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“Right now, I’m really interested in just destroying everything,” Silverman concludes. “I think it’s so fucking useful for us as humans to undergo the practice of thinking we know what something is, and then watching that thing be deconstructed in such a way that we no longer can make the assumptions we were making. I think it’s useful for us to do that in theatre, where it’s safe.”

American Theatre magazine, 2016

A nice, longer form profile of Jen Silverman that talks some about The Roommate, but also quite a bit about her background and point of view as a writer

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Well, practically speaking, I had been thinking for a while of how, when I go to the theatre, I rarely see any roles for women of that age range that are not supporting roles. When I do see older women onstage, or women in their 50s or 60s onstage, those women are generally just there; the play’s actually about younger people but those women are there to, you know, have a couple of jokes or have a couple of jokes made about them. So I really wanted to write a play for badass women in their 50s. I sort of thought that, like, there is a kind of energy, a kind of concentration that happens when they are the two players on that stage and they have all that agency and all that power. Also I find it to be such a difficult thing to write a two-hander. So that was a challenge I wanted to give myself and see what happens.

American Theatre magazine, 2015

More from Jen about her thoughts on The Roommate

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I’d never written a true two-hander before, nor had I ever written a play that masqueraded as American realism (unit set, etc.). I was interested to explore and then subvert that particular set of conventions. For all that, The Roommate isn’t quite what I’d call realism—it exists in a liminal space, where it makes use of the conventions of American realism without staying true to them all the way.

Long Wharf Theatre, 2018

In this interview, Jen talks about her impetus for writing The Roommate and what she thinks it’s about

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Selections from Reviews

These selections are observations about the play that I found interesting from a range of reviews.

You think we're headed along the familiar track of two polarities edging toward a mutually beneficial center when Silverman takes the play in a different direction. Both "Breaking Bad" and “Thelma & Louise" come to mind.

To a point. "The Roommate" never leaves its single setting — no camper-van meth labs in the Iowa brush here, and no Ford Thunderbirds headed for the edge of a cliff. For all the deviance, the play's ambitions remain rooted to the study of its characters. This is a play dedicated to conversation at a kitchen table.

- Chicago Tribune, 2018

Silverman smartly crafts a play about how two people can shape each other and the way identities shift in different stages of life. It’s a play about the labels others assign us and the ones we lock ourselves into. Early in “The Roommate,” Robyn says that “people find specific words for themselves because it’s easier than not having words, but that doesn’t mean that those words are all accurate all the time.”

- Onstage Blog, 2018

In discussing the premise of the show, Silverman said she has seen a significant number of plays, movies and television shows where the female characters were structurally positioned as the central character but weren't exactly driving the narrative. Instead, the women were reactive to whatever the male characters were doing.

She also observed that older actresses were playing roles where they were waiting for their children to come home, sitting around talking to their friends about some man or learning that their husbands were sleeping with younger women.

Younger characters were taken seriously, yet mothers and grandmothers played the dull and old-fashioned roles, she said.

"I wanted material to offer them where they were seen as powerful women and not the problem," Silverman said by phone from New York City. "I really wanted to challenge myself and keep true to these characters, who I wanted seen as strong and were living out dangerous possibilities. What happened were some beautiful surprises."

- LA Times, 2016

The moral of the yarn is straightforward enough: we are in a country where self-transformation has become an end in itself, re-invention a default response to omnipresent banality. American flimflammers don’t just rip us off  — they  infect us with the ’empowering’ disease of the con job.

[S]he wants to get at how the urge for change — when it bypasses hard work for the thrills of instant gratification — goes awry.

- the arts fuse, 2018

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Things Jen Has Said That I Think Are Helpful To The Roommate

Many of these quotes come from Jen Silverman talking about theater in general or other plays of hers specifically, but I find them all to be instructive to thinking about The Roommate, too.

In general, I’m really interested in questions about visibility, and how women are seen and the space they are permitted to take up, and what is required to break those boundaries. I was particularly interested in exploring those kinds of stories on a landscape that is so bleak and isolated and has a special kind of permissiveness. Out there, you can dream yourself into a variety of things that you may have not been permitted to do in a more populated area – so I question, what does that look like? The bleakness is in the isolation and the permission is also in the isolation. [While I wouldn’t call Iowa “bleak”, there’s certainly an implication of isolation in Robyn’s and Sharon’s life.]

