Drama High: Chapters 9-11

Truman’s contingent is not big enough for a division of labor.

The most recent of his more than twenty books (he publishes as D. G. Hart) is a denunciation of the evangelical movement’s involvement in American politics.

The stories are uncannily similar.

None of us participated in Volpe’s nascent drama program.

Darryl and Bruce played on the basketball team; Don, the aesthete among us, played soccer and tennis.

“Cynicism,” he said, “is romanticism turned sour.”

Tom Buchanan could be a Duke lacrosse player, Gatsby a Wall Street derivatives dealer whose life story unravels at the same time his deals do.

That was the insular world I lived in.

When he became a father, he no longer even thought much about his predicament as a gay man living a life that was in part a pretense.

We had a few touchy-feely moments, but very chaste...

Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features.

What are the salient features of fabulousness?

The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other.

He brings his sense of beauty and aesthetics and discernment of character to the staging of Truman shows.

She tells me about her recent medical travails, including, as she says, “my two fake hips and my fake knee.”

He makes caustic remarks about Lou.

He was still a teacher, a heralded one, but she was no longer a teacher’s wife.

It is not pessimistic, but it is pragmatic.

Music Theatre International is one of those businesses that seems to traverse two distinct time periods: the modern era of robust websites and instant communication and an earlier epoch of musty mail rooms, bad coffee, handselling, and sentiment.

They learn to work with other people. They learn patience and tolerance and how to be deferential to each other. They learn to be good citizens.

“He knew every nuance, every problem that needed to be solved.”

“It wasn’t maudlin; it was celebratory,” Volpe says.

In 2012, even Levittown’s Catholic grammar school, Saint Michael the Archangel, once so bursting at the seams that class sizes were in the fifties, was scheduled to be shuttered before winning a reprieve.

There are about seventy, far fewer than for Rent, but Spring Awakening has not been made into a movie and does not carry the same cachet.

Luke Robinson, the recycling maven who worked on the stage crew in Nebraska, steps forward with a big, goofy grin on his face.

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.

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."

When was the last time you felt a frisson of surprise and excitement at something that happened in a new musical?

...no mean feat in our mechanically prurient age...

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.”