Review Roundup: THE MEETING: THE INTERPRETER

THE MEETING: THE INTERPRETER by Catherine Gropper and directed by Brian Mertes and featuring Tony Award winner Frank Wood and Kelley Curran, just celebrated its opening night.

Set against the backdrop of the infamous Trump Tower Meeting of 2016, the play tells the story of an international interpreter thrown up against government systems of congressional and senate interrogations, catapulting him into circumstances beyond his control. 

Let's see what the critics are saying about the new play...

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: The playwright can’t seem to decide whether “The Meeting: The Interpreter” is about the meeting or about the life-story of the interpreter (hence the awkward title) – or for that matter about human rights abuses in Russia, or about the relationship between the interpreter and the journalist, or about the continuing threat to American democracy. She doesn’t even seem sure it should be a play: “The Meeting: The Interpreter” ends with an “Epilogue” — words projected onto a screen, some twenty paragraphs’ worth – summing up the Mueller Report (which wasn’t mentioned at all on stage), as well as reports from the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee (without mentioning the Trump Tower meeting and how it figures in), and telling us at length what’s happened to some of the people involved (“Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in 2016…”)

Howard Miller, Talkin' Broadway: Wood and Curran, when they are not lost among the gimmickry, bravely try to keep the audience attuned to the actual storyline. The most interesting interactions between them are those times when the two Russians take center stage and you begin to get a sense of how the respected interpreter got tangled up in the goings-on at Trump Tower. But apart from the creative production values, there is not a lot of substance to the play, in which the writer seems to want to set up a collection of circumstantial evidence to make a political statement, literally spelled out in the final on-screen moments of the evening. It's possible, I suppose, that the entire enterprise is meant to be seen as a sort of meta-satire on documentary filmmaking or video-happy theatremaking, but if that's the intent then it is one hell of an inside joke.

Average Rating: 55.0%