Tina Satter Makes Unexpected Broadway Debut with "Is This A Room"

Writer and director Tina Satter is making her Broadway debut with Is This A Room, a development she admits was not on her career "dream boards."

The play, which Satter conceived and directed, is based entirely on the verbatim transcript of the FBI's interrogation and arrest of whistleblower Reality Winner. After acclaimed runs at the Off-Off-Broadway Kitchen Theatre and the Vineyard Theatre in 2019, the production begins previews at the Lyceum Theatre on September 24, playing in repertory with Lucas Hnath’s docu-theatre piece, Dana H.

Satter initially aimed for much smaller stages. "I had dream boards with places you aim to have work, and like, the Kitchen was on it, not Broadway," she recalled. Is This A Room premiered at The Kitchen in West Chelsea in January 2019, and Satter originally anticipated the standard national and international tour that her previous productions enjoyed. However, the show's inclusion in the Vineyard Theatre's season that fall marked an exciting leap for her queer feminist company, Half Straddle, which she founded in 2008.

The show's trajectory quickly became a surprise to its creators. Satter described the steps to Broadway as "bolts of lightning." Although the show did tour, seven dates both domestically and abroad were canceled when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020. By that time, however, producers were already discussing the possibility of a Broadway run, paired with Dana H.

The brief tour offered a valuable lesson for the Broadway transition: the need to meticulously recreate the set's environment. The simple yet precise platform expanse, designed to seat the audience on either side, had to be rebuilt for every location. "We’re really always trying to recreate the Kitchen space inside or on whatever stage we’re on," Satter explained. "We sort of need to make that room in whatever room we’re in."

The Writer's Attachment to Verbatim Text

Satter did not write a single original word for Is This A Room—the script is purely the transcript of Winner's interrogation regarding her leak of national security documents. Yet, Satter approaches the material with a writer's sensibility.

She explained that it was "the writer in me that had the first attachment to the transcript as the possibility for dramatic text." She saw the "rhythms of this language being in such an incredible play space" and felt compelled to put herself "inside the poetics of that language," despite the non-ownership of the words.

When she first found the text—linked in a New York magazine article about Winner—Satter initially saw it as reading "almost like a Richard Maxwell play," referencing the experimental director known for finding the theatricality in everyday speech. As Is This A Room developed, Satter realized the text's broader implications. "It holds this larger world in it," she noted. "It steps into geopolitics and our current contemporary moment and all these larger, very potent real issues."

A Natural Fit for Half Straddle

While Is This A Room might initially seem like a departure from Half Straddle’s earlier work—such as 2013’s House of Dance or 2011’s In the Pony Palace/FOOTBALL—Satter sees it as a continuation of her artistic trajectory.

Half Straddle often features complicated female characters, a theme Reality Winner—a gun-owning, multilingual yoga teacher working as an intelligence specialist—fits perfectly. Unlike Satter’s previous invented narratives, this character and the events of the play are real, captured word-for-word, stammers and all, from the June 3, 2017, transcript.

The play is also the most overtly political work Half Straddle has staged, centering on Winner's action of leaking documents concerning Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Broadway opening takes place in a different political climate than its 2019 premiere—Donald Trump is no longer president, and Winner has been released from prison into home confinement. However, the play remains powerfully relevant to the enduring questions Americans face regarding government transparency and public information.

Satter concluded that the show "offers no solutions but just continues to open windows that I think feel really important for understanding just how dynamic and nuanced it means to care about our country, to be a patriot or not." While the move to Broadway is a monumental landmark for her career, Satter feels that the work hasn't changed—only the room.