There's something unruly, rebellious, even wild lurking within the trappings of “The Roommate,” a new Broadway production of a play by Jane Silverman. Just wait for it to reveal itself.
The Roommate has had a long life, premiering in 2015. At times, it seems to show its age. Here, Mia Farrow plays Sharon, an Iowa City resident who takes in Patti LuPone’s Robin, a leather-jacketed agent of chaos who has fled the Bronx for (at least initially) unspecified reasons. Sharon’s house, a place we never leave, is bare and exposed to the sky beyond, with stunning projections of the Iowa landscape behind the wood-frame set. But for Sharon, it feels like a prison; alone in the world, her only lifelines are her friend’s “reading group” (don’t call it a book club), her attempts to learn French via language-learning tapes, and the relentless phone calls to her son, who lives in Brooklyn. Sharon seems oblivious to the fact that her son, her only contact with the post-Iowa world, is gay. “I don't think there's anything wrong with that” is the joke that started the show and caused a stir. (Since when did “Seinfeld” start popularizing that famous line?)
Iowa City, as those who follow the wealth of fantastic fiction that emerges from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop know, is no barren wasteland; the Christina’s World-like field behind Sharon’s house doesn’t look quite real. But Silverman’s screenplay elegantly captures Sharon’s isolation. “Iowa City is a very cultured town,” Farrow tells LuBon, conjuring up a sense of alienation. “I wasn’t really involved.”
In other words, Sharon lets the world pass her by without noticing it; if her jokes and references seem dated, inappropriate or downright unfunny, a generous viewer might forgive the play for showing us a woman lost in time. Robin—at first an adversary after she agrees to an unlikely house-sharing arrangement, then eventually a friend—pushes her back and pushes her back into the flow of life, with all the chaos, fun and pain that can ensue. As the truth emerges that Robin is evading something more than the supposed dangers of the Bronx (again, described in largely comical and somewhat clichéd terms that fit Sharon’s worldview), both performances deepen and expand. Farrow, who in the early scenes seems like a complete naif, discovers the joys of running a con; Le Bon, who seems like a villain, develops a sensitivity and compassion for the lost soul who has made her character a home. It's a stylish acting duo, perhaps not one you'd expect to come from actors so different in temperature.
LePone, after all, is among the most ebullient actors, and she gives Robyn a sense of anxiety, of being stuck in this woman’s Iowa home, of impatience to hear her out. Farrow, at her greatest, is chilly. Together, they balance. LePone may be the biggest star for Broadway audiences (apologies to the producer who wanted to cast Annette Bening in the role). But it’s Farrow’s audience that will love her. When Sharon discovers that Robyn, in a former life, ran a scam—and moved to Iowa to try to get out of it—she’s initially confused. “Are you Nigerians?” she asks, in another wok-wok joke inspired by the scams that originated in the early days of e-mail.
But soon Sharon is rejuvenated and starts doing some little tricks. The audience is probably right to be wary—what preceded it was a series of jokes about two roommates, one tough, the other wild, and we’ve seen almost every cliché. But Farrow, speaking in a strange French accent that she’s been practicing on tapes in private, and making phone calls to her neighbors on behalf of a vaguely defined charity that provides chocolate bread to orphans, is not just the first good joke in a show that’s starving for them—it’s a moment when the show breaks free from the slapstick rhythms to reveal the weirdness that Silverman has to share.
Suddenly, the play picks up a strange rhythm, one that shows Farrow in particular at her best. Suddenly, the exaggerated Iowa backdrops seem like an interesting contrast to the radical reinvention taking place inside Sharon, as Le Bon’s Robin pushes her back into her old ways and then begins to overstep her boundaries. Robin is a seasoned con artist who knows her limits and feels (as Le Bon shows us, with painful brilliance) that she is being pushed beyond them; Sharon doesn’t really see what’s wrong with going as far as they can, not because they need the money but because the thrill of outwitting someone gives her a sense of self.
Directed by Jack O’Brien (a 2024 Tony Lifetime Achievement Award winner), “The Roommate” finds its rhythm as it goes, tapping into a register that, as it plays, seems too good to last. Some production oddities—the swell of music between scene changes, as written by David Yazbek—add a sense of melodrama that doesn’t quite fit what is ultimately a small, gradual story. Others, like the decision for characters to change clothes between settings, fit: A particular piece of clothing on Le Bon, playing a New York City refugee who has kept her wardrobe, thank you very much, made me laugh, as it did against the Iowa sky.
Essentially, The Roommate is a vital Broadway show and a welcome showcase for Le Bon—and especially Varo. The actress’s final scenes in the play, which reveal nothing, are deeply moving, moving from a comedy that was about herself to something quite painful, an examination of a character whose main point is that she has lived her whole life without examining herself. It would be unfair to say that these scenes, at the end of the play, make you forget what happened before, and which jokes didn’t work. Instead, they put her in context: she was playing a person, and now, after all these funny tricks, she is a person.
