Homer Roberts

Homer Roberts exists mostly in the story Prairie tells about her captivity — a fellow prisoner held alongside her by a man who calls himself their doctor. Warm, watchful, and quietly rebellious, he becomes her closest ally in the room, the one person whose presence makes the unbearable bearable.

Emory Cohen plays him with an unguarded tenderness that cuts against the show's eerie, elliptical tone — every scene between Homer and Prairie feels like oxygen in a sealed space. The writing withholds nearly everything about his life outside that room, so the performance has to carry all the intimacy, and it does.