Reality Winner inspired theatre production reaches Australia

A short from the HBO film Reality, based on Tina Satter’s play

In June 2018, decorated US Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner was handed down the longest prison sentence ever given to a whistleblower. Blueprint honoured Winner with a Special Recognition Award in 2019; her disclosure to exposed Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

The experiences of whistleblowers - whose acts of conscience often set them at oppostion with powerful forces - are inherently dramatic. Nevertheless, Reality Winner's story has inspired a number of creative works, which have brought awareness of her actions to a winder audience.

The play Is This a Room, written by US playwright and author Tina Satter is a case in point. Satter took the transcript of Reality's 2017 FBI interrogation at her Georgia home and adapted it into a play, Is This a Room. Both Reality and her family consulted on the script, which, while based on the interrogation, varies from the transcript.

The play, which has just ended a short run in Perth, Australia, debuted in New York in 2019. In 2021 it opened on Broadway, and would have been performed in many cities internationally shortly afterwards had the pandemic not intervened.

Is This a Room was later used as the basis of the 2023 feature film, Reality, produced by HBO. A feature documentary, written and directed by Sonia Kennebeck, was also released in 2021.