The Roommate by Jen Silverman. Directed by Jack O'Brien. Design by David Zinn. Lighting design by Natasha Katz. Sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman. Original music by David Yazbek. Hair, wig, and makeup design by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell. Movement director Simone Sault.
Cast: Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone.
Theater: The Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street (Between Broadway and 8th Avenue)
Tickets: Telecharge.com

Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Like Love Letters, The Roommate is a two-character play. It relates with an "odd couple" sensibility the coming together of two women of vastly different backgrounds, temperaments, and life experiences. Farrow's co-star is someone with considerably more Broadway credits, three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, who famously announced her retirement from Broadway on more than one occasion and who two years ago gave up her Equity card, declaring she was "no longer part of that circus." (Never mind!).

Setting aside the backstage and offstage drama that has enveloped both actresses' public and private lives, The Roommate gives these two big names, who are friends in real life, the opportunity to work together when they are both pushing the envelope rather beyond the "late middle age" of their characters.

Farrow plays Sharon, a woman who is living alone in a too-big-for-her house in Iowa after her marriage has dissolved. She is, as they say, at sixes and sevens, with precious little to do to fill her time beyond her book club and a part time job. She makes frequent phone calls to her son in New York, but he often doesn't pick up. In brief, Sharon is stuck in that anxious borderland between middle age and death.

Farrow embodies the role to perfection, using her own time-honored skills in portraying women who are vulnerable, ethereal, intelligent, introspective, and offbeat, yet with surprising touches of inner strength. You don't see the hard work she has put into making this role her own (The Roommate has had numerous other productions around the country in the past ten years), but what we do see is the entirety of the character on seamless display.

Then there is Sharon's polar opposite: Robyn (LuPone), her new boarder (i.e. the "roommate" of the title), who shows up and moves in with boxes of personal gear and oddments in tow. Robyn, who dresses in attire that makes her look like an aging biker chick, checks off all the anti-Sharon boxes. She is a cigarette-and-pot-smoking vegan lesbian slam-poetry writer from the Bronx. LuPone plays the role in a somewhat subdued version of what we have come to expect from her: loud, snarky, stereotypically New York-y. Problematically, and even though these characteristics fit her role, LuPone plays it all at the surface level. In truth, Robyn is less well defined than is Sharon, but there is little of the deep exploration we see in Farrow's acting partner, and, consequently, the balance is off.

The play is not greatly assisted by its increasingly implausible plot turns, which reshape a somewhat realistic situation (i.e. once you get past the unlikely pairing) into an oddball version of Thelma & Louise, though with a more hopeful, albeit ambiguous ending that places both characters in a possibly different light altogether. There are scattered laugh lines, some of them quite funny, but this is not a laugh-out-loud comedy. Neither does it resemble one of those British charmer movies filled with lovable eccentric personalities. Maybe something in between. David Yazbek has contributed original between-scenes music, but it largely underlines the episodic nature of the enterprise. In brief, there is not a lot of substance to what amounts to a 100-minute character study, in which LuPone and director Jack O'Brien step to the side and let Farrow carry the heavy load, which she manages to do with great aplomb.