June 3, 2017. A 25-year-old former Air Force linguist named Reality Winner is surprised at her home by the FBI, interrogated, and then charged with leaking top-secret evidence of Russian interference in our voting system to the media. She’s in jail now, sentenced in August 2018 to a five-year, three-month prison sentence.

Conceived as a play and directed by Tina Satter, the 2017 verbatim transcript reveals a verbal dance between the knife-sharp Reality and the FBI agents who arrive at her home unannounced to interrogate her. As Reality’s autonomy shrinks before her eyes, a simmering real-life thriller emerges, offering vital considerations of access, language, power, patriotism, and honor at this particularly loaded American moment. Learn more on our No Safety Net podcast: