Ana once said acting was her way of cheating death because she got to live multiple lives. For her there was something sublime about this abdication of self. Like the Buddhist no-self in a state of continual reincarnation. Perhaps this is why I was such a bad actor. There was always something terrifying to me about this prospect. I couldn’t quite bear to let go of myself.

At night the other actors would cluster in Ana’s room to recount battle stories from that day’s class. Our voice teacher was Paulette Winters, whose personal mission became trying to hammer out my sibilant “s” like a metalworker smelting a sword straight. The subtext being: You don’t want a career playing evil viziers and the sassy best friend. Movement was taught by the ever-sparky Jessica Schaffer, a.k.a. “the Chafer” for the burns we’d get from the studio floor. Her class was every morning at 9 a.m. and she locked the doors at 9:01 a.m. If you were late, you had to sit in the hall until after class so you could apologize to her and explain your delay. Three missed classes and you were put on probation, and no one on probation ever got invited back the next year.

But the most feared instructor was Brian Leckey, a bald man with round black spectacles, a dead ringer for Foucault — and from the rumours we heard from older students, his classes were more or less Punish and Discipline. Among the first-years, our favourite late-night gossip was swapping rumours of “Leaky’s” sadistic acting exercises, passed down through the broken telephone of the school’s oral tradition. The most notorious was the Zone. It was the only unit that Leaky taught the first-year students. The older students talked about it as a kind of initiation, a rite of passage.

“It’ll break you,” a fourth-year told me while picking the pepperonis off her pizza in the school’s cafeteria. “It breaks everyone.” She told me the program usually lost six or seven students every year because of the Zone. “Which is kind of the point, because they always accept more first-years than they want. For the tuition money.”

But none of the older students would tell us what the Zone actually was. That was tradition.

We kept waiting, and the more weeks passed the more the dread built. Until one morning in January we walked into the mirrored studio in the basement expecting movement class to find Leaky sitting on an orange plastic chair waiting for us. As each student entered the room and noticed him, their boisterous laughter and conversation from the hallway cut out until we were all gathered in silence. Leaky took us in for a moment and then instructed us to sit on the floor facing him.