Is This a Room Broadway Reviews

How does mind-numbing banality become heart-racing excitement? In 'Is This a Room,' the transcript is only the starting point. More salient is the way the production, conceived and directed by Tina Satter, views the document through an expressionistic lens, allowing Emily Davis, in a heartbreaking performance, to make words into windows on a world of interior terror.

It's a fascinating piece in every way, replete with fabulous central performances from both Emily Davis (who plays Winner) and Pete Simpson (who plays the lead FBI agent at the interrogation). You're left with a picture of a young woman of conscience who was hardly prepared for such heavy-handed government intervention (Becca Blackwell and Will Combs play the other two agents).

Is This A Room is a gripping, highly recommended piece of theater, and also an unexpectedly intricate ballet. The 70-minute, deservedly multi-award winning play, which opens on Broadway tonight at the Lyceum Theatre, is an enactment of the transcript of what was said when the FBI first came to the Augusta, Georgia, home of former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner on June 3, 2017.

Is This a Room dwells in a nebulous other-region, even now that it has moved uptown to Broadway. The 75-minute thriller is conducted in suspended time: You don't leave the show so much as you wake from it, shaking off its foggy, clinging, chilly mood. Satter and her company have built a highly choreographed event around a found text, the verbatim transcript (with redactions) of Winner's arrest at her home in 2017. Satter hasn't changed a single word, revealing the exquisite way lowercase-r reality can 'write' a text. On the page, the unscripted lines already throb with subtext and sing with terrifying overtones.

Satter, who serves as artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, performs an impressive sleight of hand, coaxing suspense from a foregone conclusion like a rabbit from a hat. Satter's choreographic staging is marked by striking tableaux, as the agents circle their prey with a levity that grows cold - gradually, and then all at once.

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.

The FBI transcript is choppy, repetitive, and dull. However, 'Is This A Room' (which was conceived and directed by Tina Satter) is primarily concerned with what is not said - theatricalizing the tension, uncertainty, and awkwardness of the interrogation experience through body language. The production also employs hazy lighting, sudden blackouts, overlapping voices, pauses, and a dissonant score and sound design.

s 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.

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)?

Satter's staging ratchets up the tension slowly, subtly. Note how Garrick creeps behind Reality's shoulder, then inches closer and closer to her face. He throws around the word 'voluntary,' but could Reality simply have left? Everything about the situation-including the redactions in the transcript, which are punctuated by blistering sounds and stark lighting shifts-screams pressure; it's no wonder she eventually comes clean. (Side note: This is an argument for the lawyers, which she did not have. But the fact that her confession, which came before she was read her rights, was admissible is mind-boggling. If Briscoe and Logan had pulled this stunt with a perp on Law & Order, McCoy wouldn't have gotten the confession past any judge in New York.)

Immaculately directed by Satter herself, and staged on a flat platform flanked by elevated stands designed by Parker Lutz, the production finds agonizing claustrophobia in the mundanity of bureaucracy-of purposely blank systems built on talking around everything, of getting to the point, of facing the inevitable.

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.

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.

If you knew nothing about Winner, this effectively staged transcript - let's not call it a play - offers a vivid portrait of group male intimidation of a woman. The FBI team features a good cop (Pete Simpson), a bad cop (Will Cobbs) and a clown cop (Becca Blackwell, who even sports orange hair). As Winner, Emily Davis suffers a slow meltdown into near-hysteria as the men, search warrant in hand, literally invade her personal space. The title refers to a room in her house where the interrogation takes place.