What I liked
Aspid (Sam Sheeks) and Thyma (Kelley Pierre) make up the bulk of this play. Even the situation depends entirely on whether their lives feel genuine and they themselves make us care. This is a challenge they and director Scott Golden meet.
What I didn't like
What I must note, however, is that the play is too short. At about fifty minutes, it (by necessity) ends up zooming through their emotional lives and processes. It robbed the show of some power because while we get to know and like the two characters, we don’t know them very well and have not had time to really invest in them.
My overall impression
I’ve been telling friends that The Same Room is “No Exit but with a happy ending.” This usually inspires a laugh and the question “So heaven is other people?” Well, yes. So is hell. Plus the full range of everything in between. Two young women literally end up thrown (by who? or what?) into a room. We and they pretty soon realize they are dead, outside of time and space as we understand it. Nobody knows what happens next, but they must somehow handle it. In this work, the two are anything but strangers—thus both hell and heaven. Adding to to the tension is the nice touch that the lights above the locked doors where they entered change based on what they do or (maybe) feel. Might they escape when the lights turn green instead of red? Maybe.
