Where are Oscar and Felix when you really need them? Jen Silverman’s sit-com (and, briefly, rom-com), The Roommate, opened Wednesday night at 1812 Productions; it is both unfunny and uninteresting. It’s Breaking Bad without the cancer, dealing drugs just for the fun of it.
The set up is this: Sharon (Jen Childs) lives alone in Iowa, her husband having “retired” from their marriage and her adult son having retired to adult life in Brooklyn. Robyn (Grace Gonglewski, looking terrific) arrives as her roommate. After the tornado jokes, the vegan jokes, the lesbian jokes and the flyover jokes, the play goes on to endorse phone-scamming people—even friends— out of their credit cards, peddling pot brownies to twelve-year-olds, stealing watches, and buying guns because they feel so good in your hand. The theme seems to lie in the repeated line, “There is great liberty in being bad.” To find all this hilarious in the contemporary world is to require an audience so naive—and immoral—as to be more shocking than the show.
Mercifully, it’s short, like this review, which is also merciful (believe me).
[1812 Productions at Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place] September 26–October 20, 2019; 1812productions.org
The play does not espouse the idea that “being bad is good” because Robyn is really put off by Sharon’s transformation. Instead of finding a safe place to make a different kind of life, Robyn knows she can’t stay here now. True, the play itself does not know how to effectively accomplish this shift, but it does give you a glimpse of what they might have had together if they weren’t both fleeing the “mistakes” of the past.