Dana H by Lucas Hnath, and: Is This a Room by Tina Satter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dana H by Lucas Hnath, and: Is This a Room by Tina Satter Barbara Fuchs DANA H. By Lucas Hnath. Directed by Les Waters. The Vineyard Theatre, New York City. October 27, 2021. IS THIS A ROOM. Conceived and directed by Tina Satter. The Vineyard Theatre, New York City. October 27, 2021. In a piece written early in the Trump era, Rob Weinert-Kendt argued that documentary theatre should not be constrained by its commitment to the real or prevented from rendering “a truer reflection than a mere document might.” But what if the “merely” documentary actually complicates our understanding of how narrative is constructed and relayed? What if “reflection” fails to capture the complexity of what must be conveyed? These are some of the questions powerfully raised by Is This a Room, constructed entirely out of the transcript of an FBI interrogation, and Dana H., collated from interviews with the playwright’s mother. The Vineyard Theatre’s juxtaposition of the two pieces at the Lyceum on Broadway in October and November 2021 provided the opportunity to consider how verbatim theatre, as a particular subset of the documentary, complicates our conceptions of theatrical authenticity and verisimilitude. Although the pieces were not presented as a double bill, their conjunction posed rich questions about what truth and reality might mean on the documentary stage. Is This a Room, created and directed by Tina Satter, with the extraordinary Emily Davis in the lead, was first presented at The Kitchen in January 2019 and moved to Broadway in October 2021. The piece reenacts the FBI interrogation on June 3, 2017 of intelligence [End Page 383] contractor Reality Winner (yes, her actual name). Winner, who was subsequently convicted of espionage and served five years in prison for leaking proof of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, was “visited” at her home in Augusta, Georgia, by three agents. As the program notes, “Is This a Room stages this visit word for word from the official transcript recorded that day.” Click for larger view View full resolution Becca Blackwell, Will Cobbs, Pete Simpson, and Emily Davis in the 2021 Broadway production of Is This a Room. (Photo: Chad Batka.) The play gives no sense of Winner’s eventual fate, yet the audience is well-aware of it. While we might share in the disorientation of the protagonist as the aggression ebbs and flows and the conversation distracts, we inevitably bring our knowledge of the aftermath to what becomes a chronicle of an arrest foretold. Rather than concern ourselves with the resolution, we are thus thrown back onto the process: How can this series of inane exchanges add up to such a serious outcome? Where exactly, in this bewildering conversation, does power lie? Winner shares with the men who come for her a background in compliance: she fully perceives the violence that remains implicit and therefore offers little overt defiance. Yet the tension in the theatre, sustained by the strong design of the minimalist production, was almost unbearable. Where the FBI had redacted bits of sensitive information, the lights blinked pink; when more substantial censorship was at work, the lights faded ominously to black in effective lighting design by Thomas Dunn. The light and sound design (the latter by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada) felt especially significant as they gestured to what lay ahead. Beyond these sound and lighting cues, Is This a Room explored how verbatim transcription obscures even as it reveals. From Winner’s visible discomfort and isolation, to her almost plaintive refrain of concern for her pets, to the awkwardness of chit-chat amid a terrifying search, Room confronted the audience with the mismatch between official records and lived experience. Much was left between the lines, expressed in the dissonance between what we saw and heard and what we knew was going on. For the most part our eyes could not be trusted: how could the slight presence of Davis, in her Converse high-tops and shorts, convey her moral courage? What to make of the avuncular Pete Simpson, who played the good cop Agent Garrick without ever breaking character? The unspoken menace of the gender imbalance in the scene was...