“The Roommate,” a 2015 play for two actresses written by Jen Silverman, is often described as a dark comedy but the top-notch production on stage through March 19 at the Trinity Repertory Company Lederer Theater Center in downtown Providence mines its deeper notes as a bracing character study.

Directed by Trinity’s outgoing Artistic Director Curt Columbus as he concludes 20 years in that role, the production delivers the abundant humor in Silverman’s sharp-edged narrative while heightening the play’s redemptive moments of mercy and mystery.

Performed on Broadway in 2024 by Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, its characters are two women in their mid-50s. Sharon is a newly divorced empty-nester who needs a roommate to share her house on the outskirts of Iowa City. Her new roommate, Robyn, is a sophisticated urbanite who seeks a place to hide and start over.

In Trinity Rep’s production, resident company member Jackie Davis as Robyn and guest artist Kortney Adams as Sharon endow their characters with irresistible chemistry and presence throughout the play’s 11 scenes, which unfold without interruption over an hour and 40 minutes.

Trinity Rep stages the play in its smallest venue, the 250-seat Dowling Theater. The audience sits a semicircle around the stage, where scenic designer Edward T. Morris and Lovanni Gomez, lighting designer, have created a prim, well-appointed kitchen furnished with a round wood table, chairs, a counter-side stool and a window curtained in white organza. A backdrop of a blue sky with clouds suggests the wide Iowan landscape, and on each side of the stage, tiny drawings of houses evoke a neighborhood. Below the kitchen, a row of boxes holds the belongings of Robyn.

The edge of stage stands in for a porch where Robyn occasionally retreats to smoke a joint — until non-smoker Sharon gives one a try and Robyn’s “medicinal herb” becomes a kitchen staple.

The staging visualizes both matter-of-fact reality and inner emotional experience. Kitchen walls, at first pale green, become deep blue in the course of the play.

Lighting by Gomez also becomes, in one scene, apparitional, as does the costuming designed by William Andrew Young, whose outfits also convey Robyn’s earthy, urbane style as well as Sharon’s evolving sense of herself.

Sound designer Peter Sasha Hurowitz injects R&B-inflected music into scene changes, keeping the mood light despite the rising tension between episodes.

Absorbing to watch as their chemistry develops along with unsettling surprises, the two actors embody their characters with warmth and wit. Davis’ wryly humorous Robyn can express herself with a slight shift in tone of voice or through a subtle flicker in her face. Adams is agile as Sharon, who is often in high-test mode whether from anxiety or zeal, yet in rare moments of self-awareness becomes quiet as she unexpectedly hears herself spontaneously state a simple truth.

The play opens and concludes with Sharon on stage alone. In the first scene, she is in the kitchen anticipating her first meeting with Robyn. Adams exudes her character’s anxiety, her eyes fixed wide open and her movements as stiff as those of a wind-up doll. In contrast, Robyn, as performed by the ever-convincing Davis, is a cool character. Yet she shows Robyn’s alarm when, newly arrived from the Bronx, she learns of the frequent tornadoes in Iowa, where she has come “for some peace and quiet.”

When Robyn, self-possessed to a fault, learns that Sharon does not usually lock the door, she says, “I feel better with things. Locked.”

When Robyn has something to say, her lines resonate with double meanings. When asked by Sharon about becoming a poet, one of Robyn’s more benign previous pursuits, Robyn says that she told herself, “It’ll probably be bad, all first poems are bad poems. There’s a great liberty in being bad.”

Observing that they are both mothers of successful adults who seldom contact them, Robyn says, “Our kids don’t have to like us, they just have to survive long enough to become us.”

Leaving a lengthy phone message on her son’s answering machine, Sharon says of Robyn, “She’s an interesting person. She knows things. She does things. Everybody always told me not to do things.”

While Robyn is out at the local farmers’ market shopping for her vegan diet, Sharon rummages through Robyn’s boxes and finds much that stirs her curiosity and at times, her astonishment.

Hungry for a new life, Sharon soon goes from tasting Robyn’s almond milk and trying Robyn’s “medicinal herbs” to pressing Robyn to help her satisfy her increasingly intense appetite for a world—and a self—beyond what she has known. Her craving draws each of them into uncharted terrain.

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