IS THIS A ROOM

Although a true story, I chose to set this story in a non-realistic place. In alignment with my directing research of The Female Gaze, I used space to better guide the audience to Reality's inner state of mind and emotional experience.  I was intrigued by Reality Winner’s description in her biography of her sense of dread, her fear that she might be taken to a black ops site and disappeared. Being in a black ops site, prisoners often describe the experience as being devoid of sensory information; unrecognizable sound, minimal light, feelings of being confined, an impending sense of doom. Coupled with the knowledge that the espionage act has had a century old life in American society, I was wondering how many stories like this have unfolded, which we are unaware of? How many ‘Reality Winners’ have existed since 1917 that have disappeared into the darkness of our collective unconscious? The idea of a type of black hole that Reality finds herself in during the interrogation seemed to make sense to me as it could be a liminal space that exists across time and space, where metaphorically, these missing stories as well as Ms. Winner’s might be held. And if we created that, a place where all these stories could possibly be told, then maybe there is a structure in the liminal space – an indestructible shiny monolith – that is the keeper of all the stories. The monolith just so happens to be a brick wall to let us know that on any particular night, in the University Theatre, where the audience sees the performance, we are witnessing Reality’s story.