Then it’s Maureen who clears her throat. “I feel terrible about this, but the thing is I’m not going to be able to come to New York for your opening night. ZordorWorld is opening that weekend. They’re freaked out about costume malfunctions. There will be a hundred and eighty employees rigged up as intergalactic functionaries, and so they figure something will for sure go wrong, and I need to be there when that happens. I’m so sorry, honey.”

Here is where human life gets ridiculous. After all her internal distancing, instead of being relieved in this moment, Cate finds herself a little miffed that Maureen is blowing off her big moment.

opening night

Usually Cate stays with a play through the first or second preview night. If everything is going smoothly, her work is done. With Blanks, though, she wants to see the impression it makes on the opening-night crowd, spot the critics, count the curtain calls, duck the champagne corks popping at the after-party. It’s a beautiful, fragrant nocturnal flower. She wants to be there when it unfolds.

An hour before the theater doors open, she’s double-checking the tech they’re using to project Vita’s letters of seduction, passion, and eventual dismissal onto a sepia screen above the writing tower where Vita (her body double is Ally Wilber, a totally unfamous actress with a long, bony frame) sits at her desk, her back to the audience, writing on an iPad. Ally is in place now, fooling around, writing, Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, over and over.

“Whatever size you have now,” she tells the tech guy who’s running the projection, “Double it.” Then, “Yes. Perfect.”

From there she goes onstage to unnecessarily fuss with some fake clematis climbing the tower wall. She’s just burning off nervous vapors, like everyone else. Backstage, the air is alive with hope and vanity. Molly and Lauren are in a tight huddle with Judd Shoemaker, working on a small dialog revision for Harold Nicolson. Costumes are checked back and front. Ruby Pepper tries to engage Cate in a silly bit of conversation.

“I’ve just rushed down here by the tube,” she says in an annoying impersonation of someone out of breath.

“Right,” Cate says. She seriously doubts the London Underground even existed in Virginia Woolf’s time. She waits until Ruby is gone, then Googles it, and unfortunately finds it opened in 1863. Still, she has a hard time picturing Virginia hanging from a strap next to someone eating “crisps” from a bag.