Most people begin to reinvent themselves in preadolescence and carry on with it, in some fashion, for the rest of their lives. But just because we can reinvent ourselves doesn’t mean our newfound selves are superior builds. Sometimes they’re actually a pretty bad idea.
The bad idea in Jen Silverman’s The Roommate will surprise you. Their script leads the audience—laughing all the way—through a one-act, odd couple allegory on the cost of knowing others and being known.
The two-person cast of Sharon (Gail Dartez) and Robyn (Eleanor O’Brien) get to know one another before our very eyes, as Robyn schleps boxes of her stuff into Sharon’s prim and tidy Iowa kitchen. Both in their 50s, Sharon says she recently “retired from a marriage.” Robyn just bailed out of the Bronx and drove her chaotic boxed-up life to the middle of nowhere to regroup—or so she says.
The radiant orderliness of Sharon crashes against Robyn’s slam poet, vegan, lesbian, soon-to-be-former smoker sensibilities until the duo get smashed and drop their pretenses, which sounds boilerplate but unfolds as a drop-dead hilarious sendup akin to Jack Nicholson pretending to smoke his first joint in Easy Rider (1969). Sharon and Robyn hazily realize they have more in common than they thought. That is… until Robyn takes the self-excavation too far and lets slip secrets about a former version of herself whose problems she is now actively fleeing. Sharon—playing against type—is intrigued.
The Roommate is a consistently comedic work, but it’s less like watching a clown fall on a banana peel and more like watching ourselves in the role of that feckless victim: the same slip and fall but a moment of introspection. Could we have been that clumsy or unlucky? The play compels us to ask similar questions of ourselves.
The show’s extraordinary acting and directing support Silverman’s melancholy, introspective subtext. O’Brien in particular has created a flawless Robyn, closed off and well-defended. The pacing established by O’Brien and director Jamie Rea allows the tension within this battered, multifaceted individual to gradually surface. Dartez’s Sharon is more birdlike and superficial, but this too seems appropriate. Midwesterners will recognize themselves.
If you liked Profile Theatre’s “spooky season meets fall of America vibes” staging of Witch in the fall, this is the company’s second production by Silverman this season and the last of its 2025-26 programming. This is specifically what Profile does: Every year, the company takes a deep dive into a single or a sparing number of dramatists, exploring their work in depth. The Roommate is a fitting coda to this span and a perfect connection to the company’s 2026-27 plans, which will open with Silverman’s Spain and culminate in a new commissioned work by another company focus, Mike Lew.
Profile Theatre presents The Roommate at the Ellyn Bye Studio at the Armory, 128 NW 11th, Portland, through June 21. showtimes and tickets at profiletheatre.org, 105 minutes, no intermission, content warning for smoking dope.