Is This A Room

One summer’s day in 2017 FBI agents approached the 25-year-old intelligence contractor Reality Leigh Winner outside her house in Augusta, Georgia. They interrogated her and searched her property. The young woman was charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in the US presidential election. The FBI made a transcript of that first interrogation at Reality Leigh Winner’s house. Director Tina Satter came across the transcript by chance on the internet. “It was a play,” says Satter – one with a Kafkaesque dimension.

The production with four excellent actors re-enacts every second of the interrogation complete with all its coughs, pauses and sighs. As a result we become witnesses of the agents’ abuses, threats and platitudinous small talk – until almost incidentally the tension in the room changes and the audience witnesses an astonishing information.

Ruhrtriennale will premiere a work by Tina Satter who found the group Half Straddle 2008 in New York for the first time in Germany.