The last time many theatergoers saw Mia Farrow onstage in New York, in 2005, she was in a coma, re-creating a lifetime of memories in James Lapine’s flashback-filled Fran’s Bed at Playwrights Horizons.
In Jen Silverman’s dark comedy The Roommate, just opened at the Booth Theatre, Farrow looks much livelier. She’s bright and bubbly as the overly chatty Sharon, who’s renting out her sprawling Iowa City home to the enigmatic Robyn (three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, a terrific foil for Farrow), a vegan lesbian slam poet, gardener, and former potter. As she explains, “being a potter can be very stressful.”
After learning that Robyn drove in from The Bronx (“Isn’t the Bronx…dangerous?” Sharon asks, eyes widening), Sharon brings up her clothing designer son, who lives in Park Slope: “Everybody thinks he’s a homosexual, but he’s not.” She keeps talking. “Some of my son’s friends are homosexual people. Probably most of them.” And keeps talking…eventually confessing: “I kissed a girl once in college.” Consider that Silverman’s version of the proverbial Chekhovian gun.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Robyn is cagey about her past—and even her present (“I grow things,” she says obliquely)—but the sudden arrival of this mullet-wearing, moto jacket–clad woman in the middle of corn country begs the question: Why? “I imagined wide open skies, I think and rising at dawn… A sort of…restorative manual labor,” she muses. That only makes Sharon more intrigued about her new roomie, and some strategic snooping eventually yields a few clues…which we won’t reveal here. Let’s just call Robyn’s past checkered.
Unexpectedly, Sharon is far from judgmental, even about the pot plants lining her windowsill—which, of course, she doesn’t recognize (“I thought they were just…weird…plants”). But please don’t call them drugs; they’re “medicinal herbs,” explains Robyn. “Herbs only become drugs when a capitalist economy gets involved.”
If this were a Hollywood movie, Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda would smoke a joint and bounce around the kitchen while singing Motown songs into their hairbrushes. But Silverman—whose plays also include the historical satire Spain, the Brontë riff The Moors, and the Shakespeare-inspired feminist rant Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties—is smarter than that; they smoke, play some music, do a bit of dancing, and begin a tentative friendship.
A play centered on two mature women in an age group that’s often ignored and rarely explored—in the script, the characters are listed as 50s–70s—could be considered a risk, but since its world premiere in 2015 at the Humana Festival, The Roommate has been produced all over the country, including at the Steppenwolf Theatre Co. and Williamstown Theatre Festival. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s just 100 minutes, requires only one set, and offers two meaty roles. Silverman touches on a too-rarely discussed issue: What happens to women when the kids grow up and move away, and when husbands and partners are out of the picture? Selling a house means losing memories; but finding a roommate or roommates—sharing expenses—means keeping your life in place, while also forging new friendships. (Okay, The Golden Girls tackled this in the mid-’80s to early ’90s, but beyond that, it’s not a popular topic on stage or screen.)
There are a couple twists—one involves a rather questionable Walmart purchase—that push The Roommate from realistic into far-fetched territory. One, unfortunately, is the ending. Again, no spoilers, but it’s a moment for Sharon that should be brimming with possibility, not hampered by implausibility.
The Roommate opened Sept. 12, 2024, at the Booth Theatre. Tickets and information: theroommatebway.com
