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.
When she sees Gladys coming out of her dressing room in fit-pitching mode about something or other, Cate decides to get up out of the oncoming fray and climbs to her reliable perch, the fly gallery, to watch the audience settle in. She’s not expecting to see anyone she knows. Maureen is at the amusement park. Neale is feeling too fragile to navigate crowded airports. This seemed reasonable when she announced it, and Cate said she totally understood, but really, she doesn’t. She took it as one more piece of the distance Neale has been throwing between the two of them.
Then, midway through her scan, in one of the back rows of the orchestra floor, on the aisle stage left, she sees Dana. Or someone she thinks is Dana, but Cate’s desire that it be Dana fills in the rest. She can’t be sure, because she can’t make out details at this distance, and then the house lights are dimming and the curtain is going up on Vita’s living room. The old phone, heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil, goes off on the end table, its huge, jangly ring drawing Vita, handsome in breeches, in through the garden door to pick up the receiver and shout, a little breathless, “Hullo? Yes? Well you see I was all the way down by the moat” to begin the play.
Looking down on her work as the play rolls out, sets thick enough to accommodate big characters, she is happier than she’s been in a long time. She holds still a moment to feel her accomplishment. She designed these sets. She’ll get to make others for plays as good as this one. She saved her friend. She has a fabulous dog. Dana is possibly sitting in a partially obstructed seat at the back of the theater.
When the lights come up for intermission, the bad seat occupied by the real or imagined Dana is empty. Cate goes out to the lobby, then onto the sidewalk in front of the theater, then into the crush in the ladies’ room, but she’s nowhere to be found. The mystery buzzes inside her in a low register through the rest of the play, and through the after-party until she is exhausted, on her way to the hotel in a cab, when it occurs to her that Dana—if it was her—has moved to the unsupervised area of the playground.