Kelley Curran and Frank Wood in The Meeting: The Interpeter’s interpretation of the infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016.
Considering it has a cast of two, The Meeting: The Interpreter is a very busy production. The actors, Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, move all over the stage—standing here, kneeling there, spinning around in wheeled chairs, dancing a little—and Curran, who plays multiple characters, repeatedly switches her costume or wig. Video, puppets, sound effects and a slew of props are also part of the action.
Everything is well executed, yet audience members may leave the show wondering if all that activity has any consequence beyond gussying up a rather dry story. The Meeting: The Interpreter could impress you as ambitious and inventive—or it might wear you out if, instead, you find the stagecraft overblown and frenetic.
To start to appreciate Catherine Gropper’s two-hander, you have to think back past the myriad more recent Trump scandals to the mid-2017 revelation of what’s now known as the Trump Tower meeting—the June 2016 gathering organized by Donald Trump Jr. after a business associate with Russian contacts emailed him to suggest they could provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The playwright isn’t so much concerned with U.S. electoral politics, though. Her focus is on her title character: the man who served as interpreter for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer and point person at the meeting. While The Meeting is fictionalized, the real-life interpreter (who’s never named in the script) has the same biography as the character in the play—Russian-born, came to the U.S. for graduate school, now a citizen, has translated for the State Department and at the United Nations, a registered Democrat.
Wood and Curran in a scene re-creating the interpreter’s appearance before Congress. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Gropper, who’s also a documentary filmmaker, has said she was inspired to write the drama by a “chance encounter” with the actual interpreter from the Trump Tower meeting, and three different scenes revolve around conversations between the Interpreter and a Curran character identified as the Journalist.
Other scenes depict the Interpreter’s interrogations by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI. And this is the part of the story from which Gropper derives one of her main points: that this man who was merely doing his job, objectively (and anonymously), got dragged into the spotlight and questioned by authorities. “An everyday person getting caught in the chaos of intrigue’s power at the top—a glistening place where cameras become feeding utensils,” as the Journalist says.
During the Interpreter’s congressional testimony (which is taken from actual transcripts), videographers film Wood and Curran and simultaneously project the footage in close-up on a big screen. This may accentuate how his privacy was violated, but it does not make bureaucratic proceedings exciting to watch—and those are the two longest scenes in the play.
Video is used so much throughout the show that the dolly track is ever-present on stage and the two camerapeople take a curtain call. This is not the only stagecraft that seems more like embellishment—distraction, even—than essential to the narrative. Curran delivers a speech as she removes several neckties she’s wearing (to portray multiple congressmen) one by one, stapling each tie to a box after she takes it off. This “choreography” gives her something to do instead of staying still while she speaks, but it doesn’t necessarily symbolize anything to the audience.
Puppets are brought out for the Trump Tower meeting, to represent each attendee. Separately, a puppet appears as Sergei Magnitsky, a name tangential to the meeting but central to Gropper’s story. Veselnitskaya’s primary intention for the Trump meeting was lobbying for repeal of the Magnitsky Act, sanctions against Russia that were instituted after Magnitsky, an attorney and auditor who alleged corruption by Putin’s government, died in prison of “blunt cranial trauma” in 2009.
The script returns time and again to Magnitsky, with the Interpreter and Curran as Veselnitskaya offering contrasting versions of his plight. He: “Poor soul, alone in a cell. He had courage and died for it.” She: “He was no good! He was arrested, as part of his fraudulent scheme to cheat our motherland.”
Magnitsky’s sacrifice for his beliefs becomes a key theme of The Meeting, as the Interpreter has to make two decisions that could compromise his integrity: whether to accept a lucrative job offer with Veselnitskaya’s anti–Magnitsky Act lobbying group, and whether to accede to an FBI request to wear a wire. He also grapples with his divided loyalties to American democracy and his Russian heritage.
These ideas make for more absorbing drama than the tedious government hearings, blunt conversations between the Interpreter and the Journalist or Veselnitskaya, and rehashed old headlines that Gropper chose to stage. And they may not have needed all the bells and whistles that director Brian Mertes and the design team added on.
Wood (right) has the title role in the two-hander; Curran plays a journalist, a Russian, an FBI agent, members of Congress and their aides.
The Meeting: The Interpreter runs through Aug. 25 at the Theatre at St. Clements (423 W. 46th St.). Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday; meetinginterpreterplay.com.
Playwright: Catherine Gropper
Director: Brian Mertes
Sets: Jim Findlay
Costumes: Olivera Gajic
Lighting: Barbara Samuels
Sound: Daniel Baker & Co.
Projections: Yana Biryukova
Puppets: Julian Crouch
Choreography & Movement: Orlando Pabotoy
