Cate senses she and Ty are at a tipping point. He appears to be pursuing a friendship. She has by now been to his apartment (a quietly dramatic scheme of gunmetal gray and Chinese red filled with hard-to-find pieces of low-end Americana—in other words, a temple in her religion); met his cat, Chris; eaten what he says is his best dinner offering, fish tacos. From here, the next steps would be small, then larger personal revelations, trust, a gossipy alliance. But she can’t do it. She is by now too far outside almost everything and too low on social energy, and is not looking to be let in anywhere new.

“I’d better get up to my lovely room and hop on eBay,” she tells him as a way of slipping free of their conversation. “I have some accessorizing ideas for Vita’s living room.”

She thought this hotel—slightly above her price range—would be better than the plaid hotel, but it’s really just a different spin on awful. Everything in the room has either a scary sheen or a burnish. The color scheme (flamingo pink, gray, and mauve) and artwork (pinky-orange sunrise, or possibly sunset; it’s hard to tell) suggests modulated grieving. The bedspread is a slippery grayish beige. Greige. She has folded it and put it in the closet.

She sits cross-legged on the bed with her laptop and a small plastic carton of couscous salad and shuts out the room around her. Instead she pushes her thoughts inside the play, which is the best thing she’s worked on since Adam died. Once in a while, despite the antiquated nature of theater—all the fakery happening in the same room as its viewers—a really good piece can use this propinquity to intensify the audience’s experience, make them forget where they parked their car. This is that play. Vita’s serial womanizing could easily have been played for laughs, a sexual farce, but that’s not what Lauren had in mind. Vita is just a vehicle for the confusion that comes from not being able to firmly stake an identity. And the pain that comes for those who lend their emotions to a shadow that lengthens, then recedes. This is not the story of damage done by a reckless lover, but by a society with ignorant, vigorously enforced conventions.