This is Government

This Is Government spends a working day in a cluttered congressional office where the staff are one office manager, two interns and a telephone that will not stop. The member they work for is never seen. Everything that reaches him has to get past the three of them first.

Kaz has done the job long enough to know which calls matter. Tip, the senior intern, has firm politics and no patience for an office that answers to swing voters. Emi is new and has not yet worked out what she is allowed to say out loud. Then the building goes into lockdown over a bomb threat, the three of them are shut in together, and the argument they have been circling all morning becomes the only thing left to do.

Nina Kissinger wrote the play, drawing on the junior end of legislative work, and it had its first production in 2025. It is a workplace comedy for most of its length, built on the particular absurdities of constituent mail and switchboard politics, and it turns without warning: the room that was funny at ten in the morning is one nobody can leave by two. What it finally asks is what an ordinary staffer's job is actually for.