It’s 448 pages long and most people haven’t read it, so volunteers have staged readings of the report of the Trump-Russia inquiry

Hundreds of actors, journalists and novelists have been holding public readings of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia interference in the 2016 US election and the Trump campaign.

Over the weekend, a hundred people came out to Seattle’s Town Hall to present a nonstop 24-hour stage reading of the Russia investigation’s findings, just days before Mueller’s own highly anticipated appearances at congressional hearings.

In front of hundreds of audience membersin a hall decorated with American flags, the readers took turns reading out the 448-page report.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Mueller is due to testify before Congress this week. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

There was the occasional flurry of laughter when an especially repetitive series of redactions were read out loud, but the event unfolded exactly as it was intended – as a serious affair.

“It’s not entertainment; it’s not Saturday Night Live; people need to read this,” said Brian Faker, a local producer who, along with playwright Carl Sander and actor Sarah Harlett, organized the event. “This is a report about a country that is not dead, and the only way to keep it alive is to kind of keep track of how things are going and read this report.”

Faker said he felt the reading represented a response to a “systematic effort to ignore or misrepresent” the report’s findings. The report was released in April and is available in print, online and even audio book, but the vast majority of Americans – including many members of Congress – reportedly haven’t read it. Trump dismissed its findings, falsely claiming it cleared his campaign.

The Seattle reading came as Mueller is set to testify in front of Congress on Wednesday about the inquiry into Russian election meddling and ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

In what has been called a “make-or-break moment” for Democrats, Mueller is expected to devote at least three hours to back-to-back hearings in front of the House judiciary and intelligence committees, which could fuel calls for impeachment proceedings to begin.

The event in Seattle is one of many similar readings held across the US in recent weeks designed to offer Americans who haven’t read the dense and extremely technical report an opportunity to hear it firsthand, discuss its findings, and draw their own conclusions.

Last month, a team of some of Broadway’s biggest stars, including Annette Bening, John Lithgow and Kevin Kline, came together at a church in Manhattan to perform The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts,” a new one-hour play made up of adapted and condensed portions of the report. Although it was announced only a few hours before the one-night only performance, more than a million people tuned in to its live stream.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mark Hamill, Zachary Quinto, Annette Bening and bottom row from left, John Lithgow, Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Michael Shannon, participated in The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts. Photograph: AP

Earlier this month, more than 250 people attended an 11-hour live reading of the second volume of the report in Washington DC’s Arena Stage. Readings are also scheduled next month, including an 11-hour presentation of the report in Cleveland, and a two-day reading of it in West Hollywood’s City Council Chambers.

Faker said the idea for the reading in Seattle was inspired by the Manhattan performance, as well as the realization that few people had actually read the report.

He said he thought, “let’s just get together as a community and read this for our community and then like everyone else, whether it’s in their personal lives or at the ballot box, they can use this information to make super-critical decisions about how we’re going to deal with these nutty times”.

Some members of the audience followed along in their own printed copies of the report or even took notes. All of the Seattle readers were volunteers. Donations at the door covered staffing costs, and anything extra will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Seattle chapter.

Linda Wolf, a 75-year-old psychoanalyst in Seattle, said she came out for the event because she hadn’t read the report and wanted to be prepared for Mueller’s testimony.

“This is a little daunting, this report,” said Wolf, who planned to watch for a few hours at least three different times during the course of the reading. “But I think coming and having it read properly … and then maybe there’s some conversation that might go on periodically, about what we’ve heard.”

Although there were periods in the middle of the night when the audience was reduced to the single digits, Faker said he considered the event a success.

“We read it,” he said in an email following the reading. “We did something in the face of a systematic effort to ignore or misrepresent the mountain of evidence in the report that, were it not for the DoJ view that a president can’t be indicted, would have been enough to indict this president.”