Everyone’s overwhelmed by the presidential election, and how could it be otherwise with the fate of American democracy hanging in the balance?
Backstage at the Booth Theatre, Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, who are starring in Jen Silverman’s comedy “The Roommate,” are as tense as any politically sentient human being right now. But they try to leave the panic-inducing headlines at the stage door. How else could they perform this very necessary public service of entertainment?
Eight times a week this fall, Farrow and LuPone have been providing Broadway audiences with much-needed relief from doom-scrolling. You can practically see the stress falling away from theatergoers as they become putty in the hands of these cunning troupers, who are finding laughs in every corner of this “Odd Couple”-esque comedy, scheduled to run through Dec. 15.
A two-hander that speaks directly to women of a certain age wondering whether a second act is still possible, the play revolves around a mousy Iowa woman named Sharon (Farrow), who undergoes an almost unthinkable character transformation after taking in a roommate. Robyn, (LuPone), a hard-bitten lesbian from New York, enters Sharon’s orderly home with the force of a truck barreling down the Cross Bronx Expressway.
A vegan who smokes medicinal herbs and has no time for Midwestern niceties, Robyn has had many lives. She’s been a potter, a poet and a felonious con artist. Sharon, a 65-year-old divorcée who hasn’t been with a man since her husband left her, hasn’t really lived at all. Both women have adult children who keep them at arm’s length. Intrigued by Robyn’s criminal past, Sharon asks if she can have a piece of the lawless action. Having always lived by the rules, she wants to live dangerously. Robyn is trying to clean up her act but can’t resist indulging Sharon’s long-repressed wild side.
The comedy capers into some outlandish territory, but audiences seem happy to suspend disbelief for the chance to enjoy Farrow and LuPone demonstrate that it’s never too late for a woman to reinvent herself. Their long careers in acting have taught them this lesson repeatedly. But timing is everything in show business, and Farrow wasn’t sure whether this unstable moment in American political history was the right time to make a Broadway return.
Jack O’Brien, the show’s director, tried to allay her concerns by framing the production as a public stress reliever. Farrow recalled, “I said, ‘Jack, the election — I don’t know how we’re going to even get through it. The streets are going to be wild.’ And he said, ‘Look, there’s only one thing we can do. We can offer people 90, 100 minutes of escape from all that.’ ”
LuPone, a three-time Tony winner and musical theater diva for the ages, is built for Broadway. But Farrow is made of milder material and was understandably nervous about the grueling commitment. She was in a long run of “Romantic Comedy” with Anthony Perkins at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre beginning in 1979 and starred in the Broadway production of “Love Letters” with Brian Dennehy at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 2014. But it’s been a while and, as you might guess from her movie roles, she tends to be a bit of a worrier. But the lure of working with LuPone and O’Brien, both long-time friends, proved irresistible.
Farrow said that she had read Silverman’s script a few years ago but didn’t have the “impetus” at the time to do it.
“I forget why, but not that it wasn’t clever, not that it wasn’t funny, blah, blah, blah,” Farrow said. “But it was the idea of Jack and then Patti, and once we both said that we wanted to do it, that was it. Because we had the wonderful Jack O’Brien and we had each other.”
“I wanted to do a play,” LuPone said. “And I wanted to work with my friend. So it was a play, it was with Mia and it was with Jack. Jack directed me in one of my most successful performances, as Kitty Duval in ‘The Time of Your Life.’ Jack is a neighbor in Connecticut. We’re all in the same county. We’re a stone’s throw from each other. No, not a stone’s throw but as the crow flies. Very close together.”
Had Farrow and LuPone toyed with the idea of working together before “The Roommate”?
“Never crossed our minds,” Farrow said. “We were parents together. Our kids were in the same school. Steve Sondheim introduced us. We’ve been friends — what is it, 30 years? So that’s solid. That’s good. We go to the movies. We have mutual friends and so forth. But I never thought I’d be working with Patti, because when I thought of Patti, I thought of her singing. And I don’t have that.”