-  Interview: Jen Silverman on Female Visibility and Power in Her Gripping New Play “The Moors”

At the end of the day, I think the biggest measure of success IS maintaining your own voice. It’s not writing the play you think someone wants to read. I want to write aggressive, highly-structured, darkly comedic plays, often involving women or queer characters, often exploring various facets of identity and legacy and home-coming and institutional violence.

My plays are usually triggered by characters, and the characters are catalyzed by questions. Questions that haunt me generally point me toward the characters I need to follow. Intellectual curiosity alone isn’t enough – or, god forbid, the feeling that I’ve “figured it out.” And also, I want to see a mode of story-telling that can only really live on a stage. So ideas that feel necessarily and urgently theatrical are the ones I’ll follow down farthest.

- Playwrights Center interview

I find myself drawn to very dark humor. I think the world is most often an unpredictable and heart-breaking place, and the one gift we have been given in all of this – as a species – is the ability to laugh at ourselves. I’m interested in stories about transformation, change, about the kind of courage or desperation it takes to completely reinvent your life.

-  UpClose: Jen Silverman, Women’s Voices Theater Festival

I begin most plays with the characters. Who they are, what they want to become, what they don’t have, what they’re willing to sacrifice. I’m most interested in the question of sacrifice, and I’m most interested when the answer is “nearly everything, for the right price.” What interests me most about the characters in Phoebe is how they live double lives: what they’re doing vs. what they tell themselves about what they’re doing. Who they are vs. who they decide to be.

-  We talk playwriting and the Kilroys with Jen Silverman, author of “Phoebe in Winter”

I had this amazing interaction after a show one time. An older audience member walked right up to me and said, “I don’t like your play.” I asked her what she didn’t like, and we ended up having a fascinating conversation which boiled down to the fact that one of the character's choices made her deeply uncomfortable. This character's values had thrown hers into question in a way that she was a little bit angry about. The more we talked, the less angry she was: “I mean, I liked some of it.” I didn’t know how to articulate to her that she didn’t have to backtrack; the conversation we were having was the value of the experience. In this country, it’s such a big deal whether or not we like something — characters have to be likable, we always have to be having fun. Sometimes I just find all of that completely beside the point. We can get to more fascinating and complex places when we aren’t being held at likability-gunpoint.

I am fascinated by questions of transformation: Can you change who you are by changing your behavior? Your language? Your country? Your relationships? Is it possible to become new, or are we always ourselves, no matter where we go? I’m interested in exploring intimacy from different angles — how do others see us in ways that we can’t see ourselves? How would we like to be seen? How do characters — especially female ones — achieve a certain kind of visibility in their lives or their relationships? And I often think the hardest questions are best asked with a certain amount of dark humor.

- Powell's Q&A: Jen Silverman, Author of 'The Island Dwellers'

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Let’s say you’re an artistic director, who prides yourself on programming new work. You have a “slot” for a female playwright so that your audience can see Woman Things. And you have a “slot” for a playwright of colour, so that your audience can see Ethnic Things. And the other three or four slots in your season are meant to be about universal human stories, and so that is where you put your Chekov, your Arthur Miller, your emerging white male playwright.

“Why are stories by or about queer women ghettoised as 'lesbian' or 'feminist'?”, The Independent, January 31 2018

This very interesting piece, which focuses on Jen’s play, Collective Rage..., explores her thoughts on the exoticising (or ghettoising, as she terms it) of plays about/by women. It feels a little extreme in relation to our show which seems so gently “about women” that it hardly counts, but I think it’s worth thinking about because The Roommate *is* a story about women’s experience and whether or not we come to see it as a universal story definitely says something about the perspective of the average theatregoer.

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In this video Jen talks about her writing process: how she almost always starts with characters when writing a new play (~4:00), and her various other artistic projects (~16:45) - fiction, writing for TV and film, and drawing.