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.
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