Mia Farrow & Patti LuPone In ‘The Roommate’: Odd Couple, Odder Play – Broadway Review
deadline.comMia Farrow and Patti LuPone make for an appealing and very welcome stage duo in Broadway‘s new comedy-drama The Roommate, a pairing that’s selling out the Booth Theatre in an engagement opening tonight.
Unfortunately, their third costar – a beige landline telephone that gets an implausibly large role for a play set in the current day – is required to pull more weight than it or the story can handle.
First produced in 2015 at a Louisville regional theater, Jen Silverman’s play shows its age with that wall phone – the superfluous presence of an iPhone suggests maybe there’s been some tinkering over the years, and, if so, not enough – while other details (jitters over sexuality, naiveté about pot, jokes about “Nigerian prince” phone scams) might have seemed dated even nine years ago.
And those aren’t the only flaws in this awkwardly paced, abruptly mood-shifting tale of two very different women on the verge of old age looking to outrun their pasts and stake new claims on the future.
Read more on deadline.com
