It’s a bit disorienting: You walk into the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Studio Theatre and see the entire room has been reorganized to put the stage – a carpet rectangle – in the center of the room. The audience is on both sides of it.
I knew of this arrangement ahead of this performance of Is This a Room, but I wasn’t sure why the choice was made. The show’s FAQ on its website says:
“IS THIS A ROOM is built entirely from the verbatim transcript of a real FBI interrogation. Every pause. Every cough. Every interruption and shift in tone. With audiences on both sides of the playing space, perspective becomes part of the storytelling itself. An alley-style configuration creates greater access to all those intimate storytelling moments and heightens that tension by bringing you closer to the action and directly into the room.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
“Perspective becomes part of the storytelling itself.” So maybe we’re supposed to feel disoriented? After all, the interview we witness – verbatim – of the FBI showing up at Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Leigh Winner’s (Isabelle Muthiah) house is a strange scene. She’s bringing back her groceries when two men with guns strapped to their backs tell her they have a warrant to search her house. Why?
Within the context of the show, we never find out. It’s redacted from the transcript, and therefore, all we get are red lights, a “REDACTED” projection on the wall, and a beep over actors mouthing what can only be assumptions of what was actually said during the real investigation.
You might still be wondering, though: Why are they there? Only from reading the playbill ahead of time, or remembering the story from the news, will you know that Winner had leaked documents about evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, to the press, using her high-clearance access.
Special Agent R. Wallace Taylor (Rasell Holt) and Special Agent Justin C. Garrick (Jonathan Wainwright) are shifty … and weirdly nice, all things considered. It made me wonder if they were just doing their job. They keep referring to what Reality did as a “mistake” – almost wishing her to not be guilty. Or not? It’s truly hard to tell. Both actors put on a great performance – a dance, of sorts – acting out these scenes down to the minute details, like a sneeze or a stutter.
As for Reality, she seems genuinely confused as to why they showed up. Was she just that good at playing innocent? Of course, eventually, she admits to something. (Again, we don’t know what she says because it’s redacted.) And we can see she’s visually angry about something, too. Muthiah does an amazing job of depicting Reality’s complexity as a person – and acting those redacted scenes with just her body language and eyes.
The documentary-style play, staged to merely show what happened (as far as we know), somehow had all the tension, humor and drama as if it were written for the stage. And perhaps the funniest line, delivered by Unknown Male (the character’s actual name in the cast list!), played by Mark Corkins, was the titular “Is this a room?” which had the audience in uproar. How is it that some random mystery man asking dumb questions made it into an FBI investigation tape? We’ll truly never know, but what a moment of reprieve did it bring.
All in all, this show made me think quite a bit, mostly about the larger “whys.” Why stage an FBI transcript? Why is it so disorienting? Why this form for sharing this story?
The best conclusion I’ve been able to come to is this: True journalism lets you look at something – the facts, the details, the anecdotes, the transcripts – and decide for yourself what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s true, what’s most important to ourselves. This documentary-style play does the same.
Is This a Room runs through April 5 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre.
