In June 2016, at the height of the Presidential election, a Russian lawyer named 
Natalia Veselnitskaya met at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and six other people, reportedly telling the candidate’s son that she had incriminating information about Trump rival Hillary Clinton. 

One of the eight people at the meeting was the Russian-American interpreter Veselnitskaya had hired, because she didn’t speak English.

Much was made of this meeting after it was made public the following year, becoming the subject of Congressional hearings and investigations and the continual reporting of detail after detail after detail as they emerged – what led to it, what was really said, what came out of it

Playwright Catherine Gropper apparently saw a good play in the story of this minor player at this meeting, after she had “a chance encounter with a renowned Russian-American interpreter just before Covid,” as she writes in the program. This is presumably the same Russian-American interpreter who was at the Trump Tower meeting (whose name she doesn’t mention – and requests that I not dig up from the reports; I’m guessing this is to protect whatever privacy he has left.)

I could see an engaging play fashioned from the interpreter’s story, perhaps a way to add clarity and perspective to what is in some ways a continuing saga. But “The Meeting: The Interpreter” is not that play.  Indeed, it’s flabbergasting how hard the production works at self-sabotage.

Broadway veteran Frank Wood feels like an ideal actor to portray the interpreter, who the script suggests  was an “everyday person” unexpectedly caught up in history. Wood’s acting partner in the production, Kelley Curran, an actress who is best known as the devious social climbing former lady’s maid in “The Gilded Age,” portrays the Russian lawyer, and more than a half dozen other characters, including an unnamed journalist who is apparently a stand-in for the playwright (she too meets the interpreter by chance) as well as the Congresspeople and staffers who interrogate the interpreter in scenes that rely heavily (and tediously) on verbatim transcripts.

 But the two first-rate performers are given little opportunity to inhabit their characters. They frequently and inexplicably start dancing (choreographed by Orlando Pabotoy.) They play with puppets (designed and constructed by Julian Crouch), who represent the characters who attended the meeting and other members of the Trump family. In case that’s not complicated enough, director Brian Mertes also employs a three-person crew to shoot the actors with a camera mounted on a dolly,  projecting the in-real-time videotape onto a huge screen that often blocks the audience’s view of the in-the-flesh actors on the stage. 

These gimmicks are done competently enough, but it’s hard to avoid concluding that the director didn’t feel the script was worth paying attention to.

He has a point.  The dialogue ranges from the stilted sentences from the transcripts to a cringeworthy attempt at lyricism: “Occasionally, politicians’ dark shadows fascinate us,” the interpreter says. “So, we attempt to hide our wounds, peeking at our own darker shadows, while greed is marching on our democracy.”

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
Theatre at St. Clements through August 25
Running time: 95 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $44 to $144
Written by Catherine Gropper
Directed by Brian Mertes
Set Design by Jim Findlay, costume design by Olivera Gajic,lighting design by Barbara Samuels,sound design by Daniel Baker & Co, projection design by Yana Biryukova, director of photography and camera Tatiana Tolpovskaya, puppet design and construction Julian Crouch, choreography and movement by Orlando Pabotoy
Cast: Frank Wood, Kelley Curran