Review: You Got Older, a Quietly Powerful Drama for Uncertain Times

Every life comes to a threshold when it seems like the old world is disappearing but a new one has not yet come into focus. That’s where Mae finds herself in Clare Barron’s You Got Older, an off-Broadway revival now playing at Cherry Lane Theatre. Beautifully enigmatic and bracingly honest, it’s the kind of play that gently but insistently pulls its audience into the emotional space of its characters, leaving us with a deep sense of shared humanity.

This is not obvious from the first scene, when Mae (Alia Shawkat) stands over a box garden with her father (Peter Friedman) discussing peppers. A widower, he is about to undergo surgery for throat cancer, and she has moved back to her childhood home in Washington State to look after him. It’s convenient, in a way, since Mae has recently lost her job and boyfriend in Minneapolis. Like a latter-day biblical wanderer, she’s suffering from a growing rash on her body and hasn’t had sex in over 40 days. It is giving her hot dreams about a brooding cowboy (Paul Cooper bringing layers of erotic menace to a role he just stepped into a few days ago). Unwittingly, poor dad always seems to knock on the door right as things are getting good.

But perhaps she can find an outlet in Mac, a guy who approaches her in a dive bar and claims to have harbored a crush on her since they were in school (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt conveys an alluring air of mystery despite his character’s disarming sincerity). “I’d like to have sex with you tonight,” Mae candidly admits, “but I have a rash.” Shawkat’s emotionally exposed performance is heroic and deeply relatable. When Mac offers to rub ointment on her back, she accepts this rare opportunity to be touched by a man without feeling like she is performing—and judging from Shawkat’s million-dollar smile, it is an oasis of sheer pleasure in the desert of life crisis.

There’s something distinctly middle-aged about You Got Older, with its sensitivity to the vulnerability of both the body and the soul. I turn 40 next month, and I had the sinking suspicion that Barron had been spying on me, refracting my life through the lens of her own quirky yet sharply perceptive dramatic voice. Of course, I know that’s impossible: You Got Older made its world premiere with Page 73 at HERE over 11 years ago, when the playwright was in her 20s. How did she know about all this back then? What more has she discovered in the ensuing years?

While I have not always appreciated Barron’s more recent work (my 2018 prediction that Dance Nation “won’t be taking up any space in the trophy case” remains one of my more embarrassing declarations), this production of You Got Older is forcing me to reassess. Is it really true that Barron’s plays suffer from a “lack of focus,” or was I just not listening hard enough?

Barron’s deeply intuitive but slyly interior style of writing feels perfectly matched to director Anne Kauffman (who staged the original production), with her willingness to marinate in the awkward and her ability to draw unguarded and strikingly human performances from her actors. Friedman is especially moving as a man acutely aware of his own mortality, desperately trying to pass on his wisdom while he still can.

Kauffman and the cast do their very best work in a scene depicting all the Hardy siblings arrayed around dad’s hospital bed. There’s oldest sister Hannah (Nadine Malouf projecting authority, needling Mae about her job hunt in a way that is simultaneously annoying and caring). Youngest sibling Jenny (Nina White radiating effortless narcissism) has an irritating habit of derailing every conversation.

Characters move in and out in a gorgeous dramatic fugue so we get a sense of the harmonies and dissonances in this family. When dad is left alone with son Matthew (Misha Brooks giving us little glimpses of a rich internal life as he stuffs his face) he sneaks his father an illicit cup of water, revealing the secret conspiracy of men in a family in which they are quite outnumbered. Not only do these actors looks like a real family, they feel like one too—a tribe that, despite its professional-class dispersal is still bound by powerful ties.

Costume designer Ásta Bennie Hostetter helps us to imagine their expanded universe, with Hannah’s power-mom jacket and Matty’s average straight boy jeans. While the performances are consistently realistic, Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set leaves ample room for magic, with Isabella Byrd’s lighting blurring the lines between Mae’s imagination and the real world. Sound designer Daniel Kluger elegantly underscores the action with notes of tension and skull-caressing original music, subtly guiding us through Mae’s emotional wilderness.

It’s not clear that she has completely emerged by the end of the play, but life rarely has hard borders and neatly delineated chapters. We just keep going. You Got Older is a beautiful reflection of that. Rarely has a play made me feel more seen.