The Roommate, a new play from Jen Silverman in their Broadway debut, has an easy, one-two pitch: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow. The two living legends – one a grand dame of American theater, the other a classic Hollywood star – are the only performers in, and reason to see, a just-fine play. The longtime friends (through their late mutual Stephen Sondheim) are the unexpectedly hot duo of Broadway’s fall, as a classic odd couple with a sweet-and-sour, yin-yang contrast that plays to their personas – brassy, unbowed, magnetic; doe-eyed, enigmatic, sly.
Farrow, in her first full-dress Broadway production since 1979, plays Sharon, a sheltered and stereotypically unsuspecting midwestern woman fresh off a midlife divorce. Lonely and tiptoeing into a second act, she opens up her spacious, sunlit home in Iowa City (midwestern-practical set and costume design by Bob Crowley) to LuPone’s Robin, a Bronx-bred firecracker reluctant to discuss her past – or much of anything at all – with her chatty, too-inquisitive roommate.
