NEW YORK — It’s near-impossible to look away from Mia Farrow’s enveloping performance as a lonely but feisty Iowan in director Jack O’Brien’s staging of Jen Silverman’s quirky one-act, one-set play “The Roommate.” One fears looking down at the floor for a second and missing an implosion.
Maybe “explosion” is the better word. It’s hard to know.
That’s because Farrow’s organic fusing of externals and internals is so central to her work as an actress. When you get to experience Farrow live and in person, as you now can on the stage of Broadway’s Booth Theatre, you can see (far better than on film) how deeply she immerses herself in a character, how she understands how to generate empathy, how she uses her upper and lower vocal registers to powerful effect, and, perhaps surprisingly, the sophistication of her comic timing. She knows how to land a hard laugh and she gets off some zingers and yet she wraps her arms around her character so intensely you want to go up there and give her a squeeze.
Farrow is, of course, familiar as a complex long-time celebrity and thus has a persona one thinks one knows even though she’s acted only very rarely over the past decade. But at the Booth, you begin to see that her main gift is exquisite control over everything: text, character, audience, the whole shooting match.
Even over Patti LuPone, for goodness sake
LuPone is Farrow’s co-star in “The Roommate,” a play I’ve seen twice before, once at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and later at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. It has a simple structure. Farrow plays Sharon, a naive, divorced, 60-ish woman who lives outside Iowa City and has decided to take a roommate to cut down on costs. In prior productions, Sharon was played as a traditional gee-whiz Midwesterner, more naive than most but not so far from, say Coach Walz. Not this time. Farrow suggests from the start there is a lot more going on, locating this character somewhere between pot-luck suppers and the world of sister wives. And yet she still makes sure that you fear for her wellbeing at every moment.
Robin (LuPone) is the sardonic, lesbian, cutting, noir-clad New Yorker who answers Farrow’s advertisement. She’s running away from something or someone, or somethings or someones, we intuit at the start — and the first part of “The Roommate” is in the mode of “The Odd Couple,” with sweet Sharon marveling at snarky Robin’s veganism and struggling with the arrival of marijuana plants on her kitchen windowsill, and Robin slowly coming to see the value of organic family markets and Midwestern friendliness. Both women are needy: Sharon openly so, Robin underneath her thick Bronx defense mechanism.
But as the play goes on, all of that gives way to a vibe something closer to “Breaking Bad,” as Sharon finds some of Robin’s past activities to potentially be a new form of self-actualization for a woman fundamentally bored with her life. The show dances on the age of Eros and yet also effectively exploits a sense of dread, that things are not entirely as they seem with either of these women and that we’re all just waiting for stuff to blow up.
Throughout the night, you’re increasingly aware that both of these great actresses (and O’Brien’s direction) are considerably better than this material. “The Roommate” is a play that starts out with an interesting premise, runs into some credibility problems, recovers a bit and then runs into a few more; it wants to dance away from realism but doesn’t manifest enough of the confidence needed to really build its own world.
Even if you can buy the basic set-up that puts the two women together with minimal advance knowledge of each other — and I can, just — the complications strain credulity with the rapidity of their arrival. You have to buy that Sharon really is that naive, despite living in a relatively big college town, and that Robin really has done all the things she has done and emerged mostly unscathed. Not so easy, frankly. And the temporal specifics of the show (the play was written a decade ago) add to the murkiness. The program says “Now,” but the references to internet dating and the like are out of date.
LuPone is recognizably LuPone, which is not a problem and, indeed, is probably what most audiences are coming to see. As you might imagine, she never is dull for a single second, you’re always glad to see her make an entrance and her coiled energy and drive is such that I wondered at one point whether she might add a joke or some extra bit just to ratchet up the dramatic tension and keep herself, and us, better entertained. I kept wondering how much better “The Roommate” would have been as a play had these two remarkable women (and this director) been attached from the developmental start, rather than being retrofitted into a script that, in the end, cannot match all these two spectacular actresses can do. Then again, that was true of Farrow’s terrifying nanny in “The Omen.” It’s hard for writers to match her.
I seriously doubt many audience members will regret their attendance at “The Roommate.” You just don’t see performances like the one delivered by Farrow, now 79, very often.
A consummate Manhattanite transformed into an Iowan? Not a problem for her. If you ever wanted proof great actors get better with age, it’s here. Take your roommate.
At the Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St., New York; theroommatebway.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
