‘The Roommate’ explores odd couple’s relationship
As you may expect from its title, Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” opening the 2018-19 season at the Long Wharf Theatre, is an odd-couple play. It has a lot in common with Neil Simon comedies about growing older, staying relevant in a changing world, surviving a broken relationship and coping with friends and family. The play seeks to be edgy, modern and dangerous, but its debt to old-fashioned relationship comedies is clear.
A divorced woman in Iowa named Sharon has a spacious house and no one to share it with, so she advertises for a roommate. In comes Robyn, a hard-bitten New Yorker hiding a few secrets and perhaps just hiding out.
Some of Robyn’s secrets are benign: She smokes cigarettes on the sly. Others are more alarming, to Sharon at least: Robyn smokes pot. She even grows it. Sharon doesn’t even know what a pot plant looks like.
Robyn: “It’s medicinal herbs.”
Sharon: “Oh, I thought it was drugs.” Other topics under discussion by the women, as they grow closer and begin to influence each other’s lives, include homosexuality and bisexuality, forgery and phone scams, veganism and the “weird” taste of almond milk.
Silverman sticks Robyn and Sharon in a series of awkward, presumably amusing situations. The women are shown to affect each other’s behavior and tastes. Sharon becomes bolder. Robyn develops a stronger conscience, realizing that her small-level criminal schemes have consequences.
Yes, there’s a scene in which Sharon drinks almond milk for the first time, and one in which she smokes marijuana. Forty-year-old Patti Smith records are