The preface describes the play’s setting as summer, 2012, at a theater in Worchester County, Massachusetts. The set, at the play’s opening, is essentially a mirror of the audience: rows of (performative) stage theater seats facing rows of (real) audience theater seats, backgrounded by the projector booth, which radiates a beam “out over our heads” (ii).

The preface also describes the play’s characters: Sam, a thirty-five year-old Caucasian man who wears a beat-up Red Sox cap; Avery, a twenty year-old “African American” man “in love with the movies” (ii), who wears glasses and red, slightly European-looking sneakers; Rose, a twenty-four year-old “sexually magnetic” (iii) woman who sports baggy clothes, no makeup, and dyed, forest-green hair; and The Dreaming Man/Skylar, merely described as “twenty-six” (iii). Sam and Avery wear the “same degrading uniform” (iii). Rose doesn’t wear a uniform, as she’s a projectionist.

The pre-show section describes the opening scene, which contains no dialogue. The onstage theater fills with movie-goers, the house lights dim, and Bernard Herman’s Prelude to The Naked and the Dead plays. The real audience can’t see the film itself; all they see is a beam and some abstracted shooting images.