Theater review by Adam Feldman
The talk in Clare Barron’s icky, tender, gorgeous You Got Older is sometimes so small it nearly vanishes completely. Alia Shawkat plays Mae, a youngish lawyer whose life is in ruins—she has lost her job, her apartment and her boyfriend in one fell swoop—and who has moved back to rural Washington to spend time with her father (Peter Friedman). Between awkward pauses in the play’s opening scene, they discuss gardening, toothbrushes, sleeping arrangements; what they don’t discuss is his recent cancer diagnosis. You Got Older is less about disease than about the unease that surrounds it, and it beautifully captures elusive things about avoidance: It’s about the denial of death, but also the denial of living.
You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
You Got Older mostly unfolds as well-observed comedy that often ventures into morbid territory. When Mae and her siblings—blunt older sister Hannah (a hilarious Nadine Malouf), amorphous middle brother Matthew (Misha Brooks) and excitable youngest sister Jenny (Nina White)—gather around their dad’s hospital bed, they spend their visit bickering, teasing and commiserating about the off-putting family odor they share: “Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg.” A similar sense of bodily dysfunction informs the flirtation between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate she encounters at a local bar; she shares details of her painful rash, and he reveals that he is into that sort of thing. (“I like scabs. And ingrown hairs. And flaky skin.”) Sex and death are hard to separate for Mae; she dreams of being “obliterated” by the object of her horny nighttime fantasies, a square-jawed Cowboy (Paul Cooper) who is like a cross between a Mountie and the Marlboro Man, and even he is not as strong as he seems.
You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin
The original Off Broadway production of Barron’s extraordinary play was one of my favorite shows of 2014, and this revival at A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre—impeccably directed, once again, by Anne Kauffman—is as funny and discomfiting as the original. I’ve gotten older, but the play hasn’t aged a day, and the new cast is terrific. (So are Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design, Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Daniel Kluger’s sound and music.) As her very name suggests—and as did the names of Shawkat’s characters Maeby in Arrested Development and Dory in Search Party—Mae is uncertain and lost, and Shawkat is a master explorer of confused interior landscapes. Her quizzical depression plays beautifully against Friedman’s understated understanding, and his desire to impart to her some kind of wisdom about living as he faces what may be the end; moments of real connection poke through the characters’ guilt and distraction. (“I’m always itching to go do something else even when I’m in the middle of having a nice moment,” Mae’s father admits.) Barron presses on tender bruises—loss, comfort, fear, concern—in ways that often leave you laughing with a strange pleasure of recognition. But if you find yourself in tears by the end, the play can handle that, too. It holds you in a bracing embrace, as close as it needs to—which is to say, too close.
You Got Older. Cherry Lane Theatre (Off Broadway). By Clare Barron. Directed by Anne Kauffman. With Alia Shawkat, Peter Friedman, Caleb Joshua Eberhardt, Nadine Malouf, Nina White, Misha Brooks, Paul Cooper. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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You Got Older | Photograph: Courtesy Marc J. Franklin