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[0:08] Alan Seales: Welcome to a very special bonus episode of The Theatre Podcast. Now that Broadway is coming back, there are opening nights, red carpets galore. I've been extremely lucky to have been invited to several of them in various capacities. So to make sure to go over to Instagram and follow me there at theatre underscore podcast for the first-hand account of everything that I've been doing there, full stories and pictures. But this quick little episode is with my friend Beatriz Westby, who you need to also go to the show notes and find her Instagram account because in her spare time, she's also a mermaid. Jumping into this, Is This A Room opened on Monday, October 11th, to a phenomenal collection of all positive reviews and is playing in rep with another groundbreaking play at the Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street here in New York.

It tells the story of 25-year-old Air Force linguist Reality Winner. Yes, that's her real name, when on June 3rd, 2017, 11 FBI agents appeared at her home to interrogate her about leaking a classified document proving Russian interference in the 2016 election. Still with me? The play reenacts the verbatim transcript of Reality Winner's FBI interrogation and is an entirely true story. This is insane. So obviously you're here for the red carpet interviews. You're not here to hear me ramble. Let's kick this back to Bia as she talks with director Tina Satter, who just made her Broadway debut with this play.

[1:37] Tina Satter: First question for you is, what was it about this project that made you want to do it, made you want to actually transform the story into a play? It was this young female protagonist at the center of it, this complicated female heroine that I'm always drawn to in my work and that this was real and this incredible hour we had in her life that happened in America in her small room in June 2017. It just felt like so rich to think, can we do this? Can we show who this young woman is in this crazy way? She's intersecting with our national moment in this transcript that we have. Can we make that a play? And I just, it was really being drawn to who Reality was in this incredible moment in time we got to see her in. That really inspired me.

[2:25] Tina Satter: Why do you think this is an important story to bring into the theaters now? I mean, I just think it's important and an opportunity. Like we happen to have this transcript. So we actually get to see like behind the scenes, literally we get like this portal into how the FBI talked to someone who leaked some information. Like no matter what side of that you come down on, we actually get to see how a version of that played out. And so it's just to me what we always, I've always said is like we show the first word of that moment in time and the last word of that conversation. And of course, it's really political because it literally steps into geopolitics and the machinations of the American state.

But we try to sort of be like this happened and it's protocol. She did do something wrong, but there's reasons why she did it. There was information withheld from the American public. You know, so there's so much at play and instead of like commenting or twisting on it, we sort of wanted to put out all of this one conversation that happens around it as a way. It's just such a gift to have had that transcript to me. And if it could be a theatrical thing, it takes us underneath the headlines. Like we actually get to be there in the room as the FBI does their work and as a young woman who believes she did something to show, she felt we were being lied to. She explains herself and they kind of explain themselves. So it was a really amazing opportunity.

[3:49] Amanda Villalobos: There's a lot of issues that I think this show brings up and I don't think the point of the show is to defend her necessarily or say that what she did wasn't wrong. But it's about opening a discussion about fact and fiction and having information like this and also like how we decide in America to punish people for what they've done and whether or not they made her, you know, you know, she was punished much more severely than anyone else had been for information that was pretty kind of like obvious at the time. So it's just like I think it's interesting. It starts a conversation about that and I think we need to talk about that.

[4:38] Chris Giarmo: I think that this piece is so important because it puts people in this position of empathy. Whether you're a parent and you have a child or whether you're a kid and you have a family that you're responsible for or you're just your decisions affect them. I think it puts people in this place of really understanding what our freedom means and how much we take it for granted.

[5:06] Deirdre O'Connell: And why do you feel that bringing politics and bringing all of these incredible women-led stories that are so intense and so beautiful but also so tragic in many, many ways, why do you feel that that is so important right now? We're all kind of crawling out of our foxholes, right? And I feel like this piece was made before but somehow the feeling of doing it now, it's as if we prepared it for now. It's in a funny way. I feel like we little did we know how much we would need a story about the darkness underneath the world that we're living in because so many times in this last year you'd ask, I asked myself like what has been going on under the surface? And this play is a lot about that as is this story.

[6:11] Andy Grotelueschen: I'm just so excited to be here. This is actually my first proper Broadway show inside since everything. So I'm so excited about this double bill that the Vineyard is producing up here. It's such a wonderful opportunity to see two strange plays. Have you seen them already? No, and I missed them both in their previous incarnations, but I just I think it's so remarkable that they're getting a space here. Yes, we are on Broadway now. But Is This A Room and Dana H actually opened off off Broadway at a theater called The Kitchen on January 4th, 2019 before transferring off Broadway to the Vineyard Theater and now here to the Lyceum.

