Never Surrender, Never Submit

My heroin-addict acting teacher resorts to psychological torture. Is she taking lessons from my father?

I am having a horrible time at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. I just can't give in enough, or freely hurl myself into the clutches of the lunatics who teach us. The ones who make me crazy have a creepy intensity, and make demands for submission that feel just like living with the Naked Dad.

So I am constitutionally incapable of surrender, no matter how much I want to succeed, or how hard I try. It just feels like they all hate me, though they are probably all very nice out-of-work actors just trying to get by. Except for the heroin addict. She's nuts. She wants to probe me, like a Vulcan. Her take on me is that I'm too obsessed with how I appear to others and need to free myself. (Well, just because she takes heroin doesn't mean she is without observational skills.)

She does this strange exercise while breathing deeply, turning slowly on one foot, the other held high in the air, her breasts thrown forward, her toes spread apart in a way that makes her feet look webbed - while she inexplicably chants speeches from "Hamlet." Everyone is enthralled. I try to pretend I am too, but I think she's crackers. And her zeal, how it borders on religiosity, is my father, Adam, to a tee.

(When the Jim Jones thing happens Adam turns to my brother Aaron with a smirk, saying he could do that too if he wants, make people drink Kool-Aid and die. Everyone has to have a hobby. I am visiting Aaron and his wife and kids once, and we bring them a packet of Kool-Aid. Oh, how we laugh.)

Another girl in my acting class, also seventeen like me, is having the same trouble as I; neither of us seem able or willing enough to submit. One harrowing day the heroin-driven teacher decides this girl isn't responding to her acting partner fully. She is right about that. But the teacher's solution is to begin following the girl closely from behind, yelling epithets at her, trying to get her to respond. No dice. Then the teacher calls up several guys from the class, including me - though I refuse - and tells them to chase the girl and try to forcibly hold her down against her will and take her clothes off.

"Do you like that?!" The teacher is screaming. "What are you going to do about it, huh?! Wimp! Crybaby!" The point of the whole thing is to get the girl to fight back organically, but to me it's like watching Life with Father, and not in a good way. I'm sitting there getting furious. How dare the heroin addict. How does she know whether the girl is a survivor of rape in childhood or something? How can she set off a bomb in someone's psyche like this? And why is this heroin addict turning into my dad when I am in New York to escape him?

When the dust settles - the girl never fights back but the teacher stops it before it becomes Academy-sanctioned gang rape - the teacher asks the girl why she won't fight back, and her garbled, emotional response boils down to something about not going against what a teacher tells you to do. In the spirit of "If I tell you to jump off a bridge," the teacher tells her to jump out the window. The girl crawls out toward the window ledge. A couple of us drag her back. And... Scene.

The teacher turns to us all and asks if any of us are upset with what has taken place. She singles me out immediately, belligerently saying she knows I will have something to say. Finally we have something to agree about. I tell her she is irresponsible and that what we have witnessed, what my classmate has been subjected to, is a psychological and sexual assault.

I am proud that I stand up to her, even as she sneers at me, daring anyone else in the class to agree with my narrow-minded, literal, anti-artistic position. No one does, though the girl later thanks me for being the only one to think about how she feels.

This is it, my big moment of courage during my first year in New York. I take the issue to the administration who steadfastly defends the teacher and says it is the way they do things at the Academy. That's the end of that romance for me. I can't tell anyone back in Texas. It is my first real failure. It never occurs to me to talk it out with someone, with my mother, to ask her advice. I don't have the vocabulary to admit I don't know something.

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