Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone make for an appealing and very welcome stage duo in Broadway’s new comedy-drama The Roommate , a pairing that’s selling out the Booth Theatre in an engagement opening tonight.
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Unfortunately, their third costar – a beige landline telephone that gets an implausibly large role for a play set in the current day – is required to pull more weight than it or the story can handle.
First produced in 2015 at a Louisville regional theater, Jen Silverman’s play shows its age with that wall phone – the superfluous presence of an iPhone suggests maybe there’s been some tinkering over the years, and, if so, not enough – while other details (jitters over sexuality, naiveté about pot, jokes about “Nigerian prince” phone scams) might have seemed dated even nine years ago.
And those aren’t the only flaws in this awkwardly paced, abruptly mood-shifting tale of two very different women on the verge of old age looking to outrun their pasts and stake new claims on the future. Not even the ever-reliable director Jack O’Brien can get a firm grasp on this squiggly story, but at least he doesn’t have to make the effort alone: Who wouldn’t want Farrow and LuPone on their team?
As this odd play’s odd couple, Farrow and LuPone portray, respectively, Sharon, a recently divorced 65-year-old Iowa housewife, and Robyn, a sunglassed, leather-jacketed lesbian from the Bronx who has, for reasons we’ll learn soon enough, made the unlikely decision to pack some boxes and relocate her life to a not-so-little-house on the prairie.
We’re never quite sure exactly how these two strangers found one another, but we, like them, are soon glad they did. Farrow’s Sharon, in her mom jeans, flannel shirts and braided pigtails, is smothered by loneliness and boredom – even before her husband walked out, she’d been all but abandoned by her adult son who some time ago set out for a New York City career in women’s fashion (all evidence to the contrary, he’s not gay, mom insists).
Sharon’s isolation is evident in her chatterbox enthusiasm at the prospect of a new pal, while LuPone’s Robyn is all mystery and dodgy answers. She’s very protective of her moving boxes, smokes the odd joint (an activity that The Roommate treats with a degree of pearl-clutching not seen in years, even, one suspects, in Iowa). Robyn’s jittery defensiveness about her past tips us off that she’s on the run from something sinister, and audiences will get the gist long before Sharon finds a trove of fake drivers licenses in one of those boxes.
As is de rigueur in these opposites attract pairings, each woman will come to appreciate the other while discovering her own very similar otherness lurking beneath carefully constructed facades. The Roommate mostly avoids the character-as-talking-life-lesson trap, though not always.
For LuPone’s tough-talking Robyn, her journey means learning to be more emotionally available, to stop looking over her shoulder at imagined pursuers (but are they imagined?). For Sharon, it means opening herself up to risk, to some chance-taking, some pot-smoking, some Patti Smith music and even a bit of petty larceny, drug pushing to school kids and conning old folks out of life savings.
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Yeah, that was fast.
If The Roommate would have us believe that this Grace & Frankie could become Bonnie & Clyde in the blink of an eye, it at least does so with enough good humor and easy charm to keep our eye-rolling in relative check.
Or at least most of the time. Silverman too often can’t seem to get the details right. It’s one thing to present Farrow’s Sharon as one of life’s perpetual wallflowers, at least until Robyn arrives, but would a 65-year-old woman who went to college presumably in the late 1970s-early ’80s actually have only one CD for her old boombox, and would that one CD really be the Singing Nun’s 1963 hit “Dominique?” And would a hip pot-smoking (and worse) New Yorker in 2024 still consider Patti Smith’s 1979 song “Dancing Barefoot” to be “new music?”
If the play’s moods were consistent – if Silverman had leaned more confidently into dark absurdism, say, or, settled more comfortably into Neil Simon formulaic sentiment – details about landlines and music eras wouldn’t stick out so much.
Fortunately, The Roommate has Farrow and LuPone to lean into, and their appeal is not small. LuPone is urban angst and wiseguy humor personified, while Farrow, handed the bulk of the play’s jokes, is at her quirky best, all jitters and tics and a neediness that’s as credible to us as it is annoying to her unseen, far-off son (unseen, by the way, but not unheard: thanks to that landline’s very loud voicemail, we’re treated to a vocal cameo that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who knows Farrow’s family life or has paid attention to the career of a particular journalist).
In fact, the delightful Farrow is so thoroughly invested in her characterization that she almost manages to pull off an ending that’s so slap-in-the-face unbelievable, so bizarrely amoral that it careens from the walk on the wild side to a breaking bad trip to bountiful. Maybe The Roommate is telling us to beware of the lessons we take from strangers, or maybe it just decides on an easy goodbye jolt. Or maybe The Roommate doesn’t really care much about the difference.
Title: The Roommate
Venue: Broadway’s Booth Theatre
Written By: Jen Silverman
Directed By: Jack O’Brien
Cast: Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone
Running time: 1 hr 40 min (no intermission)
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