Theater News

Adrienne Warren to Star in Broadway Premiere of Emma Donoghue's Room

Warren will play Ma in Donoghue’s stage adaptation of her acclaimed novel.

David Gordon

David Gordon

| Broadway |

January 23, 2023

Adrienne Warren
Adrienne Warren
(© Tricia Baron)

Tony winner Adrienne Warren will return to Broadway this spring in a stage adaptation of the bestselling novel Room.

Room is written for the stage by Emma Donoghue, who penned the 2010 book and its subsequent 2015 film adaptation, which won an Oscar for star Brie Larson. The production will play the James Earl Jones Theatre, beginning previews April 3 in advance of an April 17 opening. The run is scheduled to conclude on September 17.

Cora Bissett will direct the drama, which features songs and music she cowrote with Kathryn Joseph. Sets and scostumes are by Lily Arnold, with projections by Andrzej Goulding. Complete casting is still to be announced.

Warren will play Ma, a woman kidnapped as a teenager and locked for seven years in 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. But the time has come to escape and Ma and Jack must face the outside world for the first time.

Room arrives on Broadway following a 2017 world premiere at the Theatre Royal Stratford and a 2022 run at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. In a review of the original production, our sibling publication WhatsOnStage said the show turns "serious trauma into simplistic fable – one that does a major injustice to every real-life case it resembles."

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