Mr. Z told Rosemary and Arik that the two of them were henceforth exempt from attending class with all the others. They could show up just for the play rehearsals—what he now called Workshop—and have that count toward a credit. They were that special. Mr. Z immersed them in European literature, showed them movies. They read the lyric poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and the medieval love letters of Abelard and Heloise, and watched films from the French New Wave like Breathless and Jules et Jim, which Mr. Z praised for their fresh, passionate naturalism. Afterward, they engaged in trust exercises that would look to any outsider like creative riffs on Twister. Workshop became to Rosemary and Arik a gateway to an earlier, more romantic world.

Mr. Z said he demanded raw honesty in his “company”—the grandiose term he used when referring to his two star pupils. His company had to be one where trust was the key operating principle. Nothing that happened within the Safe Room—their windowless black box studio—was to be shared with the outside world, and nothing that happened within would ever be considered weird, dumb or taboo. He said trust was so crucial in the creation of drama that it was why the Sundance Institute held its workshops for writers and directors in the isolated mountains of Utah. If the outside world was ever allowed to intrude, the magic of their Arden would be lost.

“Safety, and in particular, the safety of emotional freedom, is a very fragile thing,” he said.

In this hothouse atmosphere, Rosemary found herself enjoying the company of Arik, who, beneath his rugged good looks, turned out to be a shy, oddly sensitive boy who swallowed his words. He worried excessively about his low, manly voice, yet neglected to shave off the downy Fu Manchu patches bracketing the sides of his mouth. He and Rosemary found a shared connection in the fact that they both had fatherless homes—Arik’s dad had “gone out for smokes” years before. His housewife mother, who couldn’t prove that she started college in Yerevan and graduated in Beirut because her papers were lost, worked as a seamstress at a dry cleaner’s. They liked to say his father was dead but sightings of him continued to surface, making dignity hard; he’d be spotted buying baklava in Glendale or driving an airport taxi on the 405. Arik had an eight-year-old brother whom he both adored and abhorred; both of them were bound by embarrassment and pity for their mother, a hirsute bowling ball of a woman who pickled her own root vegetables and spoke with an impenetrable accent. Their living room, he said, was crowded with other people’s suits and gowns that his mother brought home to alter while she watched Lebanese soap operas and wept.