Fate dealt Graham a joker. He only intended his big, cheerful play to be a temporary financial solution. He wanted to make a play to which you could bring your nephew, your lover, and your great aunt. He didn’t allow himself any artistic intentions, just stuck to the template of combining surefire elements of Broadway blockbusters. These included:

• cuddly animals;
• amateur detectives;
• inspirational songs about possibilities, potential, romantic happiness, durable friendship, and beating the odds; and finally,
• audience interaction (children pulled onstage from their seats to dance with Petey Panda and his friends; an audience-chosen ending).

He put all this into a jumberator and what came out was Pand-a-Rama!, which by now has had two Broadway runs and has four touring companies roaming the world, a movie version, a novelization, a video game, and a line of detective panda action figures. He will never have to work again in his life. He will always be famous for this unsinkable piece of junk.

What the indignity bought him is endless time to write and produce plays that are brilliant but so obscure and opaque hardly anyone comes to them. The shows are elaborate puzzles the audience must solve. People don’t want to work this hard for their entertainment, or take notes in the dark (he provides lighted pens). Or come three nights in a row to see all the acts necessary to complete the “geopolitical acrostic.”

His obsession with surveillance has taken over his writing. The play he’s working on now takes place in a single room, underground. There are only two characters. They are not friends; they’ve just been assigned together to the room. They wear identical gray jumpsuits. They are both listening in on phone calls. Their only interaction with each other is when they take off their headsets for a coffee break. They only talk about the coffee, although coffee may be a code word, also stale cookie. It is never clear who they work for, who is benefiting from their machinations. They might or might not be facilitating something that might or might not be a zero-sum endgame, and the winners are not going to be regular people, or even, necessarily, humans.

The audience, he’s told Cate, hears every phone call. What he’s trying to capture, he has told her, is a very slight amount of change. Picture a vacant field on a cloudy day at five-eighteen in the afternoon, then at five-twenty.