“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, parroting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robyn.
A ditsy 65-year-old divorcée, Sharon is a convert to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which options for growth seemed few.
But Robyn, who encouraged the experimentation from the minute she arrived to rent a room in Sharon’s Iowa City home, is alarmed by the change from meek to monster. A plate of pot brownies for the book club ladies is one thing; larceny is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” she warns, “are two different activities.”
Because Robyn is played by the surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not especially amusing in itself, gets a big laugh. And because Sharon is played by the preternaturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither evokes a sigh.
Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth.
But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.
Rather, under Jack O’Brien’s direction, it often feels like a 1970s throwback. Before the play proper, to get his stars’ entrance applause out of the way, he has them walk onstage like the hosts of a variety hour, with their names projected behind them as if there were some possibility of confusion. On an overlarge yet underwhelming set by Bob Crowley — Sharon’s kitchen is the size of a hangar and about as interesting — he shapes scenes as discrete sketches, with jaunty bumpers (music by David Yazbek) during longish blackouts (lighting by Natasha Katz) that squander any dramatic juice stirred up in between.
Those scenes detail the way the women warm to each other and begin to swap personality traits. Sharon samples Robyn’s almond milk and soon her disdain for conventionality; Robyn, at first secretive, begins to open up in response to Sharon’s guilelessness. They bond over being bad mothers to children who, now adults, keep their distance. (There are way too many answering machine monologues, one voiced by Farrow’s son Ronan.) And when Robyn eventually reveals her history as a scam artist, let alone a lesbian, Sharon becomes obsessed.
Though LuPone and Farrow remain compelling throughout, they are not done any favors by O’Brien’s heavy underlining. Sharon’s naïveté (she wonders whether Robyn, a vegan, can eat carrots) is pushed toward dopiness at the start; her disappointment toward pathos at the end. (But Farrow does pathos exceedingly well.) LuPone’s Robyn has the opposite trajectory, arriving in full dudgeon (and we know how well LuPone does dudgeon) yet departing with an unlikely lesson in her heart.
The overemphasis feels emblematic of the production’s waffling about its raw material. Is “The Roommate” a pungent analysis of the traps of self-definition? (“People find specific words for themselves because it’s easier than not having words,” Robyn says. “But it doesn’t mean those words are all accurate.”) Is it a comedy of manners like those that tired businessmen supposedly enjoyed in the Neil Simon era? (Pot and lesbian jokes now seem dated.) Is it a juicy vehicle for older women, who seldom get them anymore?
Judging from Silverman’s previous work — including “Collective Rage” (great) and “Spain” (less so) — I think it’s probably all of the above. But because such plays use genre strategically, often undermining it, they work better when they are not played too broadly; broadness leaves the story and the characters too far out on a limb to get back to the middle where the real conflict is.
In sticking closer to the play’s natural contours, the more modest (and noncommercial) production of “The Roommate” I saw in 2017 at the Williamstown Theater Festival, starring S. Epatha Merkerson and Jane Kaczmarek, felt more coherent than the current one. Merkerson, with the subtle, naturalistic detail she’d honed on television, made Sharon’s transformation almost credible, neither idiotic at the start nor a mastermind at the end. Kaczmarek’s reverse trajectory as Robyn was likewise beautifully graduated.
But LuPone and Farrow are stars of a different magnitude. We do want to see them way out on limbs. They thrive in the danger, and the danger is exciting. The problem is that this version of “The Roommate,” working backward from that fact, delivers a pair of very satisfying performances that cancels out the play. You’ll remember LuPone’s sneers and Farrow’s tears — not what caused them.
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