Why Pop Culture Loves the Toxic Drama Teacher Trope

My high school drama teacher would sit in the audience during dress rehearsals. After the last note rang out and the lights came up, the cast and crew would gather on the stage to hear his thoughts. As the sweat dried on our faces, we would look out hopefully into the audience and see our teacher sitting in the center row, making his fingers into the shape of a gun and bringing them to his skull.

“I’m going up to the light booth,” he would say. “And I am going to shoot myself.”

The relationship between a child and a drama teacher can be the most significant one that children have with an adult outside their own family. Inherent in this relationship is the collapse of personal boundaries. It is not an exaggeration to say that drama teachers preserve and save lives—you probably know someone who survived school because of a teacher who wore a giant turtleneck and an attitude of affrontedness. Drama teachers open a gateway into a transcendent experience of play and art-making which most people will probably leave after high school and not return to for the rest of their adult lives. And they do so by behaving in ways that would be considered wildly inappropriate in any other setting.

I was not hurt by the fact that my performance made my drama teacher joke about taking his own life. Or rather, I was a little hurt and I liked it—I wanted him to hurt me more, to hurt me until it made me great.

While academic excellence, athletic ability, or parental wealth might determine success in other classrooms, the amateur acting studio is where raw emotion and brutal honesty reign. A drama teacher might prod a student’s abdomen to find their diaphragm or inquire after their parents’ divorce in search of emotion to mine for a King Lear monologue. But when are these tactics part of a vital search for truth, and when are they simply inappropriate?

Across films, books, and social media, creators have begun asking this question. Comedian Sydney Battle went viral on TikTok this summer with a comedy bit that seemed lifted from my own memories. In a video captioned “my middle school theater teacher giving feedback on a scene,” Battle’s character wears a cardigan, a bobbed wig, and oversized glasses. “Okay, can I be honest?” she says. “I saw my best friend pancaked by a New York taxicab in 1979, and witnessing that was not as painful as what I just saw.”

When are these tactics part of a vital search for truth, and when are they simply inappropriate?

Such is the unique power of an educator whose job involves judging and molding a child’s looks, talents, and dreams: Decades later, we are still trying to understand how they remade us, and in whose image.

This is not a new phenomenon. There is a great tradition of depicting the archetype of the unbridled, emotionally exploitative acting teacher. Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour hinges on a washed-up stage star turned drama teacher whose absurd narcissism catalyzes a miscarriage of justice. Stanislawski, the father of method acting, was satirized in the 1967 novel Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov. Mr. Farrell of the 1980 movie-musical Fame was played by a real acting teacher at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts; his character invites his students to share their most troubling personal stories during class time. In the 1975 musical A Chorus Line, a character based on the recollections of actress Priscilla Lopez tells the story of the high school drama teacher at LaGuardia who screamed at her, “You’ll never be an actress! Never!” The song ends when she recalls, with gusto, her teacher’s death.

The heyday of my student theater career, which took place in the 2000s, saw mostly warm, funny send-ups of drama teachers, like Mrs. Darbus of the High School Musical series, played with gleeful maximalism by Alyson Reed, and the perennially well-meaning Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) on Glee. Chris Lilley’s wonderfully vicious Mr. G on Summer Heights High was iconic to the few who saw it. The celebrated 2014 nonfiction book Drama High, which told the story of real-life high school drama director Lou Volpe, was adapted into the short-lived 2017 NBC series Rise.

Recent depictions of drama teachers have turned darker, ranging from lovable eccentric through craven manipulator all the way to abuser, questioning the assumption that cruelty is a necessary ingredient in greatness. This shift reflects the ongoing legacy of the #MeToo movement and an increased awareness of the role of trauma in personal development.

In 2020, PEN15 concluded its takedown of 2000s adolescence with a satire of a middle school drama teacher who instructs the cast to list each other’s weaknesses. Unlike the very similar storyline in Fame, there is no justification for this behavior, no sense that these manipulative tactics might be the force that propels the young students on to plum roles on Broadway or in CBS procedurals. PEN15 emphasizes just how childlike middle and high school students are, as well as how adults who dress them up and play with them like dolls are themselves childish. In the 2022 romantic comedy Bros, Billy Eichner’s character describes a drama teacher who devastated him by telling him he was too gay to succeed. These are portraits of drama teachers who got so absorbed in drama that they forgot to teach.

Two recent novels consider the darkest outcomes of this dynamic. In Susan Choi’s 2019 novel Trust Exercise, drama teacher Mr. Kingsley enmeshes himself in his students’ sex lives, purportedly to wring meaning out of them. He creates an environment that makes no distinction between child and adult, avant-garde and exploitative. In Adam Langer’s 2022 novel Cyclorama, a high school director’s decades of abuse are shrouded by his reputation as a beloved educator. Mr. Densmore’s methods are so insidious that he extracts blackmailing material from his students through the journals he urges them to keep during a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. The teen actors, with their practiced vulnerability, are perfect targets.

