Emily Davis as Reality Winner (second from right) is confronted by FBI agents played by (from left) TL Thompson, Pete Simpson and Becca Blackwell.
You wouldn’t think people could forget the name Reality Winner, but with the constant stream of news related to Russian election interference over the past 2½ years, the early chapter involving Winner has been largely forgotten. People could watch Is This a Room thinking it is a fictional, or at least fictionalized, encounter between a young woman and the FBI agents who have come to interrogate her. And that’s the beauty of this show, whose script comes verbatim from an FBI transcript of June 3, 2017, the day Winner—a 25-year-old Air Force veteran who’d been working for a national-security contractor in Georgia—was arrested for leaking classified information to the media.
As staged by Tina Satter, who conceived and directed it, Is This a Room plays like a conventionally structured drama: starting with a disruptive event to set the plot in motion, providing character exposition, and building suspense with the gradual revelation of the reason for the FBI visit. The dialogue even has Mametian staccato rhythms, as characters interrupt one another and often don’t complete their thoughts. And just like in many a police procedural, there’s a good cop/bad cop setup, and the suspect obfuscates until authorities have backed her into a corner.
Davis and Thompson dramatize a 2017 FBI interrogation. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
This could have been a very different kind of production, one lacking the dramatic momentum and vivid characterizations that Satter and her cast give it. It’s unrecognizable as documentary-based theater if you associate that genre with a static staging that relies more on recitation than performance. While the creators’ sympathies obviously lie with Winner, who is serving 63 months in prison (the longest sentence ever imposed for unauthorized release of government information to the media), Satter avoids speechifying and clichéd barbs, typical pitfalls of theater with a political agenda. Lines that in ham-handed agitprop would be relayed merely as obvious applause cues instead provide the emotional climax of Is This a Room—when Winner explains why she did what she did upon finding the classified report about a Russian malware attack in fall 2016 on some U.S. election systems:
It was just too much to sit back and be helpless…that was the final straw. I felt really hopeless, and seeing that information that had been contested back and forth, back and forth for so long…why isn’t this out there?
Is This a Room manages to mine emotional heft out of an FBI transcript thanks to its committed cast, led by Emily Davis. A baby-voiced blonde in cutoffs, Davis’s Winner is a most unlikely espionage suspect. In a naturalistic performance devoid of hysterics or grandstanding, she plays Winner as almost nonchalant about the situation she faces. From the moment the agents arrive, she claims not to know why the FBI is interested in her, and she calmly cooperates, giving them full details on what they’ll find in her home and office; when they later ask why she didn’t seem surprised by their visit, she has a ready answer. Since the FBI transcript doesn’t have any “stage directions” indicating the speaker’s emotional tone, the interpretation of all this was up to Davis (and Satter), and the actress is thoroughly convincing, right down to eliciting a smidgen of doubt about Winner’s guilelessness.
“A baby-voiced blonde in cutoffs, Davis’s Winner is a most unlikely espionage suspect. In a naturalistic performance devoid of hysterics or grandstanding, she plays Winner as almost nonchalant about the situation she faces.”
As Winner’s main interlocutor, Pete Simpson artfully portrays an agent in “good cop” mode, disarming with his tentativeness and chitchat about dogs and working out. Does this Agent Garrick really understand that Winner just got so “pissed off,” or is he maneuvering her toward a confession without an attorney present? His colleagues are played by TL Thompson as Agent Taylor and Becca Blackwell as an agent identified in both the transcript and show program as Unknown Male. As they stalk the premises and remove property, their no-nonsense-bordering-on-sinister demeanor contrasts with the gentler rapport between Winner and Garrick.
Some lighting and sound effects are also key in transforming this FBI interrogation into a gripping drama. Redacted lines in the transcript are represented on stage by a flash followed by a quick blackout, their increasing frequency paralleling the encroaching sense of dread over Reality’s future. Sound design is by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada; the lighting, by Thomas Dunn (Yamada also composed music for the show.)
Is This a Room lasts all of 70 minutes and ends, as the transcript does, before Winner is placed under arrest. The topic of Russian election meddling is never actually mentioned. Even with these constraints in the source material, what has been put on the stage feels urgent and illuminating.
Is This a Room runs through Nov. 24 at the Vineyard Theatre (108 E. 15th St. between Union Square East and Irving Place). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are available by calling (212) 353-0303 or visiting vineyardtheatre.org.
