Years ago I took an acting class with a teacher that I still respect very much. I didn’t stop taking her class because of any unhappiness with it as much as I just reached a point where I felt I’d gotten as much out of it as I could. Plus, cute girls stopped joining.

I often wondered if one of the reasons the teacher enjoyed the class so much, other than the feeling of accomplishment she achieved and the money she made, was from watching us all participate in the heinous emotional exercises she invented and put us through. They usually had to do with sensitive, private matters in our lives that we would never normally want to express to a room full of near strangers, or even close friends for that matter, and having us act them out. She had this way of feeding on the perverse seed of self-indulgence that lies in every actor, nudging us on stage and drawing out our ugliest truths about ourselves and our lives. Before you knew it, class was over and you were walking to your car thinking, “Did I really just act out an improv scene about the time I wet my pants in the middle of science class because I was too shy to raise my hand? And was actually wetting my pants again really necessary? Why do I have to be so method?” And yet, I could never shake the idea that what I’d done had somehow made me a better actor. Why else would I feel so mortified?

One of the teacher’s most firmly held beliefs was that every man has deep, uncorrected emotional issues with his father. Thus, every six months or so she’d pull from her large pile of scripts a scene from the movie Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson, playing a former piano prodigy that, not surprisingly, has issues with his father. There’s a scene in the movie where he rolls his father’s wheelchair to the top of a hill in town. His father is literally speechless because he suffered a stroke and will most likely die soon. And then Jack confesses to him the feelings of inadequacy and remorse that he now realizes he’s felt all his life, and apologizes to him for being such a failure, and asks for his forgiveness for his leading a life that his father can only think must have been a waste. I know it well because I probably had to do it at least three times. The problem was, while her overall theory might be true for most men, I really don’t have unresolved issues with my dad. I’m able to love and respect him, know that he loves and respects me, and when necessary, simply regard him as a nice old man that I hang around with when I visit home, but not in a weird way because we’re related. So the Five Easy Pieces scene was never one easy piece for me.

The first couple or so times, I did reasonably well at finding some kind of emotional substitution or creating a detailed back story fitting enough to get me in the right kind of headspace in order to fulfill my teacher’s almost sinister fascination at seeing young people go through turmoil. The final time I was given the monologue, however, I just wasn’t able to totally commit. I’m not sure if it’s that I just wasn’t in the mood for such heaviness that day, or if I’d exhausted the depth I could achieve from that scene after the other times I’d done it, or maybe just the lack of cute girls in class that day that I felt the need to impress. As she instructed, I crouched down to an empty chair and delivered the lines, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than just say them with nothing behind it. When I finished, she was naturally a bit disappointed and asked me what the problem was. I explained that part of it was I was physically uncomfortable. She reminded me he was in a wheelchair, and I would have to crouch down to him for him to hear me. I suggested that I would probably sit and look up at him. On the ground, she asked? No, on a rock or a log I replied. She seemed strangely intent on the idea that I would have to crouch, and that there would be no rock or log near near my father’s wheelchair to sit on. My argument was, if this moment was so crucial in my life, and I took the time to wheel my father up a big fucking hill to tell him how badly I messed up my life, and these would be among the last words I ever said to him, I think I would make sure to roll him to a place on the hill where I could comfortably sit on a rock or a log instead of crouching down and losing all sensation in my feet before even getting to the part where I explain why I never stay in one place for very long. And maybe she was just in a bad mood that day, but she seemed to think that my reasoning was absolutely ridiculous. But seriously, what kind of hill doesn’t have some kind of rock or log lying around? Who in their right mind would CROUCH?!

I’ve come to think of myself more as a writer than an actor in the past few years, and I promise you this: If I ever write a scene involving a character opening his heart to another character in a wheelchair in any kind of exterior setting, the scene directions will in no uncertain terms have that character sitting on a rock or a log.