[7:14] Lee Kinney: Have you been feeling a big difference in the audiences in the before in the Vineyard and now on Broadway? Yeah, it's a I think the pieces like lived in a really different place in three different iterations and like I think has been really successful at continuing to be the same piece it was while encountering a really different group of people. You know, there's a different audience that is attracted to a show that's in this part of town and in this house than one that's downtown and I think it speaks to the power of the piece that it continues to resonate without being really changed very much.

[8:02] Frankie Grande: It's good to have the glitz and the glam of Broadway but also to be reminded that this is a place where we nurture artists and where we put challenging stories out into the world and where we can affect change. We can do that on this street and that's what both of these plays are doing, Dana H and Is This A Room? So I'm so grateful that this is the way we're starting things off.

[8:36] Judy Kuhn: I think I am just not taking anything for granted. I just feel so grateful to be able to go to the theater. I feel so grateful to be working again. I am full of hope that all the conversations around equity and diversity and the change that needs to happen in our business, it's maybe finally gonna push things forward. And I just said I have a lot of optimism right now.

[9:14] Steven Sater: I feel renewed that you know, I know we're saying Broadway's back runners, but what it was moving to me I walked these I stayed in New York the entire pandemic. This was such a ghost town. It was such a desolated feeling I was on my own a lot and to walk here and to see people get I mean I know we're just beginning we're starting up but there's a renewal of life as we knew it. It's like a homecoming in a certain way and I'm so moved at the kind of changes that have come down on Broadway since we you know just that plays of real meat and substance and provocative plays could help participate in a public conversation or now appearing on Broadway. I'm happy for the Vineyard.

[9:56] Blyth Adamson: How has that challenge been? Oh, well, I love challenges. So it's just been a delight to be able to add all of the best public health strategies we have to make this a safe place for the cast, the crew, and especially audience members coming to watch tonight. And for somebody that hasn't come to the theater yet, what should they expect and how can they prepare so that when they come in? Well first bring your vaccination card or some form of proof of your vaccination. It's one of the strengths that we have right now that every single person in this audience is fully vaccinated. Second, bring a good high-quality mask so we do have people sitting side-by-side and a high-quality mask is a great way to make sure we have that extra layer of protection for people.

[11:02] Tina Satter: And I have so many questions about just design choices and when did that come in? When did all of the very, you know, it's a very stripped down stage. There's just some chairs. When did all of that come into play from the beginning when I first thought this could be a play? I felt like there should not be much set it was about seeing this conversation unfold and seeing Reality and the energy and exchanges among Reality and all these men in her house and that the clearest thing was just of actors sort of say those words in as clear of a space as possible so we could really feel what that might have felt like which may sound antithetical to not put her in a small room. But if we could create the feeling which I think we did with the set and their staging it would be really powerful. So that was an early idea.

[12:04] Tina Satter: That part of it actually and I love the whole blackout. I love all of those design choices there so it makes sense for what the story is and how he works. Done too in the name of the show was also very interesting to me because it is such an odd line or moment in the show. So what was the decision there of having this be the name of the show? You know, we when we had a title it I was always calling it Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription because that's what was stamped on the top of the actual transcript and looked like the title and then it was like we got to have a little more title title something more poetic and I just went through and looked at any line that was really interesting in it.

Like when she says the phrase like a girl's name, Is This A Room? is that a room was just there was something so random that sentence is really strange. Is this a room? It's like and so it just was on this list and something strange about it and we finally decided to have a title the first time it premiered ever and so I put that on it. Not sure exactly. I took the question mark off and then it's come to have a ton of amazing meaning I think and it is right before she finally confesses that she did it so it sort of seems like some weird something that gets unlocked in her and I just thought it was a really beautiful moment and then since her mom, her mom Billy Winter Davis has said it's such a good title because she really did hate that room and you know, it was a loaded room to her. So it really it's got some darker meaning for Reality in the show too but it feels like a good title to the family too.

[13:23] Alan Seales: Thanks for listening to this extra special bonus episode and special thanks to Beatriz Westby for being our extra special red carpet guest host. Find more information about The Theatre Podcast and me at VPN dot FM slash TTP. You can get more information about Is This A Room at the lyceumplays.com. If you don't know how to spell that, don't worry. Just take the show notes. It's all there for you. Make the world a little colorful.