Booth Theatre

Broadway review by Adam Feldman Sometimes the old can be full of surprises. That’s the running premise of The Roommate, which brings together two very different senior citizens—Sharon, an unworldly Iowan played by Mia Farrow, and her new housemate, Robyn, a streetwise Bronx transplant played by Patti LuPone—and sends them down paths of self-discovery. It’s also what makes this production of Jen Silverman’s crowd-pleasing comedy work as well as it does. A variation on odd-couple themes, the play tills land that has been farmed many times. Yet it finds freshness in the familiar through a series of small twists—and, in Farrow’s star turn, an enchanting revelation.  The Roommate seems expressly engineered as catnip for small local theaters: one set, one act, two juicy roles for leading ladies of a certain age. But director Jack O’Brien, that sly lord of all genres, has conceived it smartly for Broadway. Farrow and LuPone take a curtain call before the show even begins, walking onstage to applause as their names are projected in giant letters behind them, as though to announce upfront that this play is to be appreciated as a showcase for actors you know and love. And Bob Cowley’s scenic design situates the whole thing in artifice. Although The Roommate takes place in Iowa City, Sharon’s house, stripped to its wooden skeleton, has been plopped in the middle of rural nowhere; on the rear wall, crisp images of an old-fashioned barn and windpump sit on a pixelated field of corn.  The