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Sooner or later in our lives, most of us have endured the awkward roommate situation. Whether or not in faculty or properly into maturity, there’s one thing deeply relatable about sharing house with a stranger. That stress fuels Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” which opens with Robyn, newly transplanted from New York Metropolis, arriving in rural Iowa in quest of reinvention. Ready for her is Sharon, an overbearing, tightly wound single mom who spends her Friday nights leaving rambling voicemails for a son who has clearly stopped listening. It’s a traditional comedic setup that, at its greatest, looks like a contemporary, gender-swapped riff on “The Odd Couple.”
The broad strokes are greater than sufficient to hook audiences at The Dio, which has carved out a welcome area of interest by staging usually under-produced works and giving them contemporary life. “The Roommate” had a high-profile Broadway revival in 2024 led by Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, so the shadow is lengthy. Following in these footsteps isn’t any small feat, but director Steve DeBruyne and leads Carrie Sayer and Kathy Waugh deserve actual credit score for finding the humor and the humanity in a script that usually leans closely on caricature, cliché, and a few doubtful narrative pivots to cross the end line.
The play begins with Robyn, performed with scrappy unpredictability by Waugh, unloading her U-Haul packing containers into Sharon’s meticulously saved kitchen. Sayer’s Sharon watches in close to shriveled disbelief that her name for a roommate has really been answered. She is a textbook empty nester, her identification wrapped up in a son who has relocated to the Huge Apple and whose sexuality she obsessively speculates about regardless of figuring out little or no about his life. It’s an amusing character trait at first, although Silverman pushes the joke so insistently that it borders on redundancy.
Robyn presents as Sharon’s polar reverse. She is a free spirit decided to outrun her previous, at the same time as that previous lurks ominously within the background. On the floor, the character feels assembled from a handful of buzzwords tossed right into a blender, grifter, lesbian, vegan, insurgent, and poured onto the stage. But Waugh resists the stereotype. She finds stunning heat and vulnerability beneath the sides, grounding Robyn even when the script doesn’t.
Below Matt Tomich’s resourceful scenic and lighting design, your complete motion unfolds within the kitchen. The confinement works to the manufacturing’s benefit. It forces intimacy and permits the actors to construct a rhythm that grows more and more electrical. Conversations escalate from veganism to relationship to drug use, and shortly the pair are buying and selling confessions with the reckless abandon that solely strangers can handle. For a 105-minute, no-intermission two-hander, that power is essential.
Sayer, particularly, devours the dialogue. She stretches punchlines to their breaking level and wrings each ounce of awkward delight from Sharon’s late-in-life experimentation, particularly throughout a scene involving an encounter with some hashish. Her transformation from brittle Midwestern mother to somebody tentatively rediscovering want is genuinely compelling.
The place “The Roommate” stumbles is in its tonal whiplash. The script introduces a significant revelation: Robyn was as soon as a telephone scammer who preyed on the aged, draining their financial institution accounts. It’s a darkish and morally loaded flip. As a substitute of interrogating that weight, the play treats it as an offbeat lark. Sharon, newly emboldened, eagerly makes an attempt to attempt her hand on the grift, adopting accents as if auditioning for a comedy sketch.
It’s undeniably subversive, and I can admire the narrative danger. However the humor lands awkwardly. Monetary exploitation of susceptible individuals is just not a victimless crime, and the play’s breezy dealing with of it undercuts the emotional authenticity it in any other case strives to attain. The melodrama feels imported from one other, sharper play. You possibly can sense Silverman reaching for one thing harmful and provocative, but the execution by no means totally reconciles the ethical implications with the comedic tone.
Nonetheless, Sayer and Waugh work additional time to easy these edges. Their chemistry is simple. The banter feels lived-in and spontaneous, they usually handle to make even the extra contrived plot developments really feel momentarily believable. DeBruyne’s assured course retains the pacing brisk and permits the performances to hold the night. As does a slew of tongue and cheek needle drops between the scene modifications, together with Natasha’s Bedingfield’s 2004 banger “Unwritten” and “Woman’s Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable.”
At its core, “The Roommate” desires to be about reinvention. About two ladies at crossroads discovering that it’s by no means too late to start out over, and that the errors of the previous should not have to outline the long run. In Sharon’s last monologue, the play briefly transcends its sitcom scaffolding and touches one thing extra honest. Considered by means of that lens, among the present’s stranger detours really feel like imperfect stepping-stones towards a bigger reality.
The result’s uneven however undeniably partaking. The script might not at all times stick the touchdown, and a number of other jokes land softer than meant, however the performances are greater than well worth the worth of admission. Comedy is difficult. This model of comedy, balancing absurdity with emotional vulnerability, is even tougher. Sayer and Waugh rise to the problem.
And naturally, there’s the added perk of The Dio’s famously scrumptious pre-show hen dinner. Dinner and existential reinvention usually are not a nasty option to spend a night.
The Dio’s manufacturing of “The Roommate” continues by means of March 8. Tickets, which embrace dinner and the present, might be bought right here.