Is This a Room is the astonishingly true story of Reality Winner, the 25-year-old former Air Force linguist who was surprised at her home by the FBI on June 3, 2017. The play’s text is taken from the FBI transcript of her interrogation – and from these pages, Tina Satter has wrought an extraordinary human drama between Reality (Emily Davis) and the agents who question her. In this theatrical thriller, Reality’s life is upended before our eyes, and we’re left questioning American values and the very nature of the truth.
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.
On the one hand-perhaps the upper hand-Is This A House is effective in illuminating the process by which the sometimes reassuring, sometimes intimidating FBI agents elicited Winner's less-than-winning admissions. On the other hand, adhering strictly to the word-for-word declaration introduces several questions. Okay, it's word-for-word, but after a while, doesn't the actors so assiduously replicating every verbal hiccup begin to feel like a stunt? Doesn't this representation prompt a thought about what is the more efficacious manner of representing theatrical reality (no pun intended)?
2019 | Off-Broadway |
Vineyard Theatre Off-Broadway World Premiere Off-Broadway |
2019 | Off-Broadway |
Vineyard Theatre Off-Broadway Return Engagement Off-Broadway |
2021 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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