Children who seek the stage are typically people who want to be looked at. Drama teachers look long and hard and offer detailed, sometimes destructive, assessments. I think of an acting teacher in college who made us stand in a line, walked up and down scrutinizing us, and, for reasons known only to herself, labeled each of our faces “simple” or “complicated.” Or the musical theater instructors at elite summer intensive programs who told fat girls, “You won’t find stage work until you’re forty, and then you’ll be booked until you retire.” Acting teachers, especially in musical theater, often encourage students to embrace their “type.” Mine was “quirky little girl,” a label I found so comforting and for which I was so rewarded in the classroom that it began to feel like an identity. At least there were parts for me at all—if you weren’t white, acting teachers weren’t sure how to type you, and often said so. They commented openly on beauty and handsomeness and small bodies and entreated us to remember that this was the way of the real world.

I think of my middle school theater director who auditioned eight- and nine-year-old girls for Annie by having them sing “It’s the Hard Knock Life” as a group while their peers looked on. He prowled among them, head bowed, listening. “If I tap you on the shoulder, you’re out of the running,” he said. Each time his hand rose, the little girl in question would start shaking, her eyes pooling with tears, still scream-singing, “Make her drink a Mickey Finn!”

“That’s show business!” boomed the director, over the sounds of sniffling children.

After one performance in Annie, the director singled me out for rebuke. I didn’t know the choreography well enough, and it showed. “You stand out like a blue dot on a red field,” he screamed. I cried until my body hurt, but other than wishing he had pulled me aside to deliver this critique, I appreciated the correction. I was desperate to be molded into greatness, whether by scales or stretches or sharp words. I felt, and I believe my castmates felt too, that with our drama teachers, we were finally being taken seriously. Our parents and peers didn’t understand. The only people who loved theater as much as us were our directors. We had the sense that the work done in a dingy auditorium, or in a classroom with desks pushed to the side, was more real than real life, more important and vital than the work our parents did in their grim offices.

And yet we know that excellent theater teachers reach students on a soul level. Eichner’s character in Bros reflects bitterly on a memory of a harmful drama teacher. But in interviews for the movie, Eichner has said that his favorite college acting professor was instrumental in helping him own his identity. He screened Bros for her. (They both cried.)

I was desperate to be molded into greatness, whether by scales or stretches or sharp words.

That access to emotion—tears, rage, joy—is what makes the acting studio so magnetic. “First one to cry wins!” announces the drama teacher in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. When the teacher easily wins the competition, it’s a comedic moment. How kooky that drama teachers sometimes use children to process their adult emotions! Later, we see the teacher again—he is leaving a psychiatry unit at a hospital after an apparent suicide attempt. In this light, his efforts to share the beauty of theater with teenagers seems more heroic. It also feels a little inappropriate. It’s that unnerving combination that runs through so many of these examples—their ability to bring humanity to a classroom, and their inability to do so neatly, perfectly, without risking harm.

This is why we’re so drawn to artistic representations of the people who once yelled at us for failing to take zip-zap-zop seriously. We remember with a mixture of affection and revulsion these teachers who gave us a chance to be something else. They offered us alternative routes to feeling seen, wanted, and admired—ways that were often just as flawed as the conventional ones.

Near the end of my last year of high school, a classmate died, as suddenly as lights going down in an auditorium. The news of her death went out over email after last period. Standing in the nearly deserted school, I could hear the screams of people outside, opening the email as they waited for their rides home.

I wandered the building, marveling at the impossibility of a reset––to clear the stage; to take it from the top; to be in the day before where there was no small, strange body at a police station. I had no familiarity with the concept of anything being truly over.

As I turned down a hallway, someone rounded the corner in my direction. It was a drama teacher, a woman whose classes I had taken but with whom I was not close. We were both crying. I wanted to turn around, but there was no way to do so—both of us were advancing, and there was nowhere to look but at each other.

The extended eye contact and dense silence so closely mirrored acting exercises from her class. Hoping to break it, I pressed my lips together and shrugged my shoulders, as if to say, “She’s gone. What can we do?”

“Don’t shrug!” my drama teacher bellowed into the empty hallway. “Don’t you dare shrug!”

Weeping harder, she launched herself toward me and pulled me close. And as I felt my wet cheeks press unwillingly into her body, I thought, with a mixture of aversion and amazement, Even now—even now!—she is trying to give me an acting lesson.

Theater teachers open us up like surgeons and then go outside to take a smoke break. I’m reminded of a moment in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George, when a woman gazes at a painting by George Seurat and marvels at the way the artist depicted children. “The child is so sweet, and the girls are so rapturous,” she sings. “Isn’t it lovely how artists can capture us?”

Art about drama teachers feels like a rebounding mirror effect—artists capturing their teachers, who captured them long ago. As I rendered it, my drama teacher scolded my particular expression of grief because she was trying to give me an acting lesson. She would say that she was trying to teach me to tell the truth.

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