It seemed the goal of theatre school, especially in first year, was to render us empty vessels. Bodies without personalities, tics, or really any defining characteristics. One instructor actually described first year as being about “stripping you down to nothing and building you back up,” which struck me as being a bit Jonestown-y. In his essay Paradox of the Actor, Denis Diderot claimed that the best actors “are fit to play all characters because they have none.” He defined an actor’s ability in terms of absence — namely, an absence of any internal, innate identity. Like the depersonalized characters in pornos, Diderot’s actors were blank bodies onto which the fantasies of others could be projected. Hosts to be possessed. Icon painters suffused by divine inspiration. Diderot’s essay was written in 1773 and published posthumously fifty-seven years later, in 1830. Lee Strasberg, the father of method acting in America, once claimed Paradox of the Actor “has remained to this day the most significant attempt to deal with the problem of acting,” which goes a way to explaining how Diderot’s vision of the actor as automaton, as a body cleaved of its selfhood, has retained such currency in Western theatre schools.

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.