Gurevich and Levitan both quote Leonore Gallet — a gifted violinist and chessplayer — from Lasker’s Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood: “When a woman thinks of  a beautiful move, she is liable to also think about how beautiful she looks in making it”. Kokish remembers from her tournament experience reaching for a piece, and suddenly being aware of how her nails looked. “The truth is that any insecurity a teenager can possibly have is heightened when they’re sitting three feet across from someone for five hours,” she said.

To impart the feeling of a chess tournament on the  cast, Kokish staged a rehearsal at the Mechanics Institute Chess Room on Post St., which she described as “church-like, much more real than ‘Chess: The Musical’.”

“It was a helpful rehearsal,” said actor Alex Bonte. “It adds to our seriousness, and [Kingston] and I bonded in the gravity of that room.”

“The theater community and the chess community have been unbelievably encouraging,” said Kokish. “The theater community had to embrace this play about chess, while the Mechanics Institute let us use their space for a rehearsal, and the Berkeley Chess School gave us a beautiful set to use.”

Chessplayers might note some common threads in Kokish’s play and Walter Tevis’ novel with the same name. There’s a prodigious female chessplayer in both, with one parent, and she drinks too much for a while. Kokish said she hasn’t read The Queen’s Gambit. On the other hand, Jennifer Shahade’s Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport is quoted during the play,  and “inspired much of the discourse throughout the production”, Kokish said.