Even Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone Can’t Power “The Roommate”

The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at the Booth, is her voice. Farrow is playing a naïve, rather unfulfilled empty nester named Sharon, who lives in a huge house in Iowa and spends her days dreamily phoning a faraway son. Speech tends to drift out of her, as airy and capricious as dandelion fluff. When Sharon is surprised, Farrow squeezes her voice into an adorable whistling squeak. Every time she says “Oh?” in ditzy confusion—if, say, she’s just found her new tenant rolling a joint in the kitchen—it sounds like someone sat on a rubber duck. The central joke in Silverman’s odd-couple bauble, originally from 2015 and directed here by Jack O’Brien, is that Sharon’s new roommate is Patti LuPone. Technically, LuPone, a grande dame of the American musical theatre, is playing Robyn, a mysterious New Yorker who is moving into Sharon’s spare bedroom. (Bob Crowley’s schematic set shows us a modern farmhouse with zero personal touches, lonely in a flat field.) When Robyn swaggers in, carrying various arbitrarily packed boxes of vegetables and black leather coats, she’s meant to be a breath of Bronx air. But LuPone, even in a Joan Jett wig, is not the type of diva who surrenders her own redoubtable persona. Why would she? Her audience laughs anytime she rolls her eyes. The promise of “The Roommate” is that we’ll see a new double act—a Martin and Lewis, say, or a Lansbury and Arthur—in which one partner is a flibbertigibbet and the other is a volcano. But although the play’s scenario certainly sets them up for banter, the dialogue itself is bizarrely unambitious and often illogical. A typical comic beat: Sharon tells Robyn that she has a son living in New York, and asks if she’s heard of Park Slope. “Oh yeah, that’s great,” LuPone drawls, letting her mouth slide into a parallelogram. Even when LuPone is mugging through a non-joke, her vocal finesse gives her lines endless micro-nuances of contempt. For the first half of Silverman’s hundred-minute play, the two actors (friends in real […]

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