Something has to come due.
Point of attack, in that sense, isn't really a question of how far back the story reaches. It's a question of what forces the room to deal with it today — a task, a deadline, an encounter that can't be rescheduled, a decision somebody has run out of ways to postpone. History creates the pressure. A present-tense obligation is what turns pressure into a play.
Firewall opens on day three of a five-week campaign, and the event that starts everything — Harlan Works closing, twenty-eight hundred jobs gone — broke six hours earlier that same morning. The gap is short, but it isn't the closing itself that puts Miranda's team in the room. It's that the closing has already become a decision the campaign has to make before the news cycle moves on without them. Whitfield has already responded. Voss is already on the air. The play doesn't begin because something happened. It begins because what happened has already become something the campaign must answer, on a clock the war room does not control.
Places waits fourteen years to open, and it opens on an audition. The marriage that produced Sarah's diminished phone voice will still be there the day after the play ends; by itself it never forces a scene. The callback does — a director asking her to read opposite a stranger, in a room where the coping voice she uses at home won't survive a cold reading of Wilde. Fourteen years of practiced fine meets one task that has no patience for fine, and the play can begin.
Remains reaches back the furthest — a marriage, a death, two families that have never occupied the same room — and it still doesn't open until there is a job to do. The parents died six months earlier. What finally puts Maggie, Simon, Danny, and Carol in the same cabin isn't grief; grief could have kept them apart indefinitely, the way it already had for six months. It's the lease, the lawyer, the practical and unglamorous fact that somebody has to clear the cabin before the snow makes the road impassable. Loss doesn't require a scene. An unavoidable Saturday does.
That's the actual claim underneath all three: a play doesn't begin merely after history has created pressure. It begins when that pressure acquires a present-tense task, deadline, encounter, or decision that can no longer be postponed. The years do the loading. The task pulls the trigger.
As lights rise on Remains, Maggie is already in motion — turning on lamps, brushing dust off a table, checking outlets, a clipboard tucked under her arm. Mourning isn’t what begins the scene. The list is. That's the whole engine of a late point of attack, standing in a cold cabin before anyone has said a word: not a woman remembering her mother, but a woman with tasks to finish before dark.