by James O’Barr
The Harlequin creative team is, in my experience, unfailingly creative when it comes to dressing out the State Theater stage in each unique production. Walk into the house over the next three weeks and you’ll find a weird glow shining out from the proscenium, created by the pinkish and splotchy white paint on the platform covering the entire stage, and rising somewhat as it approaches the stage left wings. The trapezoidal shape of the platform is repeated in the fluorescent-like lights high above. The effect is surreal, and tells us right off that we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Director Aaron Lamb’s notes in the program for Is This A Room, and his audience welcome on opening night, strongly assert that “This is not a play about politics.” And while the story of whistle-blower Reality Leigh Winner’s prosecution and sentencing are most definitely about politics, what got long-time experimental feminist playwright and director Tina Satter interested in Winner was that “she was a fascinating human being.” When she found out that there was an FBI transcript of her interrogation and arrest in the public domain, she was amazed to find “that it read like a play.”
Winner was a 25-year-old Air Force veteran, working as a linguist/translator for a National Security Agency contractor in Augusta, Georgia. After coming across a classified document detailing the measures taken by the Russian military to influence the 2016 U.S. election, she anonymously passed the document on to a news source because she thought Americans were being intentionally misled about Russia’s active efforts to affect the outcome. The leak was subsequently traced to her, and she was sentenced to 5 years in prison, the longest in history ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.
The strange stage set enables us to take in the equally strange encounter that occurred on June 3, 2017, when 11 FBI agents arrived unannounced at the home of Reality Winner (portrayed most affectingly by Olivia Finkelstein, in her Harlequin debut). Special Agents Justin Garrick and R. Wallace Taylor (Matt Shimkus and Scott C. Brown) are the only agents named in the transcript, and two of the three actors portraying FBI agents on stage—the other is Ann Flannigan, as the agent identified as “Unknown Male”. They greet her in a casual and friendly manner, before telling her they have a search warrant. Agent Garrick asks her if she knows what this might be about. “I have no idea,” Winner replies. “Okay, this is about, uh, possible mishandling of classified information.” “Oh my goodness,” she says. “Okay.”
For most of the play’s 75 minutes, the two men trade easy conversation with Reality, seemingly wanting to make sure that she, along with her dog and cat, are comfortable. Winner is alternately guileless and cagey, until the last 20 minutes or so, when it becomes clear that the search and questioning could well end in her arrest. Listening to the dialogue, I found myself thinking, you can’t make this stuff up—it’s just so everyday, so ordinary and real, so without artifice. But the art, it becomes clear, is in the set, the lighting, the staging and choreography. Finkelstein’s Winner, dressed in her blouse and shorts and yellow sneakers, conveys a strong, quick, wily inner core but looks small and slight and fragile. Shimkus and Brown, both truly excellent actors, appear to be large men, especially as they crowd in and hover over Winner, which they frequently do, giving off both amiable concern and the menace of men with guns. The marvelous Ann Flannigan, as the third, unnamed agent, moves about the stage with enough energy and purpose to remind us that there are eight more agents offstage.
With concept and original direction by Tina Satter, director Aaron Lamb has created a piece of moving, powerful theatre with a light and confident artistic hand. Jeannie Beirne’s set design and Savannah Van Leuvan’s lighting design accomplish a trifecta, with Keith Jewell’s sound design with it’s weird cover of the redacted dialogue rendering it unspeakably inaudible.
The play is described as a thriller, which is by definition a work of fiction or drama designed to hold our interest using intrigue, adventure, and/or suspense. But there’s little to none of that in Satter’s play, and much is left unexamined and unexplained, including the title. At one point, Agent Taylor asks, “Are there any weapons in the house?”
“In the house, yes,” Winner replies.
“What do you have?”
“I have an AR-15,” says Winner.
“Is it pink?”
“It’s pink.”
“Okay.”
Winner laughs. “How’d you know?”
The agent doesn’t answer.
Maybe that’s Satters point, a take on Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There’s your answer.”
My answer? See Is This A Room at you earliest convenience. Tell your friends.
WHAT:
Is This A Room
WHEN:
March 7- 23
Evenings at 7:30 p.m., Matinees at 2 p.m. on Sundays and on Wednesday, March 19
WHERE:
Harlequin Productions, State Theater, 202 4th Ave, Olympia
COST:
General Admission $48, Senior 60+/Military $45, Student/Youth $33, Rush Tickets (2 hours prior to showtime) $24, Youth $5, Pay-What-You-Choose: Thursday March 13, Saturday March 15, Friday March 21
LEARN MORE:
https://harlequinproductions.org/show/is-this-a-room/
(360) 786-0151
Photography by Shanna Paxton Photography.