The Meeting: The Interpreter

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If you are not familiar with the Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016 or the Magnitsky Act of 2012 you are at a terrible disadvantage while watching Catherine Gropper’s The Meeting: The Interpreter now at Theatre at St. Clement’s. And while the play and the program could have defined both of these events, they fail to do so. Tony Award Award-winner Frank Wood plays the unnamed Russian American Interpreter; Kelley Curran, best known as the sly and ambitious Turner on The Gilded Age, plays seven characters mainly without changing costume or accent. By the end of this long one act play, you may be less confused but then again you might be just as at sea as at the beginning.

Seemingly not trusting the material, director Brian Mertes has used all kinds of stage gimmicks including having the two actors photographed live by a team of three videographers whose equipment runs on a track around one side of the stage while a huge screen covers the second half on which we see the actions of Wood and Curran blown up to one story high. (Aside from the distraction, those who sit in the audience on stage left may find this blocks part of their view.) The meeting at Trump Tower which precipitates the ostensible action is played by the two actors and six miniature (nude!) puppets by famed designer Julian Crouch. At various points the two actors enter a booth in the back of the stage for no explained reason, as if in a session at the United Nations. There is also unexplained dancing and singing that seems to have little to do with the events at hand.

Another problem with the play is that the story is not told in chronological order as one might expect in a docudrama which this purports to be, and this makes it difficult to follow the events until we have witnessed all of the scenes. The pertinent facts are these: during the 2016 presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a meeting was arranged at Trump Tower between Trump’s team (represented by Don Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, with Ivanka Trump pacing out in the hall during the whole meeting) with Russian operatives Rinat Akhmetshin, Ike Kaveladze and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who it was believed had a file of dirt on Secretary Clinton. As she did not speak English, Veselnitskaya  brought along the unnamed Interpreter who had just translated for her at a hearing at the Foley Square Courthouse in the Prevezon Case (also not explained by the play).

It now transpires that not only did Veselnitskaya not have anything on Clinton but her real motive was to convince the Trump campaign to get the Magnitsky Act repealed as it had caused Russia to block Americans from adopting Russian children. The Magnitsky Act which had been passed after the murder of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison “allows the U.S. government to sanction foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the world.” The Interpreter’s involvement was unforeseen as he was not told or asked to work at the meeting until he was in a taxi after lunch with Veselnitskya on the way to Trump Tower as part of his fee for the Prevezon Case. The assumption of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia led to the Interpreter being investigated for years which the play attempts to dramatize. This is in part what the Mueller Report was later authorized to investigate.

Unfortunately, The Meeting: The Interpreter starts not with this event but with two Congressional hearings, one in the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 8, 2017 and a later one on Tuesday, November 28 by the House of Representative’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which the Interpreter appears to have attended voluntarily, having nothing to hide. The dramatization of the Trump Tower meeting comes fourth in the play after these confusing hearings, the second one of which is somewhat redacted.

In between, is the first of four scenes that introduce an unnamed female Journalist (who may be the playwright) who meets the Interpreter and thinks he has a good story to tell. We next witness an interview of the Interpreter by an FBI agent who blackmails him into doing the U.S. a favor, as well as an ugly reenactment of the brutal murder of Magnitsky in his cell in Moscow. Ultimately, the Journalist announces that she is planning to release the Interpreter’s story. In an epilogue we are told what happened to all of the characters and given a list of the 28 countries that have passed a Magnitsky Act since his murder in 2012.

Wood and Curran are consistent in their performances, he as the unnamed Russian American Interpreter, she versatile as seven of the other characters including Veselnitszkaya, the Journalist, the FBI Agent and Samantha Brennan, the Investigative Counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Wood, however, never shows any emotion though it is obvious that he under a great deal of stress as the investigation come closer and closer to unfairly implicating him and his family. Only as Veselnitzkaya does Curran change her costume and her accent; her other characters are all played about the same way. All of these choices damage the dramatization in various ways.

Jim Findlay’s setting which resembles a television studio and includes a single table and two chairs and many boxes plus the track for the video camera is often confusing. When the Interpreter is interviewed at home we are not close enough to see his mementoes on the wall that he unveils before the scene. The sound booth in the back of the stage is never referred to though both actors use it. Crouch’s puppets are clever but bizarre in this context of a political docudrama. Except for Russian hats for both actors in the Trump Tower scene, and a white coat and blue suit jacket for Curran at various points, Olivera Gajic’s costumes do not change in the course of the play’s 15 scenes. For the record, the projection design is by Yana Biryukova and the director of photography and camera is Tatiana Stolpovskaya. The Meeting: The Interpreter will only work for those already informed of the events depicted in the play.

The Meeting: The Interpreter (through August 25, 2024)

Theatre at St. Clement’s, 424 W. 46^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.todaytix.com/nyc/shows/41728-the-meeting-the-interpreter

Running time: one hour and 35 minutes without an intermission