Looking elegantly windblown in a sweater, her mass of hair cascading like the precious garland of some Irish deity, Farrow has a tendency to trail off in conversation. Her sentences end not in periods but in ellipses. She is as diffident and self-doubting as LuPone is fearless and forthright. But like the characters they play in “The Roommate,” they have more in common than might appear at first glance.
The dynamic between them, on stage and off, is tenderly supportive. LuPone was gentle and bolstering. Farrow, who strangely lacks self-belief in her remarkable acting talent, was full of gratitude and warmth.
“We were social friends in Connecticut, and then we became more intimate with each other, “LuPone said. “But I think we’ve also discovered that had we grown up together, we would have been fast friends.”
“We would have been in trouble a lot,” Farrow interjected.
“She started to tell me the trouble that she got into,” LuPone said. “And I was always in trouble. So we would have found each other.”
Casually dressed in black, her brassy side noticeably toned down, LuPone spoke with such quiet, oracular confidence that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d pulled out a deck of Tarot cards and started divining our futures. Perhaps the thought occurred to me because of her role as the Sicilian witch on the Disney+ series “Agatha All Along,” but it was her sympathetic awareness that hinted at secret knowledge.
One of the advantages of working in the theater as you get older, LuPone said, is that “you’re ageless on the stage.” She held up the example of Vanessa Redgrave playing Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” as proof of her theory.
“She didn’t convey elderly,” Farrow said. “She conveyed the fertility of marriage and beauty. She was beautiful.”
LuPone and Farrow, both in their 70s, are older than Redgrave was when she won a Tony for playing Mary Tyrone.
“You have to commit to this,” Lupone said. “This is muscle. Committing yourself to a run and doing eight shows a week — that’s muscle.”
LuPone took her “Agatha All Along” co-star Aubrey Plaza into her home when Plaza was making her stage debut off-Broadway in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.” Did having a roommate help her prepare for “The Roommate”?
“I was basically her mother,” LuPone said. “It was theater boot camp. I was helping somebody who was coming to the theater having never been on stage before in a two-hander. Two-handers are not easy.”
She worries that actors who are just starting out aren’t prepared to give this work what it demands. “It can’t be easy,” she said. “Nothing can be easy and then be filled when you give it to an audience.”
Farrow’s stage chops show no signs of rust. After I praised the suppleness of her voice, LuPone exclaimed, “She has stagecraft!”
“I have to say, it is such a joy to work with Mia,” LuPone continued. “Because I don’t know the last time, or ever, when I’ve worked with an actor and looked in their eyes and really looked in their eyes. Last night, when I was sitting on the steps of the set, I said in my head, ‘I’m looking into her eyes, and she’s looking back!’ ”
“We’re very connected, and if we weren’t I don’t think it could work,” Farrow said. “For us, the challenge at first was to disengage, to be strangers, the awkward stranger coming into the house. And so we had to find a way to be wary of each other.”
Farrow talks about her acting career as though she were recalling a Charlotte Bronte novel about an insecure heroine surviving a series of dangerous scrapes and nefarious characters. Born into a show business family, she was still a teenager when she was cast in the television soap opera “Peyton Place.” An early, short-lived marriage to Frank Sinatra thrust her into the glaring spotlight, and then “Rosemary’s Baby” turned her into a bona fide movie star.
“I just read an interview with Al Pacino about how when fame hit him he started drinking and stuff,” Farrow said. “I didn’t start drinking, but I was scared and completely taken aback by people’s reactions. I was dismayed by the fact that for as long as I resemble whoever, whatever I resemble, people are gonna look at me like I’m a zoo animal. And lots of people are going to be nice to me, even if they’re not nice people, and I will never know. And that hits you hard, especially if you’re really young and still searching for what is normal.”
Seeking refuge, Farrow moved to England with her second husband, André Previn, dyed her hair brown, worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company and had children.
