The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Comic timing, deft turns
Season opener ‘The Roommate’ opener unpacks surprises
Relatively early on in Jen Silverman’s comedy “The Roommate,” which officially opened Long Wharf ’s new season recently, Robyn, the title character, admits to having something of a green thumb. Sharon, her new landlord and housemate, has no idea how true that admission is until she blossoms into a strong perennial of a person by play’s end.
“The Roommate,” running through Nov. 4 under the direction of Mike Donahue, is a play that, from the outset, sounds familiar: two diametrically opposed people with nothing in common except the house they now share, who must learn to accept each other’s differences if they are to peacefully live together. And “The Roommate” is fairly predictable, to a point. Silverman, last represented in New Haven with the whimsically dark play “The Moors” at Yale Rep two seasons ago, leads her audience beyond expectations to some relatively bold and most-satisfying surprises.
“The Roommate,” which was initially developed at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre Louisville, starts with Sharon (Linda Powell) self-exiled to her large, Iowa farmhouse. A livelong Midwesterner, Sharon is recently divorced and has too much time and house on her hands. Her only trips out of the house are her weekly grocery shopping and book club. Her only interaction at home consists of phone calls to her son in Brooklyn, and most of her calls go to voicemail. She decides to take in a boarder, though money doesn’t seem to propel this decision. Sharon is brings an awkward tension to the home (smartly realized by scenic designer Dane Laffrey, whose diagonally rectangular floor plan extends the main stage to great effect). Robyn is very street-smart, cagey and savvy in deflecting Sharon’s personal questions, while guileless Sharon seems marooned in a 1970s perspective, as if tightly bubblewrapped in innocence.
After these two disparate characters’ initial, uneasy interaction, that primary, age-old question arises: Why does Robyn stay? Indeed, Robyn’s incredulous reactions to Sharon’s naive exchanges lead one to think that she’ll lam
out of the house before breakfast. Silverman carefully heightens this suspense before dropping just enough breadcrumbs to lead her audience to the answer of that question.
Silverman’s deft stinginess with exposition keeps her audience on its toes. To mangle the words of David Byrne: This ain’t Neil Simon; this ain’t no sitcom; we ain’t got time for that now. When Silverman spills details about Robyn’s past, they drop noisily from Robyn’s oft-recycled moving boxes into a deafeningly quiet house. Some of these leaks seem designed to enhance Robyn’s dark mystique. Again, Silverman’s is conditioning her audience to suspect the worst about Robyn, just as Sharon does. Eventually one sees these as the playwright’s seeds for Sharon’s awakening from her 54-year-long slumber.
While one may perceive Robyn as a metaphorical dark angel sent to Sharon to open her mind and expose her to a world of fun in which she is free to rebel, exalt and bloom into her unbridled, true self, Robyn is very much human. Robyn tutors Sharon on living dangerously without placing her directly in peril. Moreover, she is, like Sharon, quintessentially lonely, vulnerable and irrepressible. She needs Sharon in spite of their many visible differences.
Linda Powell, previously seen in Long Wharf’s productions of “Our Town” and “A Doll’s House,” is blessed with a sense of comic timing that works in concert with her bald open-heartedness. Some of her most embarrassing comments and reactions might seem to push the limits of credibility. (“How could anyone be so ignorant?”). However, theatergoers embrace Powell’s innocence because it seems so genuine.
Lawrence masterfully plays her hand close to the chest, refusing to reveal her trump cards. Her sharp sense of underplaying big moments and subtext alike render Robyn as very human while retaining her mystique throughout.
Silverman is on record as saying that she wants to put two 50-year-old women on stage that defy routine stereotype and are recognizable as complex and flawed individuals that we encounter daily who simply require a judgment-free zone to be themselves. She certainly achieves this through well-earned humor and, more importantly, heart, without sentimentality.