She tries to read. She brought Woolf’s Orlando, but she can’t concentrate. It’s been a long time since she has been this nervous, experienced the motion sickness that comes with being kicked up a notch, or kicked down; the anxiety is about transit. There’s nothing more she can do, though. She is well prepared for this interview. She’s read the working script of the play, plus a lot about Vita. Also two of her novels and a collection of her gardening essays. Although Cate loves Virginia Woolf, she’d never read anything by Vita, who appears to have been an industrious, pedestrian novelist and poet; a major gardener; a distracted mother; a reckless womanizer. Looked at one way, she was arrogant and slouchy and aristocratic; from another angle—ridiculous. She lived in a castle; she had a moat, also a mustache. The play spans a few years from the late 1920s into the early 1930s, during which she took up, then gently demoted, a series of lovers, most prominently Virginia Woolf. Their affair was a stepping-stone across a shallow stream for Vita, a small but deep pool of tragedy for Virginia Woolf, who had the bad luck to be bipolar before the arrival of lithium. She took to her bed when her mind went astray. Birds spoke to her in Greek. On the page it’s a very good play.

Cate has brought one model and a few drawings of the sets she would like to make. This is not a minimalist play, or even an austere one. As much as it is about Vita, it’s also about the cosseted life she lived in the rooms of castles and enormous country houses. Stone walls hung with massive tapestries abetted her seductions. The rooms are part of the story. As is her garden in nighttime. This is the vision she is presenting to Lauren and Molly. Dark opulence.

“We are so glad you’ve come to us.” Molly opens the door and takes Cate’s hands in her own. This gesture might have resulted in an awkward glitch, but Molly doesn’t miss a beat as she notices, then pretends not to notice, Cate’s shortfall of fingers. Smooth.

Lauren stands behind Molly. Although the three of them were once introduced at a wrap party for the Chicago production of False Confessions, Cate knows them mostly through photographs. Although one (Lauren) is small and white-haired, the other (Molly) darkly Latinate and broad-beamed, they share the same combination of success and age. Also, weeks here and there someplace warm has burnished them both. Everything they wear is either gray or black or putty. A dash of brown for holidays. (Graham told her this.) Their heavy wedding bands are rose gold. When they got married—in the ruins of the Greek theater at Taormina—theirs was the featured wedding in the Sunday Times.