“I’m now experienced enough to believe in chemistry, and you are either lucky or you aren’t — you either find it or you can’t,” said Jack O’Brien, director of the Broadway comedy “The Roommate.” But he’s not talking about its stars, Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone (between whom there is a deep chemistry, as the two are real-life friends). Rather, O’Brien is referring to the instantaneous creative connection between himself and the play’s author, Jen Silverman.
“Jen and I met for dinner,” O’Brien continued. “I saw Jen approach the table and thought, ‘Oh, I know who that is.’ And I think Jen felt the same way about me. We’ve been querulous about certain instances, but our intense respect for each other, our affection for each other, and our appreciation — without going into waves of self-pity, as Noël Coward says — was remarkable.”
Silverman agreed, saying they could “talk to you for 45 years” about what O’Brien brought to “The Roommate.”
“In the most artistic and technical way, Jack has a relationship to comedy that, to me, feels a little bit like magic,” Silverman said. “He has an intuitive, but also mathematical, understanding of what a joke is, how a joke works, what lands a joke, what doesn’t land a joke … and [though] I never think of what I’m writing as jokes — I just think of it as characters who live in a state of desperate pursuit — there is something inherently bittersweet, funny, about desperate pursuit.”
