“Maybe you think we accepted you into this school because you can act.” He let this moderately plausible assumption linger in the air for a moment. “But you do not know how to act.” He flashed us an unnerving smile. “At the moment, what you think of as ‘acting,’ what you learned from your high school teachers and community theatre productions, is an embarrassing litany of bad habits. And I’m here to clean up the mess.”

Leaky stood up and walked to the back of the room, leaving us staring at the empty orange chair. He then instructed our classmate Maya to leave the room, wait in the hallway for ten seconds, re-enter the room, and sit down on the chair without acting.

“Without affect, without emotion, without any character. Do you understand?”

Maya nodded.

“You will sit on the chair for a minute.”

Maya got up and left the room. I caught Ana’s eyes and she widened them as if to say: Here we go. Ten seconds passed. The door opened and Maya began striding across the room with what struck me as focused neutrality.

“Stop!” Leaky bellowed.

Maya startled and stood still. She hadn’t even made it to the chair.

“Who do you think you are right now, in your mind?” he asked her.

Maya shook her head.

“Your mental image of yourself. What do you imagine?” he prodded her.

“I… I’m just walking normally.”

“Normally?”

“That’s how I walk.”

“No, that is not how you walk. That is how you walk when you are being watched. Can we see that?” He looked at us and our silence was tacit agreement. “Are you aware of what your shoulders were doing when you walked, just now?” Maya shook her head. “Your shoulders were swaying like Beyoncé strutting onto the stage. You think you’re pretty hot shit, don’t you? Well, that’s what your shoulders were saying to me. I want you to re-enter the room, and this time I want you to walk without acting with your shoulders.”

Leaky had Maya re-enter the room over and over for the rest of the class, deconstructing every aspect of her movement and person until she was on the verge of tears. But she didn’t break. Not that day. She re-entered so many times I lost count. Well over forty. She made it to the chair only once, and perhaps because of her relief or her nerves, she immediately began acting once she sat down. I could see it immediately. And I could feel the rest of the class see it as well. She exhaled, looked around. She was performing “waiting.” Leaky let her sit there for the full minute to illustrate his point. It was excruciating. At the end of the minute he turned to the class to ask us if we believed her sitting. Like a Pavlovian chorus we all intoned “no” in unison.