Review: THE ROOMMATE at Arizona Theatre Company

At first glance, THE ROOMMATE presents a modest setup: Sharon, a recently divorced Iowa homemaker, adrift in her empty nest, her horizons reduced to the monthly rhythms of a book club, agrees to share her house with Robyn, a guarded, unconventional New Yorker carrying her own secrets and looking for somewhere to disappear. Jen Silverman's script quickly leverages this dynamic and reveals a darker comic inquiry into the instability of identity and the latent desire for reinvention.

The playwright’s goal is immediately grounded by the production’s visual conception. Scenic designer Alan E. Muraoka has set the stage as a kind of psychological landscape. The backdrop renders Iowa’s rolling hills with the textured chromatic sensibility of an Ed Mell canvas: stylized, slightly abstracted, more memory than geography. In contrast, the “big old house” in the foreground appeals like something lifted from House Beautiful: high rafters, generous spatial proportions, and an orderly Americana ideal that feels both aspirational and faintly unreal. It’s a space designed to look stable, even as it is the setting for transformation. Paul Miller’s lighting brilliantly complements Muraoka's tonal palette, suffusing the domestic interior with a warmth that feels at once inviting and slightly melancholic, evoking the glow of a life that is comfortable but quietly airless.

Daniel Perelstein’s original music provides an understated structural underscore, tightening and loosening the production’s affective frame with similar restraint.

Added to this carefully composed environment are Suzanne Chesney's wardrobe choices that effectively announce the differences between the two characters even before a word is spoken. Sharon appears in soft, floral layers that bespeak a woman who has long dressed not to be noticed. Robyn, by contrast, is all dark, casual defiance: a graphic tee, slouchy sweatpants, glasses that suggest someone who observes the world on her own terms and dresses accordingly.

As their relationship evolves, Sharon is drawn toward Robyn's nonconformism, pulled out of carefully maintained normalcy and into a sequence of escalating transgressions that suggest how readily "ordinary" life can be rerouted.

In this, her third collaboration with Arizona Theatre Company, Marsha Mason directs THE ROOMMATE with a keen eye for surfacing emotional truths and human vulnerability. The result is two performances structured as a study in asymmetry. Sara Gettelfinger's Robyn resists fixed definition: she’s expansive, flamboyant, earthy, disruptive, and deliberately opaque. Opposite her, Angela Pierce’s Sharon moves through a subtler arc of incremental permissions to transgress, to cross moral lines that ultimately challenge if not redefine her sense of self. We’re watching how the boundary between being an observer and a perpetrator can so easily dissolve.

Gettelfinger and Pierce are beautifully matched, having developed a finely calibrated chemistry that makes each exchange rich and crackling. The result is that Robyn and Sharon register less as characters simply inhabiting a house than as figures caught within a sustained, low-grade tension between two lives continually negotiating their boundaries.

That tension finds its fullest expression in the play's ending, which delivers a quiet but genuinely unsettling role reversal. Robyn, who came to Iowa expressly to escape a criminal past, has instead ignited the same chaos in Sharon that she was running from. As Robyn departs, moving on, yet again, to a fresh start, Sharon remains. It’s clear that Silverman understands that process of reinvention and invites the audience to explore it: that America's most seductive promise of personal growth is morally and psychologically double-edged. To shed a self is not automatically to find one. Sharon has discarded the roles that defined and diminished her and replaced them with something that feels, at least to her, like aliveness. But the self she has constructed in their place is not her own. It is Robyn's: borrowed mannerisms, adopted methods, a secondhand identity worn like a leather jacket. The exhilaration of escape and the vertigo of self-loss feel, from the inside, remarkably alike. The play doesn’t judge her for this. It does something more disquieting: it makes the confusion entirely, uncomfortably understandable.

What emerges is an inquiry into how identity can be fluid and vulnerable. Arizona Theatre Company’s production holds that question open with precision and wit, leaving us with the unsettling recognition that the ordinary is often less stable than it appears, and far more easily redesigned.

The bottom line: Silverman's dark and witty script, Mason's incisive direction, and two beautifully calibrated performances make this one of the season's more provocative and entertaining productions.

THE ROOMMATE runs through April 26th at:

Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, AZ -- 1-833-ATC-SEAT

Arizona Theatre Company ~ https://atc.org/

Photo credit to Tim Fuller – L to R: Angela Pierce, Sara Gettelfinger

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