On the Red Carpet: The Roommate Is Giving Older Women a Rare Lead Spotlight

When Jen Silverman first wrote The Roommate over a decade ago, Broadway wasn't even on their mind. "I'm dazed. It's such a wild dream that is suddenly a reality," Silverman tells Playbill on the red carpet of the opening of their play September 12. Read what critics had to say here.

What Silverman really didn't expect was that Broadway star Patti LuPone and screen legend Mia Farrow would want to do the play. "It was a dream come true," they said. "The first time we sat down and read the play together in [director Jack O'Brien]'s living room, they heard the music of it so intuitively, so clearly. I felt like I couldn't be in better hands."

For four-time Tony winner O'Brien, who recently won the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, he wanted to immediately return to Broadway with The Roommate not just because of its cast. It's because it was giving senior female actors an opportunity to play lead roles. "I'm always thinking, no one's writing great roles for women our age—and I speak in the aggregate, because I'm the oldest person anybody knows anymore," he says jovially. "But it's sort of true. And [Jen] had the temerity and the insight to write a play that would attract those caliber of actresses. It's time for that. We need that."

In The Roommate, Farrow plays Sharon, a newly divorced 65-year-old woman who takes in a roommate to help ease her loneliness. That roommate is the more free-spirited Robyn (played by LuPone). The clash of personalities leads to some laugh-out-loud moments and moving interactions between LuPone and Farrow, who are longtime friends.

Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone Emilio Madrid

Though Farrow and LuPone declined to do interviews on the opening night red carpet, the creative team was on hand to provide a behind-the-scenes insight into the show. Silverman recalls how their inspiration came from meeting their partner's (set designer Dane Laffrey) mother. "His mother at that time, had just taken a female roommate. And so I had not yet met his mother, but she was telling him all of these wild stories about what it is to negotiate space with someone when you're at that point in your lives. And then suddenly, her roommate vanished. In the middle of the night vanished. The reality ended up being fairly boring, but the seeds of it led to this play," explains Silverman, who ended up meeting Laffrey's mother when the play first premiered in 2015 at Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky.

Tony-winning composer David Yazbek was brought in to write underscoring for The Roommate on Broadway. He says that request came from O'Brien, with whom Yazbek has a 25-year working relationship. "I love doing underscoring. I love scoring films and TV, and I love scoring good plays like this one, because I don't have to write lyrics, and it's just been a pleasure watching the play develop, and it's always a pleasure watching Jack O'Brien work with actors."

When asked about directing LuPone and Farrow on the stage, O'Brien admitted the two actors made his job easy. "We didn't feel it was work," he remarks. "Their ability to relate to each other is sort of beyond acting. It's something else. There's a chemistry there that really makes my work, what long-distance editing, I guess. You put them up there, and away they go."

Though it's their debut foray into Broadway, Silverman (whose other credits include the play Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties and Tokyo Vice on HBO) is clear on what they hope audiences receive from The Roommate. "I hope they have a good time and that they get to laugh in a moment where I think it's really difficult to find joy and pleasure," they said. "And I hope that if anyone in the audience has sort of written themselves off and thought that it's too late to start over and transform, I hope they question that by the end of the show."

See photos from opening night below, including red carpet attendees Kathryn Hahn (who is co-starring with LuPone in the television series Agatha All Along), Jane Krakowski, Ronan Farrow (who has an uncredited cameo in the show), and more.