When Robyn (Patti LuPone) first appears at Sharon’s (Mia Farrow) Iowa house in Broadway play The Roommate (Booth Theatre, to Dec. 15), she seems nervous, looking over her shoulder, as if someone or something is in her tail. What is she so wary of? Or is she casing the joint? Whatever, her coiled demeanor is compelling—initially at least.
Jen Silverman’s play, directed by Jack O’Brien, toys with audience expectations, especially with the anticipated delight of two such major stars playing opposite one another. Robyn, all in black and from the Bronx, is initially what you might expect—tough-talking, no-BS, and very over being in Iowa, at Sharon’s light, airy house (stage design is by Bob Crowley). In contrast, Sharon is dressed slightly eccentric boho; on first sight they are a study in hard and soft contrasts—and one assumes the comedy or drama that will unfold will be a culture clash, that they will be just another Odd Couple.
Both women are at junctions, with children who are unseen but significant presences. Sharon doesn’t know what a goya is (“It’s a vegetable. A bitter gourd”), on discovering Robyn is gay she says the clunking, “I don’t have any problem with homosexuals.” The play is oddly fixated on sexuality, but without anything fresh to say about it. Robyn’s lesbianism is a convenient plot device for the oldest trope in the book—when straight woman Sharon decides to take a brief, totally predictable trip to Gay-ville.
The play turns itself on its head, with Robyn trying to reform herself (and gain the respect and trust of her daughter back) after a secret life of scamming, and Sharon, bored of her dutiful world of long-lost motherhood and book clubs, seeing in Robyn the key to a new life of criminality. By the end Walter White might blanche at just how focused she is on embracing her dark side.
The undemanding comedy and drama of the play is in watching its pivot points shift, for one character at least. Sharon is shocked she’s 65 and needing a roommate, although while she sees herself as old Robyn does not; Sharon doesn’t like smoking, while Robyn is very much on her last final ever, honest (she sells this as “re-quitting”)!
The play resists us knowing its characters too easily or intimately—when Sharon puzzles over Robyn being married to a man and a lesbian, Robyn notes how “people find specific words for themselves because it’s easier than not having words. You know? But it doesn’t mean those words are all accurate all the time.”
“I was born as a malleable, changeable template,” Robyn says, and the loosening of strictures she represents leads first to Sharon smoking pot. Then, after she discovers evidence of Robyn’s life of scamming, Sharon—instead of fear or judgment—is thrillingly inspired to do the same. Sharon suddenly wants lessons in how to gull unsuspecting people over the phone. But Robyn has come to Iowa to go straight, to try and become the non-crim mom her daughter would rather she was—even if, proudly, she recalls once doing “a little bit of auto-theft” on the side. But it’s a lot of work, high risk.”
Sharon’s phone scam technique is initially as hippy-dippy as she is: “A bullet is a bullet, and your head is your head and if two seconds separate those things well those two seconds saved your life. So. How would you like to pay less for your cable?”
Robyn saves Sharon—the latter talks about the joy of finding someone through whom “you find yourself to be…suddenly…alive. Think about how one person can change an entire lifetime of coldness and objects and silence.”
When Robyn ponders that her mother must have been a bitch, Sharon quickly, and hilariously responds, “I don’t feel comfortable saying that myself, but I really appreciate that you said it.”
This is not a warm, cuddly friendship. The two are differently wary, differently oddballs, differently affected by past hurts. It is Sharon we watch growing and changing most fully—and so it is Farrow’s spry comedy that most compels. Robyn, in contrast, is a foil—and while Sharon grows under her tutelage, Robyn shrinks, and is forgotten by the play itself. We never get a full sense of her as the mother desperate to make things right, or the person trying to turn their life around.
We come to know what Sharon is running from and to; as a character, Robyn evaporates in front of us. She is a key—a mechanism—rather than a character. This means LuPone is weirdly underused, so we lap up every one of her side-eyes, and caustic asides.
Soon, Sharon’s dark side is in full bloom, embracing pot brownies (and extending the market to schoolkids), gun ownership, and drugs. She tells Robyn: “I’m not a kid. You aren’t raising me. Somebody already raised me, and they did a shitty job and then I raised somebody and I did a shitty job and you, generally, all you’ve done is be a really, really great roommate.”
“There’s a great liberty in being bad,” Sharon concludes—and Farrow makes a waspish, occasionally very funny case for that. But this one note—the genteel lady who becomes calculating hardass—comes close to being overplayed. It’s too bad LuPone’s Robyn is a just a dramatic device to free Farrow’s inner devil—a fuller account of Robyn trying to make good as Sharon turns ever more bad would make The Roommate a better, more intriguing play.
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