Is This A Room Event Program - Perth Festival 2025

Half Straddle Is This A Room By Tina Satter

Contents

Perth Festival acknowledges the Noongar people who continue to practise values, language, beliefs and knowledge on kwobidak boodjar. Noongar people remain the spiritual and cultural birdiyangara of this place and we honour and respect the caretakers and custodians and the vital role Noongar people play for our community and our Festival to flourish. We also acknowledge all First Nations people, whose contributions make our Festival culturally and artistically richer. Our hearts are happy that you are here, on the traditional lands of Whadjuk, part of the Bibbulmun nation and its people. Perth Festival Noongar Advisory Circle Roma Yibiyung Winmar, Vivienne Binyarn Hansen, Richard Walley, Carol Innes, Barry McGuire & Mitchella Waljin Hutchins

2 Show details

4 The show

6 An interview with Tina Satter

10 Credits

12 Biographies

16 Acknowledgements

Show details Half Straddle

Is This A Room By Tina Satter

USA Australian exclusive Fri 14 – Mon 17 Feb

Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA Yandilup/Northbridge

Duration 70mins

Fri 8pm Sat 2 & 8pm Sun 1 & 6pm Mon 7pm

Auslan Sat 15 Feb 2pm

Contains haze effects

Join us after the 2pm show on Sat 15 Feb for a Q&A session. Hear directly from the artists and creators of the work.

The show

On 3 June 2017, a 25-year-old American Air Force intelligence specialist named Reality Winner, suspected of leaking proof of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, was visited at her home in Augusta, Georgia, by the FBI. Is This A Room stages this visit word for word from the official transcript recorded that day. ’”What did you used to be?” he asked. “I just used to be myself,” Liberty said.’ Joy Williams ( Breaking and Entering ) ‘The most terrifying letters in the English language are FBI and IRS.’ Bob Dole

An interview with Tina Satter I read this one particular profile in December 2017 about Reality Winner. She was this fascinating young female protagonist – and now I’m using the word protagonist – but at the time, she was just a fascinating human being, but she was also this young woman and I immediately was just like, “this person is really interesting”. In that article there was a link to the transcript. When I was reading the transcript I felt, “Oh, this transcript is like a play,” like it immediately felt like a play … it listed the four participants and it was amazing the way it would capture the language of all the stutter – it would say sighs, it would say coughs, it was this really rich document. But there’s also this really, really specific dynamic or trajectory because it’s an interrogation. They surprise her. It’s not like they called her to an office downtown. Even weirder and raising the stakes even more, they surprise her at her home, and a very specific line of action unfolds as they try to ask these

questions to get this person to admit something. Built into the transcript there were all these amazing rises and falls of drama and exposition because … she has to answer these questions, so you’re learning all these facts about her life. It’s at once really different from my past plays, because I usually write them and make up these worlds that the characters move in. But the crossover is that in my work there are always female-centric characters or worlds being played with, so Reality Winner’s identity was a huge resonance. The weird surreal humour of life and this day being really dark but totally bizarre in the level of language and action … the FBI agents get obsessed with her cats in this really weird way, like where her cats are and they move between these hard lines of questioning to really banal questions like “how’s the neighbourhood?” which I think is a part of their tactics. So we’re playing with that as a tactic as the text offers all this texture in conversation and action.

It felt like a really cool step to take on something I didn’t write, to take on something real and something that I knew pretty early on I wanted to have this pretty realist acting on it. Usually Half Straddle’s acting idiom isn’t super realist or naturalistic the whole time in a show, and it became pretty clear when we would do readings of this early on that that was the clearest way to do it – with really good actors treating it naturalistically, and then with this slight edge we break that apart a little bit at a certain point. I was just really excited to take it on, because I never really had a script of my own or anyone else’s that I’d got to do that with. Reality Winner was just immediately this person that at once had so many things about her life that were other to me – she’d been in the military for six years and starting at age 18, she learned three Arabic

languages because she was a linguist. Things you learn in the transcript that you’ll also learn in the play are that she owns three guns, but she also teaches yoga. She’s worried in the transcript that they’re going to take her phone because she needs the music to teach yoga. She’s super into her animals. So as she speaks in the transcript, it’s this amazing morphing between a 25-year-old, giggly-ish, kind of apologetic young woman, merged with someone who can talk deep national security coded language around TSI clearances and PKI passwords. She can dip totally into a shared language with FBI men, and then she’s also herself and makes these really weird awkward jokes. She’s just this incredibly rich character. Extract from Checking in with Tina Satter – The Kitchen’s In Dialogue series By Dahlia Bloomstone. Read the full interview here.

