Lawrence.
There’s a moment in Jen Silverman’s The Roommate when Sharon, a woman in her fifties putting her life together after a divorce, and Robyn, her new housemate, have already gotten to know each other a bit. They know about each others’ kids. Robyn knows about Sharon’s dissatisfaction with her marriage. Sharon knows Robyn knows how to grow weed. They’ve even shared a joint together. But then Sharon discovers that she doesn’t know the half of what’s going on with Robyn, and she’s scared by what she finds. She’s not sure she even knows Robyn’s real name anymore.
“But what were you born as?” Sharon asks her. And Robyn answers: “I was born as a malleable, changeable template.”
It’s a turning point in The Roommate, which takes a well-worn plot — a stranger comes to town, connects with someone who’s stuck there, and together they both change — and makes it something fresh and contemporary. And it begins its run at Long Wharf on Oct. 10.
“The wonderful thing about it is how familiar it feels, but then underneath is Jen’s take on that, which is very specifically Jen — it’s not a straight up-and-down point of view,” said Linda Powell, who plays Sharon. That specificity, rooted in character and language, is what lets the play slowly go off the rails and chart its own course.
For both Powell and Tasha Lawrence, who plays Robyn, that meant a lot of fun, and a lot of character work.
“Sharon is tricky. On paper she could just be dithering, but there are a lot of levels to her. How much about her is there from the beginning, and how much is she discovering about herself?” Powell said, as “she’s going through kind of rebirth, into a new phase of herself.”
Sharon also happens to do it out loud. She’s the kind of person who says things as they occur to her. She leaves personal details on her son’s voicemail now and again just because she’s excited about them.
Meanwhile, Robyn plays her own cards close to the vest — an entirely different challenge for Lawrence.
“She is so mysterious, but at the same time, Jen has laid in very subtle things for an actress to grab onto,” Lawrence said. “There are a couple lines in the play that allow you to create a backstory for her.” That backstory includes a shaky family life, relationships that didn’t work out, and — without giving too much away — periods of solitude, of being very much on her own.
In poring over the text of Silverman’s play, Lawrence said that “she writes almost like a poem. She gives a lot of good indication about thought.” This means that director Mike Donahue has been “very careful in calibrating how to watch this relationship grow.”
At a recent rehearsal for the play, Lawrence said, Donahue reminded both actors that “you have to be word-perfect in this play, or it loses its tension. This play is almost like a musical score. You’re scoring all the way through. The beats are as much words as the words in this play.”
The music Silverman is playing, however, is the language of everyday speech, of people figuring things out, for themselves and for each other.
“When you choose not to finish a sentence, or to restart a sentence, that is a human being muscling through a thought, through their courage, through their fear,” Lawrence said. “Whatever it is, it informs the spirit, the brain, the heart, climbing that mountain, and how they navigate the boulders, the vines the trees.”
“It’s active,” she said. “You’re on the balls of your feet.”
Powell.
Powell agreed. In playing Sharon, “the trickiest part is to not let myself get ahead of her, because every step in the play, everything that happens to her, is an accumulation of not just scenes, not just beats, but tiny little moments that all build up, and if I wash over everything, I don’t find myself in the right place,” she said. “It’s a very Zen exercise — letting myself stay unsure. As an actor, I need to know what to do — but as Sharon, I need to be completely open to everything.”
It helps that actors and director have some history together themselves, and with the play. Lawrence, in fact, originated the part of Robyn in a production of The Roommate at the Humana Festival held by the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville several years ago. Powell and Lawrence, both veterans of stage and screen, meet while attending Circle in the Square Theatre School and were part of the same company at Willow Cabin Theatre Company in New York City, though Powell guessed that they “probably haven’t worked together for 20 years.”
“I’ve worked with Mike before, I’ve worked with Jen’s material, and Tasha and I started from a certain place,” Powell said.
Lawrence agreed. “It’s so exciting to act with a woman whose work I admire so much. And I know her. It’s delicious,” she said.
It also means that Powell and Lawrence have been able to dig into their characters to get a sense not only of what they have done in their lives to get to the point where they are when the play’s action starts, but to imagine where they may end up when the play is over. Part of what makes the play feel so contemporary is that neither woman is trapped by her past or her circumstances. This isn’t The Yellow Wallpaper. It isn’t Thelma and Louise, either.
“That’s one of the things that Sharon is discovering in this play is that she does have choices,” Powell said. “In the first half of her life, she’s gone with the flow and done what was expected of her. And now she doesn’t have a map.”
But Sharon isn’t “lost,” Powell added. “She has choices and she has agency.”
Meanwhile, without giving away too much about Robyn, Lawrence said “she’s a survivor, a person who’s been on her own and raised a kid on her own.”
Who knows where Robyn ends up? Though as Powell said, “I was in Stop and Shop yesterday and saw an ad for a 67-year-old woman looking for a roommate.” She took a picture of it and showed it to Donahue and Lawrence.
“This is Robyn,” Powell said.
The Roommate runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., from Oct. 10 to Nov. 4. Visit Long Wharf’s website for tickets and more information.
