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.

“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.