In the superbly acted Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) production of Jen Silverman’s The Roommate, the result is a fascinating exploration on the sometimes overemphasized importance of a character’s likable and relatable traits.
Directed by Teresa Sanderson, this richly entertaining production, nevertheless, ensures that the audience should not remain passive in comprehending and sorting out the playwright’s objective of reversing the likely premise that once women are past 40, they gradually diminish from the scene and eventually become invisible. Actors Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin and Annette Wright put the exclamation point on their definitively badass women characters, who don’t see their fifties as a time to retreat politely into the background. To wit: Sanderson, an accomplished actor who has taken on many roles which resemble, fit within and resonate with the characters in Silverman’s oeuvre of plays, is the perfect director for this 54th season opener for SLAC.
Darby-Duffin, who has been one of the busiest actors on the Utah theatrical and performing arts scene in recent years, dazzles as Sharon, in her mid-fifties, an empty-nester living in Iowa who decides to take in a roommate to make ends meet. A naturally talkative person, Sharon sounds like she needs a round-the-clock sounding board and constantly calls her son but always ends up having to leave voicemails.
When Robyn, her new roommate from the Bronx, arrives, Sharon is excited and eager to make friends with her. Meanwhile, Robyn is the opposite personality-wise. Wright is outstanding in every way to bring out Robyn’s bluntness and insistence on keeping her secrets and past mischiefs locked away, which only deters Sharon briefly. In this two-hander, both actors revel in the bounty of comic material that comes with the premise of two oddly matched roommates, but they also deftly foreshadow the serious and ominous elements that Silverman’s script has incorporated in extending the dramatic impacts of a comedy that turns progressively darker.
Because Sharon craves communication and connection so intensely, she eventually succeeds at getting Robyn to let her guard down, which leads to stunning revelations about the roommate’s past. Sharon’s alarm, however, quickly transforms into her own liberating surge of being daring and reckless, something she has never experienced before in her well-ordered life. Their friendship is cemented not in sweetness, but in the thrills of breaking moral expectations and ethical conventions. While both are ecstatic in the adrenaline of their new joint escapades, Robyn begins to regret them given that she came to Iowa to escape that past. Meanwhile, Sharon is poised to ramp up her foolhardiness to even dangerous levels. These tensions threaten to jeopardize their tenuous friendship. Both actors extract all of the available nuances in their impressive performances, with utmost believability.
In an interview published elsewhere, Silverman explained, ”It doesn’t trouble me when I’m writing because I’m interested in how people are flawed and complicated, contradictory and thorny—how people are actually people.” As for those who believe that in the initial premises of The Roommate, audiences want or should have characters who are likable and relatable, Silverman explained, ”they [some writers] are often coming from a place of deep discomfort with the truth and anxiety about an audience being asked to hold two thoughts at the same time. And I think the most important thing you can do right now is ask the audience to hold two thoughts at the same time.”
Precisely this SLAC production excels at nailing Silverman’s earnest intentions in this play, which had its premiere in 2015 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Indeed, characters do not necessarily need to be superficially relatable, as Rebecca Mead noted in a 2014 essay in the New Yorker magazine about the “scourge of relatability.” She wrote, “If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.”
One could not ask for a more stellar season opener for SLAC — very funny but also very enlightening for a substantive often dismissed social observation — than this production, which continues through Oct. 26. For tickets and more information, see the Salt Lake Acting Company website.