This simple trip is made long and annoying by a tight budget. Her flight was the lowest fare she could find among the inconvenient-hour departures. Six thirty-five a.m. out of Midway, with a stop in Tampa, as though Tampa is on the way to New Jersey. The rental car she picked up in a strip mall ten minutes down the road from the airport has fuzzy cloth upholstery steeped in cigarette smoke from an ancient civilization. Ninety-five thousand miles on the odometer. Engine rattle when she tries to push it past sixty-five. Although this play is a huge career opportunity, it is nonetheless even lower paying than some of the productions she’s worked on in Chicago or Milwaukee. The off-Broadway pay scale is absurd; she’s heard this before and is now experiencing it. But off-Broadway is, of course, adjacent to Broadway.

So she rattles onward, from the Newark airport to Moonachie, a remote New Jersey location where the sets for Blanks will be constructed. She’s here today to start things off with the fabricators. The shop is in a retired candy factory. A caramel aroma drifts vaguely out of the corners. Everything is in forward gear. Cate loves the energized scent of wood and metal and sweat and, of course, caramel.

It turns out to be an all-woman shop. No-nonsense women. Five of them. One has an injury much worse than Cate’s—her right foot has been replaced with a high-tech prosthesis. This is, she tells Cate (part of a universal private conversation among those with missing parts), from a previous career in chicken processing at a plant unbothered by concerns for worker safety.

Most of the afternoon gets used up working out details from drawings and images Cate throws from her laptop onto a pull-down projector screen in what was once the candy baron’s office lofted above the factory floor.

The carpenters want to know does the stage at Ropes and Pulleys have tracks for platforms?

Cate says no, but they’ve okayed installing them.

The painters are doubtful the walls of the basement scene can be done to Cate’s specification with just paint.

Cate says, “The writing room Virginia has there needs to be already old in the 1920s. Old cellar is, I think, a special color, a particular mix of gray and decay. I’ve brought along Pantone chips for this mottling.” She doesn’t say she got the specific colors from her father. “I’ve also brought an old British fuse box I ordered off eBay. That basement wall needs something for Vita and Virginia to bump against. A romantic nuisance.”

Someone wants to know how much greenery will be needed to create Vita’s garden.