A Cast of Leaders

Act One: Enter Stage Right

It starts with swans. Lots of swans. On a modestly cold night in early January, 14 students gather in front of a theater just off Times Square. There, they are handed tickets for the first production of the semester, "Swan Lake," which is -- and, as they are about to discover, isn't -- Tchaikovsky's classic ballet.

Although many of the students knew each other casually back on campus, in Durham, North Carolina, this is their first evening together as a class. They stand beneath the marquee with the polite nervousness of people who are just now realizing that they are going to be seeing the same faces again and again for the next four months. They are (with one exception) in their third year of college. They are impossibly young.

For many of them, this is their first exposure to ballet. The boys finger tickets for the show like anxious magicians, as if flipping the stubs enough times might turn them into tickets for courtside seats at a Knicks game. A few of the girls wave theirs in the air with the enthusiasm that comes from having donned a tutu at age five.

Sasha Jackowich is from Spokane, a conservative agricultural hub on the dry plains of eastern Washington State. Spokane counts among its chief exports wheat, alfalfa seed, and wholesome children. Sasha always wears a sweater tied around her shoulders, and she arrives at every performance a little breathless, as if she's just come from practice for the pep squad. "Everybody calls Duke 'The Bubble,' " explains Sasha as the group climbs four flights of stairs to get to their seats, which are in the last row of the top balcony. "It's totally insulated from the outside world. It's all these rich white kids."

New York City is about as "outside" as the outside world gets, and to some of the students, the thought of coming here has been terrifying enough to make them bring along the ultimate defense against big-city danger: their mother.

"My mom came with me to help me move in," says Katie "Kat" Bartram, who is from Ironton, a small town in southern Ohio where everyone speaks with a drawl that has drifted in from across the river in Kentucky. On their first night in the city, mother and daughter witness a different kind of street theater, one of New York's most unique welcoming ceremonies -- a Mafia hit.

"We're walkin' down the street, and this big ol' black Lincoln Town Car screeches up to the sidewalk," says Kat. "Two guys in suits jump out, grab some guy on the sidewalk, and just start beatin' on him. Then they drive off."

Although Payne presumably would have hoped for a less literal illustration of his intentions, this real-life drama is as thematically on target as any of the plays that the students will be asked to deconstruct. Payne wants to assault these students' conceptions of the world -- and to challenge their sense of their place in it. Natalie Lamarque participated in this program in 1997, and this year she has returned to serve as Payne's teaching assistant. From her own experience, she knows exactly why these students have come to New York for a program that brings together leadership and literature. "They are here to rewrite themselves," she says.

"There are all kinds of ways to learn to be a leader," says Payne, who has done it all -- from working in the civil-rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s to spotlighting poverty in South Africa in the 1980s. "The foolish way is to think that there is a type of ideal leader, and to try to become that. The smart way is to learn how to be a better Sasha or Natalie or Bruce, and then to find out where and how you can be effective in making changes in the world."

As if he were some sort of cultural drill instructor, Payne's mission is to draw out, and then to disorient, his recruits' existing expectations. That makes "Swan Lake," with its traditional flocks of ballerinas in fluffy white tutus, a curious first choice. This is the most mainstream of ballets -- hardly the kind of performance likely to be called "subversive." What the students don't yet know is that this is the production that one critic dubbed "the gay 'Swan Lake'."

The ballet begins conventionally enough. There is a palace, there is a prince, and the prince is unhappy. He is so unhappy that he runs away and throws himself into a lake. There, he encounters a flock of dancing swans, all of whom are semi-naked and all of whom are . . . men. No toe shoes, no tutus -- just barefoot, bare-chested men, their haunches judiciously covered in feathers.

Sasha whispers in the dark to no one in particular, "Is he dreaming the swans? Is he in love with the swans?" The answer to the latter question becomes self-evident when the prince dances a romantic pas de deux with a swan who has very nice biceps.

Not until after the curtain call does Sasha realize exactly what she and her fellow students have gotten themselves into. Back in Durham, thousands of Duke students are sitting in classrooms, listening to professors, and taking tests. Sasha and the other students in the "Leadership and the Arts" program are watching swans dance.

As she gathers up her program and carefully makes her way down the stairs and into the street, she asks a perfectly reasonable question: "Is this school?"