The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DRAMA IN FBI TRANSCRIPT INTERROGATION OF REALITY WINNER NOW A PLAY
Theater director fascinated by interrogation of Reality Winner.
In December 2017, theater director Tina Satter was stuck at a desk, temping as a receptionist, when she fell down an internet rabbit hole. After reading the New York magazine profile of Reality Winner — the 20-something military contractor charged with leaking a single topsecret document about Russian election hacking — Satter clicked a link to a blog post about Winner’s pantyhose, and then another link to a grainy PDF of an official FBI transcript.
It recorded the moment in June 2017 when a fleet of federal agents entered Winner’s Georgia home, interrogated her and extracted a confes- sion. Satter read the tran- script online, but when she recalls it now, she makes the gesture of dramatically flipping pages in the air.
“Immediately I thought, This is a play,” she said. “This is a thriller.”
Reading the government document through the lens of a director, Satter saw a title printed across the top — “VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION” — follo wed by a list of “participants,” or characters: Reality Winner, whose name alone feels theatrical; the two special agents who interrogated her that day; and a mysterious figure listed only as “Unknown Male.” The transcript was intrigu- ing in its precision. Every stutter, sigh, and stray sound was noted.
It was also jumping with sub text: Even as they circled Winner with an espionage charge, the FBI agents made small talk about the weather, CrossFit and her cat. Every- one there was struggling to act casual in the least casual of circumstances.
And then there was Winner herself, with whom Satter quickly grew fascinated.
Winner is an Air Force vet- eran fluent in several Afghan languages. In 2017, she was 25 and working at a Georgia contractor complex, translating communications related to Iranian aerospace. She taught yoga for fun and scribbled on “pretty paper” at work. She tweeted insults about President Donald Tru mp. She owned guns — pink guns. In the transcript, she toggles seamlessly between highlevel intelligence language and jokes about her “resting bitch face.”
Winner seemed to represent a new kind of figure. “I could totally relate to her dismay at living through Amer- ica over the past two years, and her sort of pop response to it,” Satter said. “This is such a patriot ofr ight now.”
She immediately sent the transcript to a collaborator, actress Emily Davis, with the note: “You could play her.” Satter is directing Davis in “Is This a Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription” at the Kitchen in New York, where the p lay is running through Jan. 12.
Satter’s experimental the- ater company, Half Straddle, has never before taken on a real-life subject. The troupe rarely deals in realism. “Our plays,” Satter explained, “are usually these wholly made up worlds,” drawn from feminist, queer and adolescent subcultures.
But Winner’s status as a young woman navigating an unfamiliar world connected it to other Half Straddle shows. Winner opens a window into a new kind of subculture: the banal office grind at the heart of the American security state, which has expanded so relentlessly that thousands of otherwise ordinary Americans have insight into classified material. Thanks to websites that surface the day’s “trending” classified “articles,” which Winner browsed while bored at work, even top-secret material begins to seem almost public.
At a recent rehearsal at the Kitchen, Satter stalked around the bare set in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, blocking the strange moment when the FBI agents (played by Pete Simpson and T.L. Thomp- son) drum what sounds like a confession out of Winner, and then seamlessly return to discussing her cat, who is on a diet. (“Oh, she’s a big girl,” Unknown Male tells Winner.) Here the actors slowed their speech and tipped their bodies, giving the impression of am ind spinning, as the synth music closed in.
And yet the play is grounded in the fact that this all really happened to a real person: a person who is in prison. (After pleading guilty to one felony count, Winner was sentenced to more than five years in August, the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for such a leak.)
The transcript itself was a crucial artifact in the legal proceedings. Her defense argued that the transcript, and its apparent confession, ought to be barred from court, as the FBI never read Winner her Miranda rights or told her she was free to leave her home.
But the government argued that the transcript proved that the agents had been so “exceedingly friendly” to Winner that she could not have been forced into talk ing. Staging the transcript felt like a way to reveal its hidden power dynamics.
“There was so much happening right underneath the surface of the language,” Davis said.
The actress shares both a physical resemblance to Winner and a South Texas background. She sees Winner as a “vibrant and sparkly person” who became isolated by her work for her country and ended up in a “lonely, vulnerable place.” And Davis is sensitive to the fact that in the play, she is moving about the world as Winner while Winner herself is locked away.
Those sensitivities were heightened when Billie Winner-Davis, Reality’s mother, heard about the production and reached out.
Satter and Davis have since been in close contact with her, and have exchanged letters with Reality herself. Both sides have approached the contents of the play gingerly; Satter has not asked Davis-Winner for insights into her daughter, and DavisWinner has not inquired about the theatermakers’ process. (She will attend the first performance, with some trepidation: While she is eager for others to learn of her daughter’s story, “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to sit through it all,” she said.)
She did assist in one way: She sent a photograph the FBI took of Reality outside her home on the day she was arrested, which inspired Davis’ costume. In the photo, she’s leaning against a brick wall in jean shorts and canary-yellow Converse sneakers. Her hands are clasped politely in front of her and her eyes are turned down.
It’s an image of Winner on the precipice between regular young woman and accused felon. She is outside in the Georgia sun, but the FBI has her in its sights.