When Robyn (Patti LuPone) first seems at Sharon’s (Mia Farrow) Iowa home in Broadway play The Roommate (Booth Theatre, to Dec. 15), she appears nervous, trying over her shoulder, as if somebody or one thing is in her tail. What is she so cautious of? Or is she casing the joint? Whatever, her coiled demeanor is compelling—initially at the least.
Jen Silverman’s play, directed by Jack O’Brien, toys with viewers expectations, particularly with the anticipated delight of two such main stars enjoying reverse each other. Robyn, all in black and from the Bronx, is initially what you would possibly anticipate—tough-talking, no-BS, and very over being in Iowa, at Sharon’s gentle, ethereal home (stage design is by Bob Crowley). In distinction, Sharon is dressed barely eccentric boho; on first sight they’re a examine in laborious and mushy contrasts—and one assumes the comedy or drama that may unfold will likely be a tradition conflict, that they are going to be simply one other Odd Couple.
Both girls are at junctions, with kids who’re unseen however vital presences. Sharon doesn’t know what a goya is (“It’s a vegetable. A bitter gourd”), on discovering Robyn is homosexual she says the clunking, “I don’t have any problem with homosexuals.” The play is oddly fixated on sexuality, however with out something recent to say about it. Robyn’s lesbianism is a handy plot machine for the oldest trope in the guide—when straight lady Sharon decides to take a quick, completely predictable journey to Gay-ville.
The play turns itself on its head, with Robyn making an attempt to reform herself (and achieve the respect and belief of her daughter again) after a secret lifetime of scamming, and Sharon, bored of her dutiful world of long-lost motherhood and guide golf equipment, seeing in Robyn the key to a brand new lifetime of criminality. By the finish Walter White would possibly blanche at simply how targeted she is on embracing her darkish aspect.
The undemanding comedy and drama of the play is in watching its pivot factors shift, for one character at the least. Sharon is shocked she’s 65 and needing a roommate, though whereas she sees herself as outdated Robyn doesn’t; Sharon doesn’t like smoking, whereas Robyn may be very a lot on her final last ever, sincere (she sells this as “re-quitting”)!
The play resists us figuring out its characters too simply or intimately—when Sharon puzzles over Robyn being married to a person and a lesbian, Robyn notes how “people find specific words for themselves because it’s easier than not having words. You know? But it doesn’t mean those words are all accurate all the time.”
“I was born as a malleable, changeable template,” Robyn says, and the loosening of strictures she represents leads first to Sharon smoking pot. Then, after she discovers proof of Robyn’s lifetime of scamming, Sharon—as a substitute of worry or judgment—is thrillingly impressed to do the identical. Sharon abruptly desires classes in the best way to gull unsuspecting individuals over the telephone. But Robyn has come to Iowa to go straight, to strive and grow to be the non-crim mother her daughter would moderately she was—even when, proudly, she recollects as soon as doing “a little bit of auto-theft” on the aspect. But it’s a whole lot of work, excessive threat.”
Sharon’s telephone rip-off method is initially as hippy-dippy as she is: “A bullet is a bullet, and your head is your head and if two seconds separate those things well those two seconds saved your life. So. How would you like to pay less for your cable?”
Robyn saves Sharon—the latter talks about the pleasure of discovering somebody by way of whom “you find yourself to be…suddenly…alive. Think about how one person can change an entire lifetime of coldness and objects and silence.”
When Robyn ponders that her mom should have been a bitch, Sharon rapidly, and hilariously responds, “I don’t feel comfortable saying that myself, but I really appreciate that you said it.”
This is just not a heat, cuddly friendship. The two are in a different way cautious, in a different way oddballs, in a different way affected by previous hurts. It is Sharon we watch rising and altering most absolutely—and so it’s Farrow’s spry comedy that almost all compels. Robyn, in distinction, is a foil—and whereas Sharon grows beneath her tutelage, Robyn shrinks, and is forgotten by the play itself. We by no means get a full sense of her as the mom determined to make issues proper, or the individual making an attempt to show their life round.
We come to know what Sharon is working from and to; as a personality, Robyn evaporates in entrance of us. She is a key—a mechanism—moderately than a personality. This means LuPone is weirdly underused, so we lap up each one in all her side-eyes, and caustic asides.
Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow.
Matthew Murphy
Soon, Sharon’s darkish aspect is in full bloom, embracing pot brownies (and extending the market to schoolkids), gun possession, and medication. She tells Robyn: “I’m not a kid. You aren’t raising me. Somebody already raised me, and they did a shitty job and then I raised somebody and I did a shitty job and you, generally, all you’ve done is be a really, really great roommate.”
“There’s a great liberty in being bad,” Sharon concludes—and Farrow makes a waspish, sometimes very humorous case for that. But this one observe—the genteel girl who turns into calculating hardass—comes near being overplayed. It’s too unhealthy LuPone’s Robyn is a only a dramatic machine to free Farrow’s inside satan—a fuller account of Robyn making an attempt to make good as Sharon turns ever extra unhealthy would make The Roommate a greater, extra intriguing play.
