There’s something loose, rebellious, and even wild hiding within the trappings of “The Roommate,” a new Broadway production of a play written by Jen Silverman. One just has to wait for it to reveal itself.
“The Roommate” has had a long life, beginning with its first performance in 2015. And, in moments, its age seems to show. Here, Mia Farrow plays Sharon, an Iowa City resident who takes in Patti LuPone’s Robyn, a leather-jacketed agent of chaos fleeing the Bronx for unspecified (at least at first) reasons. Sharon’s house, a set we never leave, is bare and exposed to the sky beyond, with striking projections of an Iowan landscape behind the wood-frame set. But it feels to Sharon like a prison; alone in the world, her only lifelines are a friend’s “reading group” (don’t call it a book club), her attempts to pick up French via language-learning tapes, and relentless phone calls to her son, living in Brooklyn. Sharon seems to be blocking out the truth that her son, her one connection to a world beyond Iowa, is gay; a “not that there’s anything wrong with that” punchline in the play’s early going lands with a thud. (How long ago did “Seinfeld” popularize that catchphrase?)
Iowa City, as those who follow the mass quantities of high-flying fiction that emerge from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop know, is not exactly a barren wasteland; the “Christina’s World” field beyond Sharon’s home doesn’t quite ring true. But Silverman’s script explains Sharon’s isolation elegantly. “Iowa City is very cultured,” Farrow declares to LuPone, conjuring saucer-eyed alienation. “I haven’t really been involved.”
Sharon has, in other words, been letting the world around her pass her by; if her jokes and her references seem dated or ungainly or just not that funny, well, maybe a generous-minded viewer will forgive the play for showing us a woman lost to time. And Robyn — at first an adversary after agreeing to an unlikely home-share arrangement, then, eventually, a friend — pushes her back into the slipstream of life, with all the chaos, fun, and eventual heartache that implies. As it emerges that Robyn is dodging something more than the putative dangers of the Bronx (again, described at first in broadly comic and somewhat hackneyed terms fitting Sharon’s own worldview), both performances deepen and broaden. Farrow, presenting in the early scenes as an utter naif, discovers the pleasures of running cons; LuPone, who shows up a hellion, develops a sensitivity and nurturing spirit to the lost soul who’s provided her character a home. It’s an elegant acting duet, one that might not have been expected from two actors who run so different in temperature.
LuPone, after all, is among the most fiery of performers, and she gives her Robyn a restlessness, an annoyance to be stuck in this woman’s house in Iowa and an impatience to hear her out. Farrow, in her greatest work on film, runs cool to the touch. Together, they modulate. LuPone will be the bigger star, perhaps, to a Broadway audience (with apologies to the producer who wanted to cast Annette Bening in the role). But it’s Farrow audiences will swoon for. Discovering that Robyn, in a previous life, ran scams — and has moved to Iowa to try to go clean — Sharon is at first confused. “Are you the Nigerians?,” she asks, in another wocka-wocka joke playing off of scam messages that originated in the early days of email.
But soon enough, Sharon is invigorated to run a few small-bore scams of her own. The audience might be right to be wary — what’s preceded has been a series of Odd Couple jokes about two roommates, one straitlaced and one wild, and we’ve followed just about every cliché. But Farrow’s putting on a loopy French accent, one she’s been practicing with her tapes in private, and placing calls to her neighbors on behalf of a hazily defined charitable group that provides orphans with pain au chocolat isn’t just the first good joke in a show that’s been starving for them — it’s a moment the show breaks free of its sitcom rhythms to reveal the strangeness Silverman has to share.
And suddenly, the play develops a loping and odd rhythm, one that shows Farrow in particular to best advantage. Suddenly, the a-bit-too-much Iowa backdrops feel like intriguing counterpoint to the radical reinvention happening within Sharon, as she pushes LuPone’s Robyn into her old ways, and then begins to push too far. Robyn is a hardened grifter who knows her limits, and (as LuPone shows us, with a painful subtlety) feels herself being pushed past them; Sharon doesn’t really see what’s wrong with going as far as they possibly can, not because they need money, but because the thrill of getting one over on someone provides her a sense of herself.
Directed by Jack O’Brien (a 2024 recipient of a Tony for Lifetime Achievement), “The Roommate” finds its pace as it goes, clicking into a register that, as it plays out, seems too good to last. Certain oddities of the production — the swelling music between scene changes, as written by David Yazbek — add a sense of melodrama that doesn’t quite fit what is ultimately a small and incremental story. And others, like the decision to have the characters change clothes between set-ups, do: One particular garment on LuPone, playing the New York City refugee who has kept her wardrobe, thank you very much, made me crack up, set as it was against the Iowa sky.
In the main, “The Roommate” is a spirited entry on Broadway and a welcome showcase for LuPone and — in particular — Farrow. That actress’s last scenes in the play, giving nothing away, are utterly haunting, having moved beyond been-there-done-that comedy to something outright wrenching, an examination of a character whose whole point is that she’d gone through her whole life not examining herself. It wouldn’t be right to say that these scenes, at the play’s end, make you forget what came before, the jokes that didn’t land. Instead, they put them into context: She’d been playing at being a person, and now, so many hilarious scams later, she’s become one.
