But, as we moved into previews, I felt that I had cured the passivity in Daisy and allowed her to bring the two women together herself. I didn’t let the doctor unite the women; I even had to get rid of him, for a minute, to let Daisy possess herself as she banishes him from her Manhattan garden.

In a later moment in Act II, I let Daisy sit down, taking a suitcase and making it a throne; indicating just by her posture that she now knows who she is. It’s her first clear day, and she sees — knows — she has to step into her own body, and her present life, before she can step into love.

And literally through her, the doctor also finds the key to his own transformation. Daisy, like Eliza, is the energy that thaws the frozen man. The agent of his change.

I checked in again with my millennial colleague.

“Watching the process has meant that my objections are now … tempered,” she said, temperately. “You and Charlotte have made her less a victim and more a late bloomer. Because you are not … 23 or, say, 24 … one problematic aspect is tempered.”

As a terminal ingénue in her 40s, I felt conflicted being told that I had saved Daisy with my own, well, maturity. But I was glad to hear confirmation that she was becoming not merely a dated role, but a real woman.

Daisy, like all true heroines, comes to own her complexity. As she told her flowers when they were hiding from the sun, the trick is to be seen.