If the FBI comes to your house, don’t let them snoop around until they show you a warrant —and for God’s sake, don’t talk to them until you have a lawyer present. That is the most useful lesson from director Tina Satter’s Is This a Room, now playing at Vineyard Theatre. But this white-knuckle thriller based on true recent events contains more complicated observations about fear, intimidation, and how power mostly exerts itself in silence.
Satter uses as her script the verbatim transcript of the recording FBI agents Justin Garrick (Pete Simpson) and R. Wallace Taylor (T.L. Thompson) took the afternoon of June 3, 2017, shortly before the FBI arrested NSA contractor Reality Winner (Emily Davis). Winner was an Air Force veteran and specialist in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto. After leaving the military, she took a job as a translator with Pluribus, an organization that contracts with the NSA. Through her top-secret security clearance, she was able to access classified documents at work, including one that was leaked to online news source The Intercept revealing attempts by Russian intelligence to directly interfere with polling places during the 2016 election. In 2018, Winner pleaded guilty to leaking the document and was sentenced to five years, three months in federal prison — the longest term ever to be given to someone for releasing government information to the media.
Winner’s case raises unsettling questions about how the security state fits into our republic: Why is so much information gathered with our tax dollars withheld from us? Are leakers like Winner American patriots or threats to national security? Is it right that worker bees like Winner languish in prison while well-lawyered national security threats like Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani walk free? Is This a Room deals with none of these questions, but it does grippingly dramatize the moment when the cudgel of the state knocked down Reality Winner’s door.