Credits

Acknowledgements Tina Satter / Half Straddle’s Is This A Room premiered at The Kitchen in New York City in January 2019. It ran Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in Fall 2019 and on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in Fall 2021. Is This A Room is made possible with support from Howard Gilman Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Is This A Room was developed in part at The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, New York Theatre Workshop’s Dartmouth Residency, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency in 2018. Brooke O’Harra, Lumi Tan, Nick Zeig-Owens, Jess Barbagallo, Bora Kim, Lili Chopra and all of LMCC staff, Linda Chapman, Jim Nicola, Madeleine Oldham, Sonia Kennebeck, Greg Hermann, Gabriel Marin, Kyle Vincent Terry, Devon Granmo, Danny Manley, Hanna Novak, Tim Griffin, Zack Tinkelman, Andy Sowers, Ian Douglas-Moore, Tavish Miller, Keilly McQuail, Captain Horatio Bonkers, Joey Truman, Rebecca Hermenze, Cricket Brown, Andrea Nellis, Megan Runyan, Rachel Viola, Vineyard Theater, Nick Stuccio and FringeArts staff, Christopher Gruits and Meiyin Wang. Special Thanks Reality Winner, Billie Winner-Davis,

Cast Reality Winner Susannah Perkins

Unknown Male Becca Blackwell Special Agent R. Wallace Taylor Will Cobbs Special Agent Justin C. Garrick Pete Simpson

Creative Team Concept & Director Tina Satter Score Sanae Yamada Costume Designer Enver Chakartash Set Designer Parker Lutz Lighting Designer Thomas Dunn Sculptural Designer Amanda Villalobos

Stage Manager Maurina Lioce Technical Director & Audio Engineer Jørgen Noodt Skjærvold Lighting Associate Krista Smith Company Manager Becky Hermenze Producer Mariana Catalina

Emily Davis originated the role of Reality Winner TL Thompson originated the role of Agent R. Wallace Taylor

Biographies

Susannah Perkins Reality Winner

Susannah has appeared on Broadway in Romeo and Juliet and Network , and Off-Broadway in The Welkin (Atlantic), Grief Hotel (Clubbed Thumb/New Georges), Mary Gets Hers (The Playwrights Realm), The Good John Proctor (The Connelly), Judgment Day (Park Avenue Armory), The Low Road (The Public), The Wolves (Lincoln Center/The Playwrights Realm) and The Rape Of The Sabine Women (The Playwrights Realm). They have performed lots of work with Clubbed Thumb and have been seen on TV in The Politician (Netflix) and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime).

About Half Straddle

Half Straddle is an award-winning, New York City-based ensemble of performers and designers led by writer and director Tina Satter that makes plays, performances, videos and music that have been seen throughout the United States and internationally.

Tina Satter Director

Tina is an award-winning American playwright, director and filmmaker. She is artistic director of the New York City-based theatre company Half Straddle whose critically acclaimed plays (including Seagull (Thinking of you), Away Uniform, In the Pony Palace/FOOTBALL and Is This A Room ) have been seen throughout the USA, Europe and Japan. Is This A Room premiered on Broadway in October 2021 and was presented at the Schaubuhne’s FIND Festival in April 2022. Tina’s narrative feature film debut as writer and director was REALITY , a film adaptation of Is This A Room which premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival and is now available on HBO. Tina is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award among other honours.

