Volpi (Tricia Small) gets tough with T-J (Dave Baez), while Kevin (Jason Sweettooth Williams) looks on.
When the program comes with a glossary, that can be a trouble sign. The glossary for The Witness Room, Pedro Antonio Garcia’s drama-with-some-laughs, runs to three pages. So much legalese—J-D Redcap, Three and a C, Chomo—how much will an audience member be able to understand? And for the first several minutes, it’s a struggle to figure out what the heck’s going on in set designer Daniel Allen’s cluttered witness room. Stick around, though, and the narrative becomes clearer. And what follows is a compelling peek into the lives and interactions of NYPD cops, their legal maneuverings in pretrial, and how slippery their moral code can get.
Sampson (Moe Irvin) and Eli (J.D. Ellison). Photographs by Andy Henderson Photography.
Want to be a fly on a witness room wall down at 100 Centre? It’s where plainclothes cops T-J (Dave Baez), Sampson (Moe Irvin), and Kevin (Jason Sweettooth Williams) are shooting the breeze, they’d use a coarser term for it. They’re awaiting a preliminary hearing on a drug bust they handled, and the small talk runs to drugs, wives and ex-wives, sports, and traffic on the FDR. Garcia doesn’t individualize these guys as much as he might, and maybe that’s a smart move. They’re all cut from the same cloth: public servants, dedicated to the public good but more dedicated to their paychecks, cynical, hard-drinking, and hypermasculine. Calling a colleague a queer is the worst insult imaginable, and the late-arriving Eli (J.D. Mollison), who isn’t, but is more religious and sensitive than his peers, will receive a healthy dose of ribbing.
But the most macho among them may be Andrea Volpi (a tough-as-nails Tricia Small), the DA, who’s there to dish out some pre-hearing coaching. This is a difficult judge, she cautions, and their stories must, must agree. Volpi uses her femininity, her ample smarts, whatever she’s got to gain an upper hand. As each witness faces the judge and screws up in some small way or other, she dresses them down, and the tension mounts. So do the questions: Are these guys telling the truth? If they’re not, but it’s in the service of putting somebody behind bars and making the city a bit safer, is that morally defensible? What if an innocent gets locked up—is that a price worth paying? How do their (probably messed-up) personal lives affect their job performance? What are the consequences of standing together, no matter what?
Will Blum’s fast-paced direction rings true, and the actors’ intense physicality—fights, guns being pulled—can be truly frightening; they’re all trigger-happy; you never know when one will go too far. As Garcia, who’s also a criminal defense attorney, writes in his program note: “I was compelled to creatively tell the story of the moral dilemmas within the judicial system. What is right and wrong? Is it the search for the truth? Who determines that?”
“They’re all trigger-happy; you never know when one will go too far. ”
You won’t find any answers, but you’ll relish the clever, realistic way he raises the questions, and be left to contemplate the maelstrom of contradictory forces confronting the police force and its necessarily imperfect responses to them.
The cast is terrific: Small demonstrates the wily strategizing going on in Volpi’s brain, Irvin struts like the cock-of-the-walk Sampson imagines himself to be, Baez nails T-J’s pride and regret, Williams is the amiable drunk you’d want in your corner, and Ellison beautifully plays a showdown with Volpi where it’s hard not to root for both of them. And then there’s the final line, a masterpiece of a switcheroo—one where you may first gasp, then laugh, and then go, “Oh, of course.”
The Witness Room is occasionally confusing, mainly in its thicket of police jargon (sample, typical line, from Kevin: “I personally know from my C-Is that Suarez has f—-ed over a lot of clients. They got a hit out on him in the DR”) and offstage characters that can be hard to keep track of. But it’s well worth 75 minutes of your time.
Tickets to Bella Vita Entertainment’s The Witness Room at AMT Theater (354 W. 45th St.) are currently available through Oct. 6. Evening performances are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; matinees are Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit thewitnessroomnyc.ludus.com/index.php.
Playwright: Pedro Antonio Garcia
Director: Will Blum
Scenic Design: Daniel Allen
Costumes: Gina Ruiz
Lighting: Aiden Bexark
Sound Design: Lindsay Jones
