Review: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Clean Up in 'The Roommate'

“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, quoting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robin.

A 65-year-old divorcee, Sharon has converted to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which growth options seemed few and far between.

But Robin, who encouraged experimentation from the moment he arrived to rent a room in Sharon's Iowa City home, is troubled by the transformation from gentle to giant. A plate of pot brownies for book club ladies is one thing; Looting is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” he cautions, “are two different activities.”

Because Robin is played by surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not particularly funny in itself, gets a big laugh. And since Sharon is played by the naturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither elicits a sigh.

Most of what the woman says in “The Roommate,” which opens Thursday at the Booth Theatre, is greeted with one reaction or another. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the lead in a play by Jane Silverman, which throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform himself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump who wants to ditch his flannel. . The way the actors' intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, moving it past the footlights behind the booth.

But as we have learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” produced regionally since 2015, doesn't necessarily represent progress, though there's no doubt that.

Rather, under Jack O'Brien's direction, it often feels like a throwback to the 1970s. Before the play proper, to get his stars out of the way of the entrance applause, he makes them walk across the stage like the hosts of different times, projecting their names behind them as if some confusion is likely. On Bob Crowley's overarching but overwhelming set – Sharon's kitchen is the size of a hangar and almost imposing – he shapes the scenes like disjointed sketches, punctuated by long blackouts (music by David Yazbeck). No drama stirred in the juices.

These scenes detail how the women warm to each other and begin to swap personality traits. Sharon Robin's sampling of almond milk and her disdain for the soon-to-be conventional; Robin, secretive at first, begins to open up in response to Sharon's innocence. They bond over being bad mothers to children who now keep their distance as adults. (There are several answering machine monologues, one voiced by Farrow's son Ronan.) And when Robin finally reveals her history as a scam artist, let alone a lesbian, Sharon is obsessed.

Although LuPone and Farrow remain compelling throughout, they are not done any favors by O'Brien's heavy underlining. Sharon's naivety (she wonders whether Robin, a vegetarian, can eat carrots) is initially pushed toward dopeiness; Ultimately his frustration with pathos. (But Farrow does pathos extremely well.) LuPone has the opposite trajectory to Robin's, a complete dozen (and we know how well LuPone does dozen) yet departing with an unlikely lesson in her heart.

The overemphasis seems symbolic of the waffling of production about its raw materials. Is “The Roommate” an incisive analysis of the pitfalls of self-definition? (“People find certain words for themselves because it's easier than not having words,” says Robin. “But that doesn't mean that those words are all Perfect.) Is this a comedy of manners like those weary businessmen enjoyed in the Neil Simon era? (Pot and lesbian jokes seem dated now.) Is it a juicy vehicle for older women, who rarely get them anymore?

Judging from Silverman's previous work — including “Collective Rage” (great) and “Spain” (less so) — I think it's probably all of the above. But because such plays use genre strategically, often subverting it, they work better when they are not played too broadly; Elaboration throws the story and characters too far to return to the middle where the real conflict is.

Staying closer to the play's natural form, the more modest (and uncommercial) production of “The Roommate” I saw at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2017, starring S. Epatha Merkerson and Jane Kaczmarek, felt more coherent than the present. Markerson, in the fine, naturalistic detail he gave on television, made Sharon's transformation almost believable, neither a fool in the beginning nor a mastermind in the end. Like Robin, Kaczmarek's reverse trajectory is similarly beautifully graduated.

But LuPone and Farrow are stars on a different level. We want to get out of their hands. They thrive on danger, and danger is exciting. The problem is that this version of “The Roommate” works backwards from that fact, delivering a pair of very satisfying performances that cancel out the drama. You'll remember LuPone's gasps and Farrow's tears—not what caused them.

roommate
Through Dec. 15 at the Booth Theater in Manhattan; theroommatebway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.