‘ROOMMATE’ RETURNS WITH NEW RELEVANCE
PANDEMIC-DELAYED COMEDY BACK WITH SAME DIRECTOR AND ACTORS, WHO ARE INTEGRATING COVID-19 SHUTDOWN INTO PLAY’S SETTING
If this isn’t comic timing, nothing is: New Village Arts Theatre’s production of the Jen Silverman comedy “The Roommate” is opening on April Fools’ Day. It’s a reunion for director Samantha Ginn and the show’s co-stars, Milena (Sellers) Phillips and Kim Strassburger, who were busily in rehearsal three years ago when “The Roommate” was shut down, like everything else at the time, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The consequences of the global health crisis have impacted this production again, but this time in a positive way. Silverman’s script calls for the action to take place in the present day, when COVID is still very much a part of life.
“What we’ve discovered,” said Ginn, who is making her main-stage directorial debut, “is that the play has deepened because we have to take into account that these characters have lived through a pandemic.”
“The play is actually about loneliness. Now that loneliness is deeper,” Ginn said. “The character Sharon (played by Phillips) is going through a divorce during the pandemic. She needs a roommate to cover the bills. I think a lot of people went through relationship struggles then and had to face some of their darker sides, their shadows.”
In Silverman’s play, Sharon will confront her new roomie Robyn’s (played by Strassburger) darker side, and to some extent her own. The two are, at first blush, complete opposites. The divorced Sharon is a conventional Midwesterner. Robyn is a refugee from the Bronx with a pocketful of secrets.
“They (Phillips and Strassburger) have a natural, organic chemistry,” Ginn said. “So when we started up again last month it was like no time had passed.” But, she added, “it’s a whole new play because of what we’ve gone through. The play changed because we’ve changed the past three years.”
This is the San Diegoarea premiere of “The Roommate,” which made its West Coast debut in 2017 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa. Silverman’s quasisatiric play “The Moors” was produced at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights that same year.
The timing of the return of “The Roommate” for Ginn and her actors has to do with much more than April Fools’ Day.
“This show is healing for us,” Ginn said. “We were so devastated when we couldn’t do the play in 2020. Now that we’re back, we have more gratitude. Being a part of ‘The Roommate’ again has sparked this joy in me that was lost during the pandemic.”