Award-winning Sound Designer Lee Kinney Talks 'Is This a Room' and the Importance of Sound

For today’s conversation, we sat down with Lee Kinney, the sound designer for Is This a Room. Based on a true story, Is This a Room follows the story of Reality Winner, an Air Force linguist. In the story, Reality was surprised by the FBI at her home and was then interrogated and later charged with leaking evidence revolving around Russian interference in United States elections. 

Lee Kinney, who spearheaded the sonic identity for this project, is an award-winning and multi-nominated sound designer who has uplifted many projects with his diverse creative talents. Some of his notable past projects include Morning Sun, Selling Kabul, Can You Forgive Her?, and For All the Women. Lee Kinney was awarded the Outer Critics Circle Honors for Outstanding Sound Design and was nominated for the Lucille Lortel Award, Drama Desk Award, and Henry Hewes Design Award. Lee has a passion for making sure the sound in all his projects stands out to the audience and is a prominent part of the production. We spoke to him in-depth about his approach to sound and how important the audio was in Is This a Room. 

What was it that began your personal journey into sound design and your passion for live theater?

I grew up in a small town in rural Canada. There weren’t many opportunities to see the live theater of any kind in our community and much fewer performances of plays. So when I became interested in making theater, the audience I had access to really didn’t have expectations, and it felt safe to just be bold, mess around, and make mistakes.

I was directing and acting, and designing scenery, but I was always most interested in making music and sound for plays. It was exciting to learn how to make this kind of music in an environment that was kind of outside the rules, and for people who were experiencing these incredibly well-known stories for the first time ever. 

Your most recent project, ‘Is This a Room’ is a recount of a real-life historical incident. How was this dynamic different for you from previous projects? Did you feel like your creative process was shaped by the real individuals behind this National event?

Well, I think first, sharing the story of someone who is still very much living it in the real world is incredibly humbling and inspiring. There is a different sensitivity to the ramifications of your work because many people who see this work are hearing about this incident for the first time as they’re watching the play.

Even as we’re tremendously careful to not comment on or skew the events, the fact is we have a hand in shaping the audience’s opinion of these events and these people. And although the play is factual in the sense that the words are exactly as they were spoken in real life, a play isn’t strictly journalism, so we are rendering something more rich and expansive than just the facts. So the creative work is aimed at framing the events inside of a psychological experience that hopes to be as true-to-life as the words are true-to-life.

Your work on ‘Is This a Room’ gave new life to the event. What do you feel is the most important facet of your role as a sound designer?

Tina Satter constructed the trajectory of the piece in a way that moves seamlessly from something that feels intensely realistic and naturalistic, to something that feels overwhelmingly surreal and nightmarish. Because the scenery is very spare, the sound and music in the piece do a lot of the work of world-building, so it was important for co-sound designer Sanae Yamada and me to carefully follow that same trajectory so that the descent into the nightmare feels organic and invisible and enveloping. Even as the sounds become less realistic, more synthetic, more bizarre, more psychological, they need to still feel as authentic and natural as the cicadas from the opening scene.

How did your approach to the sound design lend itself to the intensity of the scenes in, ‘Is This a Room?’ Was there any particular feeling you were wanting to leave the audience with using your talent in your craft?

We wanted to create a feeling of startling intimacy for the audience so that in this massive theater, every person in every seat feels deeply inside these events that Reality Winner is living through. One piece of that is the sonic landscape that scores nearly the entire play. The other piece is the delivery of the vocal performances. Real-life dialogue is much more chaotic than dialogue we’re accustomed to hearing in plays and on film. It overlaps constantly, it’s spoken under the breath, it’s full of interruptions and non-sequiturs and mistakes and references without context.

All of those nuances are what make up the fabric of this hyper-naturalistic performance, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to hear and understand. An essential part of the sound design is the creative amplification of the actors so that every tiny mouth sound is crystal clear and audible, while still maintaining a totally natural acoustic experience. The effect is that every quiet word is audible and clear and that you’re hearing it acoustically from the performer standing in front of you, and not amplified from a speaker above your head. 

What is one thing you would emphasize for individuals looking to break into the sound design space for theater?

Experiment with new technology. Sound technology is constantly innovating. There are so many affordable tools and affordable ways to learn the tools, and knowing how to use them will change the way you think about work and the way you think about sound in the world. I think there’s an expectation that there are certain standards or ways of doing things that need to be adhered to, but I think the truth is that technology and design trends move too quickly for there to be any real meaning of “standards". The more you can ignore that expectation, the more creative your approach will be and the more memorable your work will come out. 

What’s next on your career journey? Any exciting projects we can look forward to?

I’ve got three really exciting projects coming up over the next few months. We’re finishing up a beautiful new play at Manhattan Theatre Club right now called Prayer for the French Republic, by Josh Harmon and directed by David Cromer. Later this spring I’m working with Taibi Magar on this incredible investigative piece about white supremacy and misogyny by Claudia Rankine called Help. And in Apri,l Jeremy O. Harris’s Daddy is premiering in England at the Almeida, for which I’ve designed and written music.

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Thanks for reading! You can learn more about Lee and his work via his website.