Even Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone Can’t Power “The Roommate”

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.

The promise of "The Roommate" is that we'll see a new double act—a Martin and Lewis, say, or a Lansbury and Arthur—in which one partner is a flibbertigibbet and the other is a volcano. But although the play's scenario certainly sets them up for banter, the dialogue itself is bizarrely unambitious and often illogical. A typical comic beat: Sharon tells Robyn that she has a son living in New York, and asks if she's heard of Park Slope. "Oh yeah, that's great," LuPone drawls, letting her mouth slide into a parallelogram. Even when LuPone is mugging through a non-joke, her vocal finesse gives her lines endless micro-nuances of contempt. For the first half of Silverman's hundred-minute play, the two actors (friends in real life) use their instruments—Farrow twittering like a jazz piccolo, LuPone as the wry trombone—to flirt in a city-mouse, country-mouse key.

Sharon: Today is my reading group. If you want to come with me.

Robyn: Your "reading group"?

Sharon: You know, a book club. Only Tanya calls it a reading group . . . she says everything just a little bit wrong, it's because she's from Idaho and there wasn't any culture there, so she didn't get exposed to things until much later in life.

So, look—the term "reading group" would hardly baffle anyone. And Sharon's insult to Idaho culture makes no sense; she herself seems to be just finding out that vegans exist. Silverman is trying to depict a Midwestern vanity of small differences, yet the dialogue captures only the rhythm of conversation, as if the real content were going to be added in later. The roomies bond over getting stoned, but I started to feel a little high myself. What are words for, really? This don't-worry-about-it approach to meaning certainly prepares us for the goofy plot pivot, when we learn that Robyn is a con woman, having fled to Iowa to detox from a life of crime.

Not since "Reefer Madness" has an innocent been so quickly debauched. The day after her first toke, Sharon begs Robyn to teach her how to rip off the elderly on the phone. (I know I wasn't supposed to be taking the plot literally, but LuPone, seventy-five, and Farrow, seventy-nine, giggling about how to prey on senior citizens hit a bum note.) The basic equation here is a Nancy Meyers movie—ladies of a certain age begin a romantic second act—plus the mom-boss machinations of the TV show "Weeds," yet it all feels as haphazardly thrown together as the contents of one of Robyn's boxes. O'Brien's production, which lacks much in the way of behavioral detail, barely creates a sense of the real, and when LuPone, jutting her chin out, claims that, should it come to stealing cars, she's good at "jacking them and stripping them down," we drop fully into camp.

But camp is what many folks are going to Broadway for. The star vehicle is its own kind of sly artificiality, a way to flout concerns of "good" and "bad" and to simply revel in exaggerated presence. (The night I saw the show, anytime a cell phone went off the room shivered with anticipatory tension—LuPone has a reputation for berating those who violate theatrical etiquette.) In "The Roommate," we're being allowed to move in, temporarily, with two legends, both of whom are larking about in a play that's really just a pretext. No harm, right? Yet I kept thinking that Farrow, who hasn't been onstage in New York for a decade, isn't just larking about. She's actually rising above the material, first by showing us a kind of virtuosic screwball dizziness, then by shading it with lower notes of loneliness and discovery. It seems such a waste to have an actor like Farrow give herself over to a star vehicle that has so little gas in the tank.

Presence—having it, making it felt—is the crucial ineffability of live performance. In a difficult moment for nonprofit theatre, some Off Off productions are therefore being staged in apartments, in living rooms or lofts, where a few dozen audience members can get up close and personal. The performers in these shows aren't necessarily stars, but an unknown can give you the same zing as LuPone, as long as he's falling over your feet.

A strong argument for this strategy is "Family," a deliberately repulsive haunted-house fever dream written by Celine Song, the writer and director of the film "Past Lives." The director Alec Duffy installed the thriller on the ground floor of a Clinton Hill brownstone, which seats thirty (if you include the couch and barstools), and where an audience member could, if she were unforgivably nosy, read the titles of all the books on the shelves.

Three eerie half siblings, dressed in oversized black mourning clothes, enter the living room, praising—and then, sort of, psychically becoming—their just buried father. Hissing like snakes, wriggling around like alligators, they reënact psychosexual games they used to play, and search the house for their three vanished mothers. David (Luis Feliciano) enjoys being bullied; his half brother Linus (Jonah O'Hara-David) indulges him, possibly homicidally. Linus also smells something dead under the floorboards, a sensation that seeps into a theatregoer's own suggestible mind. Each sibling is monstrous in his or her own way: Alice (Izabel Mar), for instance, was born with an extra face on the back of her head.

"Past Lives," Song's delicate, realistic film, will in no way prepare audiences for how deranged this show is, a kind of cross between "Flowers in the Attic" and a much darker "What We Do in the Shadows." On the show's Web site, Duffy's company, Hoi Polloi, states that "Family" is an early play of Song's, which is sometimes apparent. Despite some startling imagery—we can hear flies in the crawl space below, which Izabel swears are murmuring specifically to her—the play isn't quite sure what to do with its accelerating energies. (The end, unfortunately, is mostly yelling.) Still, I had one of my own IRL thrills: the night I was there, Song herself was on the couch in front of me. She was so close! I stared at the back of her head, trying to work out if she was laughing at her own jokes. Was she? I'll never tell.