“Is This a Room” and “Chicken & Biscuits” Bring the Unexpected to Broadway
The human ear edits even as it absorbs. Every time I listen to a recording of an interview I’ve done, I’m confronted with the little repetitions and stutters that cling to what I process, in the moment, as perfectly fluid speech: the tics and filler phrases; the sentences that are snuffed out, unfinished; the runway of false starts from which a thought takes flight. One thing that immediately stands out in the stellar Broadway staging of “Is This a Room” (a Vineyard Theatre production, at the Lyceum) is the awkwardness of so much of our speech, its weird hesitations and confused banalities. That’s because the play, which was conceived and directed by Tina Satter, takes as its text the transcript of the F.B.I.’s visit to the home of the whistle-blower Reality Winner, on June 3, 2017. Whoever typed the thing up preserved every hiccup and stammer with bizarre bureaucratic diligence, and the production pounces on its found script with perverse, bravura precision. How strange, how funny—how totally terrifying—to see the state express its power not with a shout but in a mumble.
Reality Winner was a twenty-five-year-old former Air Force language analyst who had been working as a Farsi translator for a military contractor when the F.B.I. came to interrogate her at her house, in Augusta, Georgia. Onstage, she is portrayed by the remarkable Emily Davis, who originated the role in the play’s première, at the Kitchen, in 2019, and won an Obie and a Lucille Lortel Award for her performance when it moved to the Vineyard, later that year. The Reality we meet, as the lights go up, is a wiry woman wearing cutoffs and yellow Converse high-tops decorated with childish Pikachus, her blond hair pulled back in a sexless bun. It’s not hard to imagine her in the military; she has the ramrod posture and modest manner of someone who knows how to take an order, or a browbeating, though she can’t hide her anxiety from the two F.B.I. agents, Garrick (Pete Simpson) and Taylor (Will Cobbs), who have shown up with search warrants. Winner is suspected, they explain, of “possible mishandling of classified information,” and they’d like to have a little talk with her. It’s “completely voluntary,” of course. This is where Reality should zip her lips and call a lawyer. Instead, she starts to talk and seals her fate.
What follows is a kind of jerky dance in the round, as Garrick and Taylor suss out their suspect, and Winner does her best to both help and hinder the men. Interrogation scenes are a staple of American entertainment, and part of what we are watching here is a performance of that performance. It’s there in the way that the youthful, handsome Taylor grunts and puffs out his chest, as he must have seen a hundred actors do while playing agents and police officers on TV, and in the atmosphere of ambient menace that Satter summons, with the help of Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada’s ominous sound design and Thomas Dunn’s cool, harsh lighting. The stage itself is bare, save for a couple of low platforms and a row of empty waiting-room chairs stationed behind the action, as if to suggest that other audience that tirelessly watches us all: the omnipresent apparatus of surveillance.
But the threat enveloping Reality keeps being undercut by the unintentional comedy of, well, reality. It takes the agents a good chunk of the play’s taut sixty-five minutes to start the formal questioning, because the house first has to be searched, and Reality’s guns and animals—her possessions include a pink AR-15 and a nervous foster dog—dealt with. (“O.K., so she does not like men,” Reality says, of her dog. A playwright couldn’t have come up with a better laugh line.) As the agents wait, they seem to deflate to human size. They make small talk with Winner about pets and CrossFit. A clueless, mulletted backup guy (Becca Blackwell) roams around, doing silly stuff. (Also silly: a large canine puppet that makes literal what the imagination has no trouble conjuring up on its own.)
The leader of all this non-action is the middle-aged Agent Garrick, a shambolic, avuncular presence with a paunch and a nervous cough. He seems to genuinely want to ingratiate himself with Reality, to understand why such a dedicated, promising member of the military would compromise her career—her life—to leak a document. Simpson is so commanding in the role of this deceptively mediocre career agent that he makes his virtuosity appear accidental, inevitable. The naturalism demanded by the script—all that fumbling and crosstalk—requires razor-sharp timing, and Simpson and Davis have honed theirs to metronomic precision. It is startling, while watching these two formidable actors match each other beat for beat, to realize the extent to which the actual Reality Winner accepted the conventions of the genre she found herself trapped in. Deflection, denial, confession, motive: they are all there, teased out by questioning, then volunteered with a rush of relief as the pace picks up and the stage is bathed in pulses of pink light to represent redactions from the official transcript. (We are reminded in the program, but not in the play itself, that the classified document that Winner smuggled out of her office in her pantyhose concerned Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election.) You may consider Winner to be a hero and a martyr—she was prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act and has just been released to home confinement, after nearly four years behind bars—or you may not. She herself insists that she didn’t see her actions as extraordinary. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she says. Whatever pushed her to blow the whistle, she found a way to make the role her own.
It’s exciting, and unusual, to see a small downtown play like “Is This a Room” come to Broadway. The abrupt abbreviation of the 2020 theatre season due to COVID has had one positive effect: it opened producers up to taking greater creative risks—at least for now. Maybe the experimental, documentary nature of “Is This a Room” would have made it seem too niche, too art-house, to bet on in a more cautious season. But the show goes down like a thriller, and should be a commercial no-brainer.
The same is true of “Chicken & Biscuits” (at Circle in the Square), another show being hailed as a welcome surprise on Broadway, for entirely different reasons. Written by Douglas Lyons and directed by the twenty-seven-year-old Zhailon Levingston, it’s an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser, a comedy as conventional as convention comes. A funeral is being held for the pastor of a New Haven church, but the proceedings are threatened by conflict between his two daughters, the prim Baneatta (Cleo King) and the raucous Beverly (Ebony Marshall-Oliver). Add a cast of competing family members, plus one very anxious Jewish boyfriend (Michael Urie), and high jinks ensue.
What makes the show unusual is that it is one of a record eight on Broadway this season to be written by a Black playwright. More unusual still is that it treats Black experience as a subject to elicit pleasure and joy, rather than sober contemplation and pain. Would “Chicken & Biscuits,” which ran, pre-pandemic, at Queens Theatre, have been staged on Broadway before last year’s protests against racial injustice made producers get serious about supporting Black work? Who knows, but when I attended a recent performance, and heard the audience roar with laughter—an audience that, by the way, was more diverse than any I can recall seeing on Broadway—it was clear that the play had found the right home. Is some of the humor hokey, the characters a tad heavy on caricature? Sure. Is the show too long? By about twenty minutes. Does the priceless Norm Lewis, as Reginald Mabry, Baneatta’s husband and the church’s new pastor, bring down the house while revelling in the spirit, and was it a delight to be introduced to Aigner Mizzelle, making her Broadway début—as is much of the cast—as La’Trice, a Gen Z-er with SoundCloud dreams and no indoor voice? Yes, and absolutely yes. The show won’t be remembered for breaking any artistic ground, but it does offer something that has been in dangerously short supply lately: a good time. ♦
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