You know you're in good hands when you start with an intelligently witty script, add an award winning guest director, cast the production with two of the River Region's most respected actors/directors who have collaborated many times, and then invite an audience -- result: 90+ minutes of entertainingly provocative theatre at the Wetumpka Depot.
Directed sensitively by Tina Turley [retired recently from Theatre Tuscaloosa], Jen Silverman's 2015 one-act play The Roommate was on Broadway in 2024 starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone. It tells the unlikely story of two distinctively different women: Sharon [Kim Mason], a conservative naively trusting divorcee, who opens up her home to Robyn [Kristy Meanor], a liberal pot-smoking vegan lesbian, whose reason for escaping New York to Iowa is mysterious. How they connect and interact, and how each influences the other is the center of the plot.
The play's episodic structure, with multiple costume changes and shift of set dressings, signal the linear time movement, and challenge the cast and crew to keep the story moving forward without sapping the on-stage energy; it is mostly successful in using music to ease the segues from scene to scene, but some of the changes could benefit from shortening the time they take in order to sustain audience attention.
That being said, it is a real treat to watch the comfort level and listen to the subtle dialogue interpretations of two masterful actors playing to their strengths at humor and pathos so audiences relax and engage with their stories and relationship.
Whether introducing Sharon to drugs, or analyzing their own or others' sexuality, or Robyn's con-artist mentoring, or watching how they seem to shift their conservative or liberal beliefs, it is clear that each woman is a survivor who also relies on others to survive.
Be prepared to laugh out loud at their antics, or commiserate with the dilemmas each experiences; perhaps allow The Roommate company to get you to search inwards to find a common ground with someone different from yourself.
