The Meeting: The Interpreter Off-Broadway

The Meeting: The Interpreter 2024

Opened: August 4, 2024
Closing: August 25, 2024

The Meeting: The Interpreter - 2024 Off-Broadway History , Info & More

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Theatre at St. Clements

423 West 46th Street New York, NY 10036

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. “This man could be everyman … one of us,” says playwright Catherine Gropper.

This play is about the loss of individuality and privacy is based on actual events (a chance meeting between the playwright and an actual government interpreter). This two-person play supports a cast of thousands thanks to Mertes’ production scheme including puppetry, film sequences, projections, and intricate lighting and sound.

The Meeting: The Interpreter - 2024 - Off-Broadway Cast

Kelley Curran

Frank Wood

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FEATURED REVIEWS FOR The Meeting: The Interpreter

The Meeting: The Interpreter Review. The Trump Tower Meeting revisited.

6 / 10

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…”)

The Meeting: The Interpreter

5 / 10

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.

The Meeting: The Interpreter History

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2024

Off-Broadway

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