Review: A Taut IS THIS A ROOM at Apollinaire Theatre Company

The chill isn’t only in the winter air outside Apollinaire Theatre Company – it’s also coming from playwright and theater artist’s Tina Satter’s riveting"Is This a Room?" now on stage at Chelsea Theater Works through January 18.

Based on the FBI transcript of the 2017 interrogation of Reality Winner, a young Air Force linguist accused of leaking a classified document about Russian interference in U.S. elections, the play uses the exact dialogue, pauses, and even stutters from the interrogation at Winner’s Augusta, Georgia, home to convey the mounting tension of a high-stakes encounter.

Satter’s still timely recounting of real-life events premiered at a Netherlands play festival in 2019. It was subsequently presented at New York’s Vineyard Theatre that same year before having a brief Broadway run at the Lyceum Theatre in the fall of 2021.

At Apollinaire, the production is under the taut direction of the company’s artistic director Danielle Fauteux Jacques, and presented in a thrust staging, with the audience seated on two sides and leaning in so as not to miss a word. And with Fateaux’s first-rate cast – Parker Jennings as Reality Leigh Winner, Brooks Reeves as Special Agent Justin C. Garrick, Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia as Special Agent R. Wallace Taylor, and Bradley Belanger as Unknown Male — watching each unspoken moment for what it may convey.

Jennings gives a fascinatingly layered performance as the oddly named young woman who finds herself in real trouble when, while appearing to be just going about her business in a seemingly routine life, returns to her modest home to find the FBI waiting outside to speak with her about “possible mishandling of classified information.”

“Oh, my goodness,” she says. “Okay.” That early exchange when Winner tells the agents she has “no idea” what’s going on – and her effortless ensemble of a white blouse, jean shorts, and yellow sneakers – make it seem that the FBI may have arrived at a mistaken address.

That possibility is quickly dispelled, however, when it becomes clear that while she may be only 25, she owns three guns and has a high-level security clearance with a nearby military contractor where she puts her ability to speak Farsi, Dari, and Pashto to work. Redactions to the transcript of sensitive information, something eerily similar to today’s headlines, render the specific subject of the leak unclear while raising the story’s tension.

The redactions also allow the action to flow in fascinating ways that leave it up to the audience to choose sides and to try to intuit the true motivations of these characters. The mystery is maintained, too, in Reality’s dealings with the two interrogating agents, who, at times, appear to genuinely want her, and her unseen cat and dog, just to be comfortable. That’s a tactic, of course, and the scenes — especially those between Jennings and the always-on-his-game Reeves — convey a sense of heightening menace in the 75-minute one-act play.

The overall sense of discomfort is enhanced by scenic and sound designer Joseph Lark-Riley, whose multi-leveled set is anchored by a large dog cage ostensibly for Winner’s dog, but suggestive of so much more. Jacques also does fine work on the production’s mood-setting lighting design.

In additiion to Jennings and Reeves's impressive square offs,  fine work is also done by Mancinas-Garcia as well as Belanger, whose height and physicality allow him to convincingly represent a phalanx of off-stage agents.

It is Jennings’ Reality, however, who is most haunting. Is Reality really a threat to national security or just someone pulled into something she may not fully understand? Watch Jennings and study her character’s quirks, and see if you can figure her out. She did something, for sure, but exactly what and why remains murky. Whatever the truth is, Reality’s loss of freedom — with her off-stage federal sentencing to a then record 63-months, later reduced to supervised release — is the real story in this intriguing drama.