Why 'The Roommate' Is a Morally Complicated Comedy

Originally published on TDF Stages
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After a decade of Off-Broadway successes, playwright Jen Silverman makes their Broadway debut

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Typically, it's nerve-racking to meet a partner's parents for the first time, but playwright Jen Silverman kicked it up a notch. Their in-person introduction to Laurel, their future mother-in-law, was also the first time she saw Silverman's work onstage… and it was a play Laurel had inspired: The Roommate.

The idea for this two-person, Odd Couple-esque dramedy about unlikely housemates was sparked ten years ago after Silverman's partner told them a story about his mother, who was sharing her Midwest condo with a stranger. When The Roommate had its world premiere at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2015, Laurel was in the audience. Happily, she loved it.

Hopefully, Broadway audiences will too, because a starry new production of The Roommate is now at the Booth Theatre. Mia Farrow is Sharon, a wide-eyed, recently divorced Midwesterner who welcomes Patti LuPone's Robyn, a prickly Bronxite in search of a fresh start, into her Iowa home. Their mismatched pairing is initially hilarious but evolves into a touching friendship that helps both women grow, even though some of what they do may upset moralists.

Directed by Jack O'Brien, The Roommate marks Silverman's Broadway debut after years of well-received Off-Broadway shows with rich roles for women and nonbinary performers, including the Brontë-inspired dark comedy The Moors at The Playwrights Realm, Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties at MCC Theater and Spain, a noir exploration of propaganda at Second Stage Theatre. TDF Stages spoke with Silverman about the power of invisibility, receiving "likability notes" and why they embrace art that "makes things less simple."

Carey Purcell: While watching The Roommate, I thought about how rare it is to see a play featuring female characters in their sixties played by performers in their seventies—and on Broadway no less! What was going through your mind as you wrote this play regarding people who are and aren't seen?

Jen Silverman: There is a way in our country and our culture where, at a certain point, women become sort of invisible. It's an obsession with youth, but I also think it's a really thorny and complicated and fundamentally violent way in which our culture deals with women. I was interested in this question of what becomes possible for you when you are not on the radar. What are the ways in which you internalize and write yourself off? And then, what are the ways you can gain power and feel electricity and liberty and also the unhinged nature of that power by starting to operate under the radar?

Purcell: Sharon and Robyn are so different, and they have a profound impact on each other. Did you create one role before the other, or did you write them at the same time, crafting how they would eventually come together?

Silverman: In the first few drafts, I just sat down and wrote what happened. As Sharon came to life, she came to life in relation to Robyn and vice versa.

Purcell: In an opinion piece for The New York Times, you mentioned receiving "likability notes" in TV writers' rooms. Does that echo in your head or are you able to tune it out?

Silverman: 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. I do think when writers receive [likability notes], they 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.

Also, I have never received a likability note about a male character.

Purcell: Over the past decade, The Roommate has been produced all over the country. What makes it so appealing?

Silverman: I continue to be sort of shocked. I think on the most obvious level, it's two actors, one set, probably. That wasn't why I wrote it, and to be completely honest, that wasn't on my mind when I wrote it, but the reality is that theatres are looking to produce plays that they can afford.

But what I hear all the time from friends who are actors, who are women over the age of 40, is that there aren't a lot of roles that they are getting offered that feel exciting and big and complicated. Those are the roles that I want to write for people of any age. Those are the roles that I hope The Roommate is offering. I think a lot of times, actors want to do the play, or directors want to direct it, and then they bring it to a theatre and ask if they can do it there. My impression is that artists are advocating to be able to work on it.

Purcell: Your work is so diverse. How do you pick your projects?

Silverman: Whatever the next project is usually has to do with a question that I'm chasing. In my personal life and in my artistic life, there's generally a question that is haunting me or obsessing me, and I just sort of circle it for a while, and then that question turns into a play or a novel or a movie. Sometimes the question will lead me to an adaptation, like Witch, or it will lead me to a brand-new play. But generally, it starts from this place of chasing something down and getting closer and closer and closer to it.

Purcell: What role do you think art should play in our culture right now? What responsibility does it have?

Silverman: For me, what I feel compelled to do in the art I make is look for the complexity, look for the nuance, the moments when we encounter and embrace the contradictions inherent in characters, and therefore inherent in ourselves and our friends and our community. I'm interested in the ways in which art makes things less simple.

It feels like there is this overwhelming pressure to simplify and moralize and clean up and make everybody feel really comfortable. That is not what I want my art to do, and it's not what I want to receive from the art that I encounter. There's a lot to be said for art that fills you with joy, that fully entertains you, that makes you leave feeling great. I don't want art to be like a form of punishment. But I think the art that really sits with me is stuff that makes me have to acknowledge some truth about myself in order to go on a journey.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.