Playwright and director Tina Satter wasn’t on the hunt for a new idea back in 2017, but as it turned out, one found her anyway. While idly browsing the internet, she stumbled on an article about Reality Winner, a woman with an unlikely name and an even unlikelier story: a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist who became a whistleblower and was given the longest sentence in history for unauthorized release of government information.
It was the photo that ran with the article that first captured Satter’s eye: Here was a woman who joined the Air Force at 19, spoke four languages, and leaked documents to the press concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Yet she was just a girl, merrily grinning in a Pikachu hoodie.
Where Theater Goes From Here, According to an Actor, Producer + Artistic Director“I was like, Oh, my God, this is an American millennial who actually cares about our country,” Satter recalls. “And a lot of complicated things unfolded in how she cares, but I believe it’s because she cared. I was so out of touch with that feeling, you know? I’m a cynical, art-making New Yorker who’s like, ‘Oh, it’s so humiliating to be from the United States.’ And this person thought, No, our country can be better.”
The article linked to a transcript of the day FBI agents went to Winner’s home to interrogate her, and Satter was riveted. “The first page even looked like a front page of a play,” she says. “Like, it had this stamp on it, an FBI seal, and then it said, ‘Reality Winner Verbatim Transcripts’ in big letters, like it was a title.… It felt like a script.”
Satter, the founder of Brooklyn-based experimental theater company Half Straddle, decided to adapt the transcript into a play, which she would also direct. It became “Is This A Room,” a critically acclaimed piece that began life at downtown Manhattan venue the Kitchen and eventually made it all the way to Broadway via the Vineyard Theatre. It’s running in repertory with Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” at the Lyceum Theatre until Nov. 27. (A closing notice set for Nov. 14 was rescinded after ticket sales surged following the announcement.)
Running a tense 70 minutes, “Is This A Room” takes place in real time in Winner’s Augusta, Georgia, house on the afternoon of June 3, 2017. The piece is performed verbatim from the transcript, including every moment of awkward small talk, every interruption, and every cough and sniffle.
Speaking to the dramatic richness of the transcript, Satter was struck by the fact that everyone onstage knows that, within the hour, “this girl’s life is going to be really, really different. That’s the incredible dance that we have from that moment that we have captured on tape: This is a person literally fighting second-by-second for their autonomy, knowing it’s slipping away.”
Though Satter says she later found out there were 11 members of the FBI combing the property that day, only the ones that were picked up on the recording are featured: Agent Garrick (Pete Simpson), Agent Taylor (Will Cobbs), and a third person the transcript simply identifies as Unknown Male (Becca Blackwell).
“This is a person literally fighting second-by-second for their autonomy, knowing it’s slipping away.”
“One of the first core things [that stood out] to me was this female body in this tiny space with all these men, and what that means,” Satter explains. “I really wanted to play with what that would have felt like for her, physically, to be in that space, trying to keep her wits about her.”
To play her lead, Satter enlisted her longtime collaborator Emily Davis, who just so happens to bear a striking resemblance to Winner and whom the playwright calls an “incredible actor with a very specific skill set.”
“Emily and I had tons of conversations being like, ‘Beat by beat, what is maybe Reality thinking here? Is she trying to hide something here?’ Emily wanted that sort of work. And she's such a smart actor,” Satter says.
When “Is This A Room” premiered in early 2019, Winner was less than a year into her five-year prison sentence. She was released to house arrest this past June. Satter has been in touch with her subject’s family since the project’s early days, and has now spoken to Winner herself. As a living piece of theater, “Is This Is A Room” is uniquely suited to addressing the ever-changing situation.
Asked if the play could be considered a piece of activism, Satter says she thinks it’s more about presenting the facts as they unfolded and letting viewers draw their own conclusions. “It feels like it’s way stronger to let an audience just experience this day, this afternoon, and then come to whatever it activates in them,” she says.
“For the family and I think for us, too,” she continues, “[the play] remains a platform for her personally, and this question of: How is justice done in our country, and what does it mean to still be doing the Espionage Act? So it’s really very dynamic, actually. You get this look at this young person moving through our justice system.”
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