Early on in Jen Silverman’s novel We Play Ourselves, the narrator ruminates on the nonpareil thrill of being part of the “collective witnessing organism” of a theater audience: “When I’m in a theatre I feel held. I feel simultaneously very safe and like something very dangerous is about to happen, and that dangerous thing is the wall of my chest peeling back—slowly, so slowly, in time with the curtain rising.... It’s the sort of feeling that becomes a constant longing. It’s the sort of longing upon which you build an entire life.”
Silverman, who is in their 30s, is a prolific playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who uses they/them pronouns. They’ve built their entire life around that elusive feeling.Their plays include a Brontë-inspired confection featuring a philosophical mastiff and a doomed governess (The Moors); a riotous play centered on a quintet of characters all named Betty (Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties); a noirish drama about a pair of filmmakers working on a propagandistic movie about the Spanish Civil War (Spain); and The Roommate, Silverman’s Broadway debut. Directed by Jack O’Brien, the two-hander starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone started previews Thursday night at the Booth Theatre. The play follows two women with drastically different personalities who move in together and have to relearn ways of cohabitating after several years on their own.
While Silverman prizes restraint in their work—“how we go up to the edge of something but don’t push over it,” as they put it in a recent video call—in conversation, they are the opposite of reserved, their words spilling forth with ease. They often create works about female and queer characters, but are quick to point out that their work does not begin and end with the question of representation. While it’s possible to examine their work through feminist or queer lenses, they are, above all, interested in “the moral complexities of what it is to be a human in society,” they say. “How is the past constantly influencing the decisions we think we’re making in present tense, and what do we have to do to make different decisions in the future?”
Born to scientist parents—their father is a physicist and their mother trained as a chemist—Silverman had a fairly peripatetic childhood. They have lived in Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, New Zealand, Finland, Toronto, and Germany. In all these places, they found themselves “watching for context clues, observing, trying to figure out the social contract and where [they] fit in.” This fascination with invisible social codes has made them especially attuned to things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
“When I’m in a theatre I feel held. I feel simultaneously very safe and like something very dangerous is about to happen.”
“A lot of what interests me is interrogating the agreements that we make, that the individual makes with society or with other individuals; the ways in which those agreements can define us and can be invisible, and what happens when we start to actually see them,” says Silverman, who studied at Brown University, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard. (They have also been a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.)
The past few months have seen them in Broadway rehearsals for The Roommate, which first premiered in 2015 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, in Louisville, Kentucky.
The play is partly inspired by the true story of when Silverman’s partner’s mother took in a female roommate who abruptly vanished. The reason for that disappearance turned out to be relatively banal—the roommate was not “connected to a crime syndicate or anything,” deadpans Silverman—yet it planted the kernel of an idea for The Roommate.
Fittingly for a play that takes up the theme of re-invention, Silverman has made a few “sculptural” changes to the original script, tweaking diction and calibrating rhythm in some places to better suit the actors’ needs. Robyn, the more overtly outgoing roommate, played by LuPone, tells Sharon (Farrow): “I was born as a malleable, changeable template.” The same proves to be true of both play and playwright.
The Roommate is in previews at the Booth Theatre, in New York, and opens on September 12
Rhoda Feng is a Washington, D.C.–based writer whose criticism has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, the TLS, the New Republic, and The New York Times. She is the winner of the 2022–23 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism
