The evening of Nov. 14, 1999, was an historic night on Broadway. Uta Hagen led a benefit performance of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia?”, playing the explosive Martha, a role that she created in 1962. I remember Hagen delivering a great performance that night, but equally memorable was what Mia Farrow achieved on stage. With a script in hand, she was by far the best Honey I have ever seen. This gifted actor returned to Broadway in 2014 in “Love Letters,” a play I never wanted to see again. But again, reading from A. R. Gurney’s “letters,” Farrow proved to be funny, luminous and heartbreaking.
Expectations are everything. I looked forward to seeing Farrow, as well as Patti LuPone, in Jen Silverman’s new play, “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at Broadway’s Booth Theatre after a few regional productions. How wonderful to see the great Farrow on stage not being burdened with a script in hand.
She plays Sharon, a 65-year-old woman living in Iowa who’s in need of a roommate. LuPone plays that roommate. Her name is Robyn, and she’s from the Bronx. Iowa and the Bronx. Those are Silverman’s big laugh lines until Robyn or Sharon mentions the state of Idaho. On the laughter Richter scale, Idaho is even more hilarious than Iowa and the Bronx put together.
Since Robyn is from the Bronx, she smokes cigarettes, which absolutely sends Sharon into a stuttering tizzy. Robyn is vegan. Sharon just can’t believe that somebody doesn’t eat eggs! Robyn is a lesbian. Sharon reacts to this news as if she’d just learned that other new meaning for the word “gay.” Robyn grows and smokes medicinal marijuana. Oh boy, Sharon almost giggles herself into a coma.
Silverman has unfortunately confused Iowa with Afghanistan. She has also confused the “now” time frame of the play with 1970. Sharon and Robyn’s long dissertation on marijuana reminded me of seeing the original Broadway production of “Company,” where, even in 1970, the smoking-pot scene in Act 1 came off as bad sitcom TV. It’s arguably the worst book scene in any musical written by Stephen Sondheim. No matter. Silverman fills “The Roommate” with Mary Jane jokes in the year 2024.
Speaking of topicality, Robyn, at one point, tells Sharon that she’s younger than the president of the United States. Idaho, step aside! There’s a new joke on the Rialto.
Farrow delivers a busy, fussy, twitchy performance that runs whimsy into the ground. She is also sabotaged by a sound system that makes her voice sound as if it’s coming from another room in the theater that is not the stage. All that LuPone must do to get laughs is to deadpan every line, every double take.
In this 100-minute one-act play, Silverman waits a very long time to give us Robyn’s big secret: The character from the Bronx is not exactly whom she first appears to be. Duh. Robyn doesn’t turn her landlady into a prostitute, but the course of action that Sharon takes after being inspired by her tenant’s secret is the way Broadway, decades ago, used to treat the subject of prostitution – that it’s this fun, colorful profession that takes no victims. In the end, “The Roommate” sentimentalizes crime, turning it into something life-affirming.
It is too early in the Broadway season to call something the worst. That caveat aside, “The Roommate” is the saddest spectacle of wasted talent on Broadway since Andre De Shields played a gorilla in “Prymate” in 2004.
Jack O’Brien directs and brings one bravura touch to the production. To get around the terrible American tradition in the theater of applauding a star’s entrance, O’Brien has Farrow and LuPone walk across the stage to receive that ovation before the play begins.
