By the end of the tautly sustained 70 minutes of “Is This a Room” — the extraordinary documentary theater work by Tina Satter that reopened this week after a brief run in January at the Kitchen — you’ll probably feel the need for a drink, or a yoga session, or a full-throated scream. Unlike more classic high-anxiety plays — say, “Oedipus Rex” or “Macbeth” — this production isn’t about to offer you the cleansing release of catharsis.
That will probably hold true even if you don’t know that what’s depicted here is only the opening chapter of a long nightmare for the young woman at the show’s center. That’s Reality Winner (portrayed by the wonderful Emily Davis), the former military linguist and intelligence contractor who is now serving a five-year, three-month prison sentence for the unauthorized release of government information to the media.
Satter, the founder and artistic director of the experimental Half Straddle company, conceived and staged this sharp, blindingly polished slice of theater vérité. She did not write its text, which is instead a transcript of a tape recording made by the FBI of its initial questioning of Winner from June 2017.
Interrogation scenes are a staple of crime shows, where wily, smooth-spoken police officers in closed rooms strategically grill their subjects into telling all. The session in “Room” takes place in the driveway, yard and interior of the Georgia house Winner was renting, and it is conducted with a clumsy casualness.
It is the sense of familiar territory made surreal, of easiness gradually becoming a chokehold, that gives “Room” its echoing power. I kept thinking of the opening chapter of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” in which a man wakes up “one fine morning” in his apartment to discover he is under arrest without knowing why.
“Room” begins just after Reality has pulled into her driveway, bearing groceries, and finds unknown men waiting for her. They are Agent Garrick (Pete Simpson), Agent Taylor (TL Thompson) and a colleague who is listed in the program only as Unknown Male (Becca Blackwell).
These men do not sound hostile or menacing or even particularly official. “Hey, how are you?” they say. “How’s your day going?” They explain that they have a search warrant for Reality’s house and car. “This is about a possible mishandling of classified information,” Garrick says.
Many minutes will pass before that “possible mishandling” is specifically defined, and many more before Reality admits that she did indeed print out a document about possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and mailed it to political news website The Intercept. During that time, she will never have been read her rights.
There has been no attempt here to replicate physically the real setting for this encounter — Parker Lutz’s set is an anonymous, neutral-colored platform — and yet I felt I could see Reality’s house as clearly as if I were watching a film. Thomas Dunn’s lighting, Enver Chakartash’s costumes, and Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada’s subliminal, gut-clutching sound design summon an acute sense of place and time.
But these elements also conjure the feelings of displacement and of time unhinged that arrive when a space you had thought was yours is occupied and transformed by others. “Is this a room? Is that a room?” the Unknown Man asks, in the line that gives the play its title, as he takes in the layout of the house.
A lot of what is said concerns what is and isn’t in Reality’s house and car. What is in the home includes three licensed guns (one of them pink) and two rescue animals, a dog and a cat, whose well-being is much on Reality’s mind.
There is affable talk of pets, gym regimens and work reassignments, all grounded in tedious, quotidian detail. Little by little, the focus narrows to the nature of Reality’s work as a translator and what she may or may not have done with a certain document a month earlier.
The transcript is rendered not just word for word. It’s also um for um, cough for cough. (Garrick has sinus problems.) Simpson, in particular, is a virtuoso in capturing precisely the imprecision of everyday speech.
The staging is less literal. Every so often, the three male characters will group themselves closely around Reality. Usually, she appears utterly alone, an impression occasionally underscored by an isolating spotlight. There is one brief, judiciously placed sequence enacted in slow motion.
In a portrait of almost forensic detail, Davis delivers one of the most trenchantly observed performances of the year. You feel viscerally how Reality is always struggling to convey and to hold onto an illusion of normalcy, as if nothing were really wrong with this picture.
But her body betrays her. Her eyes brim; her nose drips; her hands twist into knots; her mouth speaks words at odds with her intentions.
Even more remarkably, without anything like a motive-revealing monologue, we sense we understand why she committed the crime of which she was accused. Or as much as Reality herself does. “I wasn’t trying to be Snowden or anything,” she says, referring to Edward Snowden, a more famous whistleblower and a man with a far more conscious plan to divulge information.
“I — I just — I guess I didn’t care about, like, myself at that point,” she says, “and just ... Yeah. I guess. Yeah, I screwed up royally.”
All specific references to the document in question, its source and the website to which it was sent are redacted in the transcript. This production provides the sensory equivalent of such redactions.
Whenever they occur, the theater is plunged abruptly into darkness. In these moments, you may feel that, like Reality, you are falling down an endless hole, wherein the reliable laws of gravity have been suspended until further notice.
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Production Notes:
‘Is This A Room’: Through Nov. 10 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; 212-353-0303, vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
.