The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at the Booth, is her voice. Farrow is playing a naïve, rather unfulfilled empty nester named Sharon, who lives in a huge house in Iowa and spends her days dreamily phoning a faraway son. Speech tends to drift out of her, as airy and capricious as dandelion fluff. When Sharon is surprised, Farrow squeezes her voice into an adorable whistling squeak. Every time she says “Oh?” in ditzy confusion—if, say, she’s just found her new tenant rolling a joint in the kitchen—it sounds like someone sat on a rubber duck.
The central joke in Silverman’s odd-couple bauble, originally from 2015 and directed here by Jack O’Brien, is that Sharon’s new roommate is Patti LuPone. Technically, LuPone, a grande dame of the American musical theatre, is playing Robyn, a mysterious New Yorker who is moving into Sharon’s spare bedroom. (Bob Crowley’s schematic set shows us a modern farmhouse with zero personal touches, lonely in a flat field.) When Robyn swaggers in, carrying various arbitrarily packed boxes of vegetables and black leather coats, she’s meant to be a breath of Bronx air. But LuPone, even in a Joan Jett wig, is not the type of diva who surrenders her own redoubtable persona. Why would she? Her audience laughs anytime she rolls her eyes.
この記事は The New Yorker の September 30, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The New Yorker の September 30, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.