Review: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Cohabit in The Roommate on Broadway

It’s terrible to feel discarded — especially by one’s own children. In Jen Silverman’s comedy The Roommate, now at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone play two very different women in similar predicaments.

Sharon (Farrow) is a divorced 65-year-old housewife living in Iowa City. Her son is a fashion designer in Brooklyn whom she only speaks with occasionally, when he bothers to answer her calls. “Everybody thinks he’s a homosexual,” she tells her new roommate, hastening to add, “but he’s not.”

“I’m gay,” says the roommate, Robyn (Patti LuPone), elongating her vowels through a wide, vaguely threatening grin. She’s around Sharon’s age and has recently relocated from the Bronx. She and her daughter once ran a small business (of a sort) together, but they are now estranged. While Robyn is looking for a refuge from her previous life in a murky corner of the economy, Sharon sees in Robyn an opportunity to really start living the way she has always wanted to — dangerously.

It should come as no surprise to Broadway regulars that LuPone excels in the role of the abrasive New York lesbian, complete with leather jacket and horrendous Joan Jett wig (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell). She assaults Farrow with her plosives, a sheathed menace rumbling under the most innocuous lines.

“I made them,” Robyn tells Sharon after she discovers her box of creepy voodoo dolls. “I used to be a pot-her.” It’s easy to see why LuPone is one of the most discussed stage actors of her generation. She supercharges even the simplest business (dialing the telephone, stirring a cup of coffee) with her own distinct dramatic flair, letting us know why Robyn is such a magnetic figure for Sharon.

Farrow plays the little sister to her big-city broad, wide-eyed and full of questions. She seems so fragile with her old lady shuffle and cute little voice. And that perfectly sets up one of the most satisfying character arcs in recent memory as Sharon, the unassuming and thoroughly unadventurous Midwestern mom, transforms into a secret bad girl.

Silverman weaves a heartwarming yarn about an older woman who has been abandoned by the people who should love her most, but who finds a second act in a life of crime. She only needed the slightest encouragement from a person who took the time to understand her. It’s the Lifetime movie no one saw coming.

Jack O’Brien, one of the most seasoned directors on Broadway, understands very well that the art of comedy requires total commitment to the truth of each dramatic beat. Under his steady guidance, The Roommate never veers into broad humor but remains grounded in real human stakes and always seems uncomfortably plausible.

Bob Crowley’s kitchen set is elegantly framed by wooden beams that suggest a much larger house. The idyllic painted backdrop of a red barn provides a clear sense of Sharon’s world, giving Farrow and LuPone something to play against. It’s aesthetically perfect, although practically it leaves something to be desired: When the two women get high, there’s nowhere to lounge except the staircase.

Crowley’s costumes, however, are a home run, a visual manifestation of Sharon’s renaissance as she ditches her plaid shirt and mom jeans for a leopard-print evening dress — a bit on the nose, yes, but she’s got a lot of catching up to do.

The subtle lighting (by Natasha Katz) and understated sound design (by Mikaal Sulaiman) help clarify a script with quite a few one-sided telephone calls. David Yazbek’s jazzy clarinet music (likely inspired by a single throwaway line about playing clarinet as a child) further unlocks Sharon’s interior life as we watch her realize that she’s not dead yet and there are still so many possibilities in the world.

Silverman has some astute and unsettling things to say about the invisibility of older women in our society, and how that could be a superpower in the right (or wrong) hands. The Roommate is not exactly the feel-good comedy of the year, but it will make you laugh and think a little harder about whom you discount in life — at your own peril. It may also make you want to give your mother a call. You never know what kind of trouble she might be getting up to.