Now her phone is mostly a tool for semaphoring whereabouts and plans, for taking pictures of stage sets and furniture, interesting colors, appliances of the past.

Maureen’s phone, on the other hand, is her best friend. Everything in her life is filtered through it—information received, confirmed, replied to, shared. Not to mention recorded with the phone’s camera. One night when the two of them were hanging out on Maureen’s giant sectional sofa, Maureen startled herself.

“Wow. I almost forgot. It’s Jill’s birthday.” Which prompted her to send a small burst of texted good wishes punctuated with a selfie of her waving. “I know they’re stupid,” she said, but kept on tapping in emojis of firecrackers and a cake. Jill is not a person, she’s a decrepit barn cat who belongs to one of Maureen’s stable of once lovers/now friends.

The dinner Maureen is already excited about is her treat at a ridiculously expensive restaurant. Cate hopes her pair of dressy pants is clean and pressed. As soon as she slips the phone back into her pocket, it starts ringing, an actual call. She looks at the screen. It’s Raymond. The guy doing the lights; she has to answer.

“What I’m thinking,” she tells him, “is big lights for the drill scene, big Georgia daylight. Then a creepy sort of pale, late-afternoon darkness for the sex scene in the barracks.”

“I can definitely do creepy,” Raymond says. “Make it double creepy if you like.”

Cate lies down, stretching out across three desks. “We need to pump up the visuals on account—”

“On account of the play sucks?”

“We can help, though.” No one wants to write or direct or act in a bad play, but bad plays do happen. And when they do, everyone concerned, Cate believes, needs to do their best to save the play from itself. When it was written, At Ease was a story with a gay subtext in a time when queerness was too naked to present directly; it needed to be discreetly dressed. It needed underwear and an overcoat. The drill sergeant’s murder of a corporal in the second act is ostensibly military discipline gone too far, but beneath it bubbles jealousy and self-loathing. The drill sergeant seethes at a crummy affair the corporal is having with an unhappily married nurse at the base hospital. Sometime in the 1950s this was put up on Broadway or near Broadway with not Ava Gardner, but someone sort of famous—like Carroll Baker or Shirley Knight—playing the nurse. And so the company is putting this relic up to honor its place in gay history rather than for its watchability.