She sits down on a seven-step staircase, stairs to nowhere. Eating a bag of chips. Waiting for the arrival of one of these revisions, a change she herself suggested. Cate thinks Vita needs to be reading on a long sofa rather than on the love seat originally planned. A sofa is sexier, even if it’s not being used for sex. A lot of the aura of this play is sex and its treacherous power, power derived from its societal suppression.

The metal grate of the elevator door screeches as it’s pulled open, revealing a heavy, blood-red velvet sofa with slightly ragged fringe at the bottom. This will provide Vita a place where she can both sit and recline. She’s going to be sitting and reclining with a number of girlfriends throughout the play. (One actress, Alex Shields, will play each of these women in turn. Her specific talent is taking on a character, vanishing into it. Here, she can disappear deftly into these characters with only wigs, hats, dresses, and voices.) Cate gets up and goes over to inspect the sofa. She asks Gladys to try it out. She’s a little thrilled to be ordering around a megastar. Who takes the order, bounces onto the sofa, stretches out full length, then sits up with her legs crossed.

Ruby runs the same test, then turns to Cate, who left her bag of chips and a Mexican Coke on the steps behind them. “Might I have a crisp?” she asks, pointing. Ruby is in full costume as Virginia Woolf—long, nubby sweater, narrow tweed skirt, sturdy shoes, her hair “bobbed.” She speaks in a high, reedy voice she says she has found in a rare recording of Woolf. She has dressed and spoken this way through every day of rehearsal. Like she’s Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of Lincoln. Another piece of this verisimilitude is that she inhabits 1927. If you try to talk with her about something in the here and now, she looks at you with fake bewilderment. This makes her impossible to talk to or be normal with in any way. Cate doesn’t even try. In this particular instance, she understands that Ruby is asking for a potato chip.

“Thanks awfully,” Ruby says to the offered package, then pauses as she eats two chips. The pause is long enough that Cate is afraid she might be about to start a conversation, but then, mercifully, she walks off, twiddling her fingers next to her head. “See you on the morrow.”

Cate moves through the shadows at the back of the stage, then climbs up into the lighting grid to get a bird’s-eye view of the sofa, see how it works in the scene about to be rehearsed—a conversation between Vita and her husband, Harold. Their marriage is, at this point, purely companionate.