In an unassuming hopscotch of mostly quiet scenes, life flourishes and slips away. A 20-something woman, at a loose end, moves to Washington State to hang out with her father — and her life’s orbit goes into a long retrograde. Dad grows a green pepper; Dad gets cancer treatment. But she does nothing. Has going back turned her into a kid again? No chance. Even at home, you get older.
The return of Clare Barron’s “You Got Older,” the playwright’s gorgeously precise 2014 drama now being revived at the Cherry Lane Theater, can feel like remission — a 100-minute suspension in an art form otherwise defined by choice and action. The woman’s avoidant stillness becomes both the play’s plaintive atmosphere and its cautionary message. How long can you wait? To grow? To help? To leave?
The play may feel familiar even to those who didn’t get to the premiere 12 years ago. (A certain continuity is thanks to the return of the original director, Anne Kauffman, our surest pair of hands for a contemporary play.) For over a decade, Barron’s writing has entered into the communal bloodstream; in informal polls conducted among theater students (my own), her pieces come up as touchstones and models — both for her naturalistic dialogue and her confessional, erotic-queasy, millennial point of view.
Alia Shawkat, a wry eye roll in human form, plays Mae, whose extended stay with her father (Peter Friedman) strikes her as both endless and far too short. Shawkat is a sure-footed comic, both vocally dry and drolly physical: she performs one scene flopped over upside down; she starts out by looking under Mae’s bed, and she just kind of gets stuck there, tail feathers up, like a duck.
At one point, at a local bar, Mae meets Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), and she executes a stuttering pivot center stage — she’s leaving, she’s staying, she’s considering having sex with him, she’s wondering about the oozing rash on her back — that contains the play and her character’s indecisive nature, all in miniature.
It wouldn’t be a Barron play without weird boundaries around sex. She’s our bard of the hormonal urge: She blew the theater doors off in 2018 with her teen dance extravaganza “Dance Nation,” but her interest in the prickly carnality of her own body was probably clearest in “I’ll Never Love Again” (2016), in which she spent sections of the play half-naked and re-enacting entries, shall we call them, from her actual adolescent diary.
Mae’s libido therefore bothers her as much as her bumpy back and as-yet-hypothetical grief. (Cancer is scary, sure, but her father’s treatment seems promising.) “I haven’t had sex in 41 days,” she tells Mac, who becomes her accidental, aimless suitor. Even with a real (ish) man at hand, Mae’s desire stays focused on a phantom cowboy (Paul Cooper), who stars in her disturbingly submissive bedtime fantasies. Is it hot when he hogties her? (Then, just when she’s getting somewhere with that thought, Dad pops his head in without knocking. DAD!)
For a while, the play exists in an equilibrium among Mae, her father, Mac and Mae’s bossy cowboy. Friedman’s on-the-nail comic timing gives this stretch an exquisite, anti-sentimental topspin, always bouncing differently than we anticipate. Dad’s a thoughtful guy, grateful that his daughter wants to be with him when he’s sick, and that he’s got a lovely view from his yard. But, he says, “I’m always itching to go do something else even when I’m in the middle of having a nice moment.”
The text gets itchy too, and shifts, relatively late in the narrative, into a family play. The initial, drowsy quiet turns into mayhem: Two sisters (Nadine Malouf and Nina White) and a brother (Misha Brooks) join Mae to quarrel cheerfully at Dad’s bedside. They bicker about the family smell (“Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg,” one of them says, with a rueful sense of discovery) and celebrate their Dad’s recovery a little too early. Each actor surpasses the next, silly and moving by turns. In a superb play, it’s a bravura scene, if rather frustrating — why can’t we have more time with these wonderful people?
And with that echo of complaint — why not more time? — we sense the play’s emotional logic lock around us. Barron’s careful orchestration of detail (a missed birthday here, a nurse gone astray there) alerts us to how profoundly we may be missing the appointments that matter.
In a pivotal monologue, during a late-night encounter with Mae, Mac calculates how many more hours (given holidays and family trips) he’ll spend with his mother. He’s sleepy, and he doesn’t notice how desperate Mae is for him to stop talking. Once he brings the topic up, though, she clearly can’t stop herself from estimating her remaining days with her father. I have seen this play twice, and both times, this moment has frightened my own mind into total blankness. Maybe next time, I’ll be able to bear it.
You Got Older Through April 12 at Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
The post Review: ‘You Got Older,’ With Alia Shawkat, Gets a Sharp Revival appeared first on New York Times.
