show.
• • •
It is complexity, not simplicity, that engages Mariela Castillo. She can hook into information, remember it, and manipulate it for artistic purposes when it has context and interest. Human beings, it is often said, are hardwired for narrative, and theater taps into Mariela’s brain circuitry in a way nothing else ever has.
Some students at Truman who were her classmates in the early grades of elementary school, when she was still in treatment, know of her childhood cancer. Few others do. She told me about it, but it’s not something she often talks about.
Volpe tends to deal with what is right in front of him: his classes, his upcoming production, writing the check to the catering hall to cover the deposit for the prom, planning the senior trip, proofreading the certificates of National Honor Society inductees. He keeps himself extraordinarily busy. He is close with his students, some more than others, but he does not probe them with questions. If they want to share, he listens. If they ask for advice, he gives it. He does not go to the guidance office and pore over their files to learn more about them. The starting point for Volpe is when you become his student. Sometimes I’m surprised at what he does not know. Then again, I’m a journalist and I ask questions for a living. (One of our children once said to my wife and me, “You know it’s not normal, right, how many questions you guys ask?”)
Volpe knew nothing about Mariela’s leukemia until I told him about it. He was aware, of course, that she was in special ed. “But I don’t pay any attention to the special education side of her because I don’t ever see it,” he said. “It doesn’t color my relationship with her in any way. Maybe I could be faulted for that. But I have never given her any accommodations or expected less of her, even in class, and I don’t think I should. With me, she is absolutely brilliant. She is one of the best actresses we’ve ever had here.”
So, to Volpe, in the week before the curtain goes up, Mariela’s struggles in Good Boys and True are strictly those of an actress who is not fully finding her character, and he is frustrated about that. She has one aspect of the part down cold: the coiled anger of a mother who finds out her son has been involved in something awful. In some ways, this is the most difficult aspect of the role; it demands that Mariela portray a wealthy, professional, and mature woman, accustomed to control and decorous behavior, whose world has just been upended by her own child.
One of Volpe’s favorite things to tell his young actors is that “less is more.” Embrace the silences. Calibrate. Understand that restrained is usually better than expansive and that unhinged almost never works. But now Mariela seems to have learned that lesson too well. At a certain moment, her part calls for seething, spitting rage. He wants her to simmer, then boil over—to “build up to an explosion.” On an emotional scale of one to ten, she needs to reach a ten. “Maybe you even need to go beyond that,” he says, “if that’s possible.”
The range of this part is exactly why he chose her. “But she just can’t get there,” he laments. “She’s underplaying the anger. There’s not going to be enough arc to it. I think she’s going to give a good solid performance, nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s not going to be a hundred percent complete development of the character.”
Along with Zach, Mariela has the most lines. Her character is the conscience of the drama, the voice of the playwright. “It’s such a central part,” Volpe says. “She’ll be okay, but if that’s all she is, our overall performance is going to be just okay, nothing more.”
Mariela knows she is struggling, so when Volpe calls her out in front of the cast it is not a surprise, nor does it anger or embarrass her. “He’s the teacher, I’m the learner,” she says. “I have to consume everything he says and try to do what he’s asking.”
It’s nothing more than constructive criticism, she tells herself. She knows how to take that very well. Her parents are demanding. She’s heard a lot worse at home. She is in the habit of writing notes in her own journal after Volpe reads from his Book of Tears. After he talks to her that afternoon, she writes: “More emotion. Try to get to a 10.” That night and for several nights afterward, she will spend hours in her room at home practicing lines and trying to hit what seems to her the right pitch. She is much too sophisticated to think it is just a matter of screaming—anyone can do that. Her voice has to tremble. It has to build. Her body has to be held a certain way. Like everything that takes place onstage, it has to be believable.
She tries it all kinds of ways. Different rhythms. Loud to soft. Soft to loud. How, in this situation, would a mother talk to her son?
“Mariela, are you all right?” her own mother calls out more than once.
“Yes, fine,” she shouts through a closed door.