“I tried to get off that track because I didn’t handle it very well,” she said. “Some people do, and I have so much admiration for them. But it seems like they have something that I didn’t have.”
Farrow’s program bio conspicuously doesn’t mention her work with Woody Allen, her former partner with whom she was involved in a very public dispute over allegations that the filmmaker had molested their adopted daughter, Dylan. Allen has denied the charges, but the matter was re-litigated in the 2021 HBO docuseries “Allen v. Farrow.”
I wanted to ask about her string of what I consider Oscar-worthy performances in such Allen classics as “Broadway Danny Rose,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Hannah and Her Sisters,” but she sidestepped my skittish inquiries about this period of her career. When I posed the question in a different way, asking her to recall a moment in her acting when everything came together, she had an immediate answer.
“I would say that I’m most grateful for ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ” she said. “I wasn’t the first choice for it. I probably wasn’t even the fifth choice. But anyway, I got the part and it was a long stretch of work, and I loved every minute of it, because even though they didn’t shoot it in sequence, the book had everything. So I read the book and whatever the scene was, I just knew where it came from. The first scene we did, I was in a phone booth in the summer in New York and had this long monologue. I loved doing the work, because it asked a lot of me, and I’d never been asked to do that much.”
The film, she said, gave her not only a career but also license to take time off and do other things. “People seem to remember that film,” she said. “Roman Polanski, forgetting any personal” — the thought went unfinished — “was a true master of cinema.”
LuPone, who was in the first graduating class of Juilliard’s Drama Division, achieved Broadway renown with “Evita.” When I ran breathlessly through her list of triumphs — “Anything Goes,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Gypsy,” among them — Farrow decreed that they should name a theater after her friend.
“But first they have to name a theater after Ethel Merman and Mary Martin,” LuPone replied.
“No, first they have to name one after you,” Farrow said.
“How about the Patti and Mia?” LuPone offered.
“I haven’t spent my life on Broadway. You have.”
Audiences wouldn’t mind if this delectable pairing — LuPone said she’s heard comparison to Burns and Allen — would keep going. Might “The Roommate” follow in the footsteps of “The Odd Couple” and spawn a movie and a sitcom? Neither has heard of any such talk. Farrow hinted that she’s more inclined to return to her quiet life in Connecticut, though the election has both of them plotting their escape if Donald Trump returns to power.
“I know that if he wins, we have to figure out how to leave the country, because I have a finite amount of time in my life and I don’t want to be under this stress,” LuPone said.
“We don’t want to live in a fascist state, “ Farrow said. “A bunch of my kids and I, along with the grandkids, are going to go to Ireland. My cousins are there. My mother [actress Maureen O’Sullivan] was born in Ireland.”
“Listening to the rhetoric now, I just feel like it’s killing me,” LuPone said.
“The guy who adores Kim Jong Un, Putin and —.”
“Viktor Orbán!” LuPone shouted.
“And Hitler!” Farrow added, raising the stakes. “I mean you don’t know what to say.”
“Why can’t Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch be deported?” LuPone mused after the discussion turned to Trump’s demagoguery about immigration and the “enemy from within.” Farrow shook her head and said, “They’re the oligarchs now.”
Both seemed relieved that “The Roommate” has given them space to tune out the election noise. Their characters don’t have MSNBC or Fox News blaring in the background. LuPone doubted whether Robyn was even registered to vote, and Farrow said that Sharon “doesn’t seem very politically aware at all.”
Not that the “The Roommate” is apolitical. Silverman is focused on the slipperiness of identity and the difficulty of finding categories flexible enough to accommodate the many possible selves locked inside women. But the focus is on something beyond partisanship — relationships and how they can catalyze change.
Farrow and LuPone know from the many chapters of their own lives that they contain multitudes. Friendship has given them the chance to explore on stage new facets of themselves as actors who refuse to be pigeonholed.