Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone make for an interesting and really welcome stage duo in Broadway‘s new comedy-drama The Roommate, a pairing that’s promoting out the Sales space Theatre in an engagement opening tonight.
Sadly, their third costar – a beige landline phone that will get an implausibly massive position for a play set within the present day – is required to tug extra weight than it or the story can deal with.
First produced in 2015 at a Louisville regional theater, Jen Silverman’s play exhibits its age with that wall telephone – the superfluous presence of an iPhone suggests possibly there’s been some tinkering over time, and, if that’s the case, not sufficient – whereas different particulars (jitters over sexuality, naiveté about pot, jokes about “Nigerian prince” telephone scams) might need appeared dated even 9 years in the past.
And people aren’t the one flaws on this awkwardly paced, abruptly mood-shifting story of two very completely different girls on the verge of previous age seeking to outrun their pasts and stake new claims on the longer term. Not even the ever-reliable director Jack O’Brien can get a agency grasp on this squiggly story, however at the very least he doesn’t have to take the time alone: Who wouldn’t need Farrow and LuPone on their staff?
As this odd play’s odd couple, Farrow and LuPone painting, respectively, Sharon, a not too long ago divorced 65-year-old Iowa housewife, and Robyn, a sunglassed, leather-jacketed lesbian from the Bronx who has, for causes we’ll be taught quickly sufficient, made the unlikely resolution to pack some bins and relocate her life to a not-so-little-house on the prairie.
We’re by no means fairly certain precisely how these two strangers discovered each other, however we, like them, are quickly glad they did. Farrow’s Sharon, in her mother denims, flannel shirts and braided pigtails, is smothered by loneliness and tedium – even earlier than her husband walked out, she’d been all however deserted by her grownup son who a while in the past set out for a New York Metropolis profession in girls’s vogue (all proof on the contrary, he’s not homosexual, mother insists).
Sharon’s isolation is obvious in her chatterbox enthusiasm on the prospect of a brand new pal, whereas LuPone’s Robyn is all thriller and dodgy solutions. She’s very protecting of her shifting bins, smokes the odd joint (an exercise that The Roommate treats with a level of pearl-clutching not seen in years, even, one suspects, in Iowa). Robyn’s jittery defensiveness about her previous ideas us off that she’s on the run from one thing sinister, and audiences will get the gist lengthy earlier than Sharon finds a trove of pretend drivers licenses in a kind of bins.
As is de rigueur in these opposites appeal to pairings, every girl will come to understand the opposite whereas discovering her personal very related otherness lurking beneath rigorously constructed facades. The Roommate largely avoids the character-as-talking-life-lesson entice, although not all the time.
For LuPone’s tough-talking Robyn, her journey means studying to be extra emotionally accessible, to cease wanting over her shoulder at imagined pursuers (however are they imagined?). For Sharon, it means opening herself as much as danger, to some chance-taking, some pot-smoking, some Patti Smith music and even a little bit of petty larceny, drug pushing to highschool children and conning previous people out of life financial savings.
Yeah, that was quick.
If The Roommate would have us consider that this Grace & Frankie may turn into Bonnie & Clyde within the blink of a watch, it at the very least does so with sufficient good humor and straightforward attraction to maintain our eye-rolling in relative verify.
Or at the very least more often than not. Silverman too usually can’t appear to get the main points proper. It’s one factor to current Farrow’s Sharon as considered one of life’s perpetual wallflowers, at the very least till Robyn arrives, however would a 65-year-old girl who went to varsity presumably within the late Nineteen Seventies-early ’80s even have just one CD for her previous boombox, and would that one CD actually be the Singing Nun’s 1963 hit “Dominique?” And would a hip pot-smoking (and worse) New Yorker in 2024 nonetheless contemplate Patti Smith’s 1979 tune “Dancing Barefoot” to be “new music?”
LuPone and Farrow as unlikely roommates
Matthew Murphy
If the play’s moods have been constant – if Silverman had leaned extra confidently into darkish absurdism, say, or, settled extra comfortably into Neil Simon formulaic sentiment – particulars about landlines and music eras wouldn’t stick out a lot, however she doesn’t and they also do.
Fortuitously, The Roommate has Farrow and LuPone to lean into, they usually’re attraction shouldn’t be small. LuPone is city angst and wiseguy humor personified, whereas Farrow, handed the majority of the play’s jokes, is at her quirky finest, all jitters and tics and a neediness that’s as credible to us as it’s annoying to her unseen, far-off son (unseen, by the best way, however not unheard: because of that landline’s very loud voicemail, we’re handled to a vocal cameo that can be instantly recognizable to anybody who is aware of Farrow’s household life or has paid consideration to the profession of a selected journalist).
The truth is, the pleasant Farrow is so completely invested in her characterization that she virtually manages to tug off an ending that’s so slap-in-the-face unbelievable, so bizarrely amoral that it careens from the stroll on the wild aspect to a breaking unhealthy journey to bountiful. Possibly The Roommate is telling us to watch out for the teachings we take from strangers, or possibly it simply decides on a straightforward goodbye jolt. Or possibly The Roommate doesn’t actually care a lot in regards to the distinction.
Title: The Roommate
Venue: Broadway’s Sales space Theatre
Written By: Jen Silverman
Directed By: Jack O’Brien
Forged: Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone
Working time: 1 hr 40 min (no intermission)
