It’s not just that Cousineau is more abusive than Kominsky; it’s also that his students are so ridiculous. In the second episode, after a classmate dies, they decide to honor him by putting on a talent show; the stink of narcissism is so bad you begin to feel that the deceased was lucky to miss it.

I understand that such scenes function as comic relief from the rest of the story, which is violent and real, if real means “extremely unlikely except on TV.” The students, and even Cousineau, are not there to comment on the theater but to fan sparks in Barry’s numb soul. In the series’ wittiest moments, their apparently foolish exercises, such as mirroring facial expressions, actually help Barry learn to be more human.

What’s unfortunate is that they don’t much humanize anyone else. The same holds for the acting students in “Trust Exercise,” Susan Choi’s novel set in a magnet high school for the performing arts in a city like Houston in the 1980s.

They’re all talentless, at least in the eyes of their teacher, Mr. Kingsley, who makes Cousineau seem like Mr. Rogers. His cult, disguised as a curriculum, involves the destruction and reconstruction of the teenagers’ egos, except that he mostly omits the second part. Instead, he helps them develop sensory awareness by groping one another or, in special cases, by having sex with him.

Choi, who attended an arts high school in Houston, executes several meta-narrational somersaults to demonstrate the damage done to young people seduced into a life that barely distinguishes reality from fiction. Norms of decency disappear when everyone is mirroring everyone else in an insular world. This is tough stuff, built as it is on an idea of the theater as an asylum run by sadistic has-beens and never-weres clinging to talismans of imaginary glory. (Mr. Kingsley is said to have appeared “with Joel Grey” in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”)