Tony Award winner Adrienne Warren will star in the Broadway American premiere of Room, written and adapted for the stage by Emma Donoghue, based on her 2010 best-selling novel which she also adapted into the award-winning 2015 film.
The production, featuring songs and music by Scottish songwriters Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett and directed by Bissett, will open Monday, April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theatre, with previews beginning on April 3. The limited engagement will run through September 17. Additional casting will be announced in coming weeks.
“I am truly honored for the opportunity to return to Broadway in a project unlike anything I’ve done before,” said Warren, who won the Tony for her performance as the title character in Tina – The Tina Turner Musical. “There were many reasons I wanted to join this team in telling this story, but most importantly, I wanted to share this beautifully human bond between a mother and her son. This is for all the little Jack’s out there determined to hold on to their sense of joy and wonder and all the Ma’s out there doing their absolute best to live, love, and protect through it all.”
Room comes to Broadway following its critically acclaimed 2017 world premiere at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, UK, and productions at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland; the National Theatre of Scotland; the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario; and the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.
The synopsis: Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma (Warren) has been locked for seven years inside a purpose-built room in her captor’s garden. Her five-year-old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma’s games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.
Irish Canadian author and playwright Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room sold close to three million copies and was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize and Orange Prize for Fiction. Donoghue also wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed 2015 film adaptation, for which she received Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations for Adapted Screenplay, and for which she won the Evening Standard Award for Best Screenplay.
