Some girls will kill for the lead role. Clara is willing to die for the background.

Thirteen-year-old Clara Vance has always been invisible. In the loud, chaotic ecosystem of St. Jude's Middle School, she is the girl who never speaks, never acts out, and never gets noticed.

Then comes the spring play.

Enter Mr. Grotowski?a bitter, failed auteur who treats his middle school drama students like Juilliard candidates. When he casts Clara, he gives her a terrifying mandate: he doesn't want her to act. He wants absolute, Stanislavskian truth. He wants her to erase her humanity entirely.

Clara takes the note.

What begins as an awkward teenager trying to impress a demanding teacher quickly spirals into a chilling, method-acting descent. Clara stops eating human food, preferring to "photosynthesize" in the school courtyard. She locks her joints until they swell, mastering the art of perfect, immovable rigidity. She views her terrified parents as "lumberjacks" out to prune her, and her gossiping classmates as a fungal rot she must violently eradicate to protect the sanctity of the stage.

The Heartwood is a pitch-black, psychological thriller about the horrors of artistic obsession and the lengths one girl will go to finally be essential. It is a harrowing journey into madness, ego-death, and the darkest corners of the human mind.

And Clara is playing Tree Number 4.