Becca Blackwell Unknown Male

Becca is a New York City-based trans actor, performer and writer. Existing between genders and using the pronoun ‘they’ Becca works collaboratively with playwrights and directors to expand our sense of personhood and the body through performance. Some of their collaborations have been with Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok, Richard Maxwell, Erin Markey, Sharon Hayes, Theater of the Two Headed Calf and Lisa D’Amour. Their film and TV appearance include Queens of the Dead, Survival of the Thickest, Bros, Sort Of, High Maintenance, Ramy, Marriage Story, Shameless, Deadman’s Barstool and Jack in the Box . Their New York theatre credits include Is This A Room ( Broadway and The Vineyard), Hurricane Diane (NYTW) and Seagull: Thinking of You (Half Straddle). Their show Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month opened the 2023 – 24 season at Soho Rep. They have toured their solo shows They, Themself and Schmerm and Schmermie’s Choice across the US.

Will Cobbs Special Agent R. Wallace Taylor

Mariana Catalina Producer

Will has appeared on Broadway in Is This A Room and regionally as Walter Lee in Raisin in the Sun (Arena Theater), Sly in Detroit 67’ (McCarter) and Lyons in Fences (The Resident Ensemble Players at University of Delaware). His TV appearances include Skinny John on For Life (ABC), Prodigal Son (Fox), The Good Wife and Madam Secretary (CBS), Deadbeat (Hulu), The Night Of (HBO) and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix). Will teaches acting and movement classes at Pace University, Brooklyn College and Yale’s Summer Session.

Mariana is a producer of live performance and a theatre artist living in New York City. She is an associate producer at the Perelman Performing Arts Center and creative producer for Tina Satter/Half Straddle, with whom she has produced tours of Is This A Room in Germany, Austria and within the USA. Mariana has worked with artists from a variety of disciplines both independently and through institutions and companies such as Elevator Repair Service, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York and Soho Rep.

Maurina Lioce Stage Manager

In New York City Maurina has been stage manager for Neal Medlyn, Alex Tatarsky, Becca Blackwell, Adrienne Truscott, Bang on A Can, Jim Findlay, David Byrne, Sibyl Kempson, Andrew Ondrejcak, Mike Iveson, Erin Markey, Suzanne Bocanegra and Young Jean Lee. Maurina is the associate artistic director and stage manager for Elevator Repair Service Theater Company.

Pete Simpson Special Agent Justin C. Garrick

In addition to Pete’s work with Half Straddle/ Tina Satter ( Is This A Room, Away Uniform and more) he has also performed principal roles with some of New York’s most lauded theatre artists including Elevator Repair Service ( Gatz, The Select ), Annie Baker ( Infinite Life ), the Wooster Group ( North Atlantic ), Young Jean Lee, ( Straight White Men, Lear ), Will Eno ( Middletown ), Sarah Gancher ( The Wind and the Rain ), Big Dance Theater (BAM etc.), Richard Maxwell, Richard Foreman, Julia Jarcho, and others. He has also performed the work of award- winning choreographers Susan Marshall, Dean Moss, Annie B. Parson and Faye Driscoll. Pete continues his 5,000+ performance run as the titular character in Blue Man Group (as well as being trainer, writer and director). For his work Off-Broadway, Broadway and internationally, Pete was awarded an Obie for Sustained Excellence of Performance in 2017 and an ND Charles Bowden Award in 2024.

Jørgen Noodt Skjærvold Technical Director & Audio Engineer

Jørgen is a designer and technician from Trondheim, Norway. He has been working in theatre and making sounds and music since 2005. Recent artists he has worked with include Half Straddle, Andrew Schneider, Monica Bill Barnes & Company, JoAnne Akalaitis & Philip Glass, Findlay//Sandsmark, Mabou Mines and Eirik Fauske.

Krista Smith Lighting Associate

Philadelphia-based lighting designer and artist, Krista’s designs have been seen in New York at venues including La MaMa, Ars Nova, New York Theater Workshop and The Public Theater. Regionally she has worked for companies including Dorset Theatre, Arden Theatre Co, Hartford Stage, Triad Stage, California Shakespeare Theater and Yale Repertory Theater. Krista received her MFA from Yale School of Drama and is a company member of Krymov Lab NYC and a proud member of USA 829.

Becky Hermenze Company Manager

Becky is a performance artist, writer and producer. She was most recently seen in Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month (Soho Rep/The Bushwick Starr). She is a full-time company member with the theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service. She has also supported the development of new works with artists such as Radiohole, Half Straddle/Tina Satter and Becca Blackwell.

Acknowledgements

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