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There ought to be an easy response to the question in the title of the playIs This a Room.
Its a simple question, but it still turns ambiguous and bizarre.
If a room isnt a room, what is it?
Nothing is as it seems.
Is this an arrest?
Is this the truth?
Is this a play?
Is This a Roomdwells in a nebulous other-region, even now that it has moved uptown to Broadway.
Satter hasnt 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.
Time skips, like a needle on a warped record.
Of course, real life skips, too, as does memory.
They ask her question after question, many of them easy to answer.
How long have you been in Augusta?
How much do you lift?
Whats your dogs name?
She doesnt really like men!
Winner laughs, terrified theyll get jumpy and shoot her dog.
They keep asking questions; they certainly never Mirandize her.
Has she ever printed out something at work?
The interrogation circles closer to the law shes broken.
Satters production treats her actors as sculptures and the stage as their gallery.
But the four also sometimes compose themselves into formal stage geometries.
Suddenly theyre standing in a precise lineup wait,whichone is the criminal?
or in a wedge, like a military phalanx.
Everyone Ive spoken to about the show had forgotten the details of Realitys situation.
How many people know she got the longest sentence ever given for releasing government secrets to the media?
That black void of the set is the hole of public memory.
Ive seen and written aboutIs This a Roomtwice before.
Whenever a show moves, it adjusts to its new venue.
A Broadway theater is not just a different stage-space, though.
Its not just about scale.
The peopleinthat room will have different preoccupations and expectations from those audiences who greeted it rapturously downtown.
Im curious, and a little fearful, about how that will go.
So Isthis a room?
The play refuses to tell us outright, but whatever it is, the walls have begun to collapse.
Is This a Roomis at the Lyceum Theatre.
