Tonight, the opening night of At Ease, she lies up in the fly gallery with her assistant, Stig. From this perch, if she drops her head, she can see Neale and Joe in their seats. They come to opening night of anything Cate works on. If the subject matter is too adult (a revival of Bent when Joe was only nine), Neale comes alone. Tonight, Cate is embarrassed that they are going to witness this loser, but she couldn’t put them off. She tried. It’s hard enough just to lie above this play and see it herself. The company could have had a million-dollar budget and the play would still sink with the weight of its awfulness. Below, Eleanor Quinn is giving everything she’s got to one of the terrible lines she’s been dealt.

“I lahk a uniform on a man. Even bettah, I lahk the uniform on the floor next to my bed.”

Eleanor is playing Layla, the voluptuous nurse on the bleak army base. Layla makes the best of her situation by bedding enlisted men. The one she’s speaking to now as they pass an afterglow cigarette back and forth lazily in the midafternoon, in an empty barracks, is Corporal Mason, who will be murdered in the second act.

When Eleanor gets to this terrible, Mae West line, Cate and Stig cut their throats with invisible knives, hang themselves with imaginary nooses. The line is the cue for the closeted, jealous Sergeant Tragg—Corporal Mason is a hunk he’d like to bed himself—to come briskly through the door and discover them. Howard Foster, the mildly famous, occasionally Steppenwolf actor they’ve borrowed to add name recognition to the cast, is at the ready, behind the door, positioned to come abruptly in. He has a stomachache tonight and Cate is worried this will prevent him from bursting through with gusto. As often happens, it turns out she’s worrying about the wrong thing. What she should be worrying about is the crummy door, which is made of some pulpy wood that bloats in ambient humidity. They’ve planed it twice, but it appears to have swollen again and is now keeping Howard from doing any bursting at all.

“Fuck,” Cate says. Although they are so very close, only a few feet away, the distance they need to cover is, regrettably, vertical. They can’t drop straight down to help; they’d wind up in a pile of their own broken ankles. They have to run a gauntlet of steps and ladders to the stage.