Home Run

By Rebecca Mead

entral to the actor’s craft is the ability to imagine oneself into the unimaginable; consider Meryl Streep choosing between her children in “Sophie’s Choice,” or Marlon Brando roaring in the jungle in “Apocalypse Now.” For Mary Albert, who recently appeared in a musical production of “Snoopy!!!” as Sally Brown, Charlie Brown’s little sister, the challenge lay in embodying her character’s notoriously ambivalent relationship to the classroom, since Mary, who is twelve, has never actually been to school. “When in rehearsal the director would say, ‘How do you think, at this moment, you’d be responding to your teacher?’ I would say, ‘I have no idea,’ ” Mary, who has long dark hair and a wide smile, the dazzle of which is only partly obscured by braces, explained the other evening, at a party following the first performance, which took place at the West End Theatre, on Eighty-sixth Street.

Mary, like her three siblings—Lucy, fifteen, John, ten, and Jane, eight, all of whom were in the production—has been homeschooled her entire life. “We were part of a parent-run playgroup, and at some point everyone started testing to get into the right school, and I thought it was insane,” their mother, Erynn Albert, said. (As it turns out, all four Albert offspring have got into the most insanely competitive gifted-and-talented program of them all, the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus; the two middle ones will appear in “Tosca” this fall.)

Lucy Albert, who played Snoopy—she wore white pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt with a black spot sewn on the back, and had her long dark hair looped up into floppy ears—explained that she was about to drop out of homeschool: she just won a coveted spot at the LaGuardia high school for the performing arts. In the show, Snoopy grumbles that he isn’t allowed to attend school on account of his species; but Lucy said that she thought Snoopy represented the best of the homeschooled individual. “He teaches himself everything, and he has so many sides, and he has time to do all the things he wants to do, and he’s not ashamed of it,” she said. “It’s kind of like me, except I’m not a dog.”

As she spoke, Lucy leaned her head fondly on the shoulder of Briar Montana, fourteen, who played Linus. Briar has been a leading light of the homeschool musical scene for the past several years but is obliged to retire, since he is about to enroll in his first academic institution: the High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies, in Chinatown. Briar, who has wavy hair and delicate features, sounded dubious about the prospect. When you’re homeschooled, he said, “everyone you meet is your teacher, and you have more freedom to pick what you want to learn.”

“Like, I did chemistry when I was nine or ten,” Lucy said.

“That wasn’t real chemistry,” Briar replied.

 “Yes, it was,” Lucy insisted.

Ben Goldstein, who is also fourteen, and who played Charlie Brown in the show, actually did a year at school, in the sixth grade. “The fun part is messing around, and interacting with people who aren’t very nice,” he said. “Probably the main reason I left is I found myself being mean.” He did not think that he was missing out on anything educationally by not being in school. “If you’re talking about facts that you’re never going to use, like when they changed the American flag—well, then, yes,” he said. “But I think I can solve problems more creatively than kids who go to school can.” (One problem Ben plans to solve creatively: homeschooling his own future kids without sacrificing the career—as yet undetermined, but definitely intellectually rewarding and lucrative—to which he also aspires. “I want to get rich and then have kids, and then I can have them do all kinds of cool things,” he said.)

As the end of their homeschool careers approached, none of the cast intended to go so far as to home-college. Not having a high-school diploma might take a little explaining to admissions staffs. Cole Houston, the show’s eighteen-year-old lighting designer and stage manager, who spent last year doing college applications, said, “You don’t have the transcript, so it’s hard for them to measure what you were doing, and to see that you weren’t playing video games all day.” Not to worry: in the fall, Cole will be heading off to M.I.T. on a full scholarship. 

ILLUSTRATION: Tom Bachtell

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/08/03/090803ta_talk_mead