Is This a Room
Opening Night: October 11, 2021
Closing: January 15, 2022
Theater: Lyceum Theatre
It’s 2017. Air Force intelligence specialist Reality Winner has just been surprised at her home by the FBI. She’s accused and charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in U.S elections. Her interrogation gets brought to life on stage in IS THIS A ROOM, conceived and directed by Obie Award winner Tina Satter.
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October 11, 2021
Consider “Is This a Room” a ripped-from-the-headlines tale that pries beneath the ink, ratcheting in so close to the events in question that their particulars fall out of focus. What’s under Satter’s microscope aren’t the facts, but their cosmic resonance and mundane imprints on the body: sweat behind the knees, a gentle but persistent cough, conscience, power, the provenance of truth.
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October 11, 2021
Much of the play’s effectiveness derives from Davis’s utterly natural yet entirely extraordinary performance, for which she won both an Obie Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for the Off Broadway production at the Vineyard Theater. Davis bears a certain resemblance to Winner, but that’s incidental. What gives her performance such quiet force is the manner in which she renders the character’s shifting and conflicting emotions, and the racing mind beneath the placid exterior, as the interrogation proceeds.
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October 11, 2021
But Is This A Room still has a movingly human presence at its core. Davis gives a performance of heart-wrenching rawness and lucidity; as you watch her dissolve from the inside, what emerges with force is a sympathetic and specific portrait of a young woman trying to do the right thing in a very wrong time. This is a spare show, but Satter doesn’t have to add much to the text to keep us fastened in. Reality is interesting enough.
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October 11, 2021
Nevertheless, a 65-minute verbatim transcript has now become the basis for one of the thrillingest thrillers ever to hit Broadway. “Is This a Room,” which opened on Monday at the Lyceum Theater, turns the ums and stutters and bizarre non sequiturs of recorded speech into astonishing — and astonishingly emotional — theater.
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October 11, 2021
Throughout the course of its taut 70 minutes, the remarkable Is This A Room, opening tonight at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, prompts a steady, gut-churning stream of “what ifs” as audiences do exactly what whistleblower Reality Winner did during her 2017 FBI interrogation: We second-guess, we attempt to predict, we consider and reconsider every angle, we panic.
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October 11, 2021
Despite being “just” an FBI transcript, Satter’s dramatic staging, Parker Lutz’s sparse set design, and Thomas Dunn’s oppressive lights (which flare or black out to signal redacted text) create a uniquely theatrical experience. The four actors in the ensemble move about the space in often non-realistic ways that heighten the tension of the interrogation. This plays into questions about reality, for although we know exactly what was said, we have no way of knowing precisely what went on in that room. All we have is the words; our minds (or in this case Satter’s mind) have to fill in the rest.
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