Alia Shawkat and Peter Friedman star as a daughter and father who reconnect in Clare Barron’s You Got Older (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
YOU GOT OLDER
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 3, $89-$189
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
Alia Shawkat makes an exciting theatrical stage debut as a single woman having “like the second worst moment of my life so far” in the stirring revival of Clare Barron’s You Got Older at the Cherry Lane.
After losing her job and her boyfriend at the same time — she was sleeping with her boss — the thirty-two-year-old Mae, a Minneapolis lawyer, has returned to the family home in a small agricultural town in eastern Washington State. Not only does she need a respite, but her father (Peter Friedman) has cancer of the larynx, so she can help out at least for a while.
Nearly everyone in their circle seems to be having issues with physical bodies. In addition to their father’s illness, Mae, who no longer has health insurance, has a lump in her throat and a large, ugly rash that requires special ointment; her sister Jenny (Nina White) has a pericardial cyst and can’t eat meat or gluten; her sister Hannah’s (Nadine Malouf) ex-boyfriend died of a rare blood cancer, and she thinks she may be passing bad skin, cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and male pattern baldness to her son; her brother, Matthew (Misha Brooks), might have a weird penis; her old schoolmate Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) admits to liking pus, scabs, and flaky skin; Mae’s fantasy lover, Luke the Canadian Cowboy (Paul Cooper), has weeping lesions from his neck to his groin; and the entire Hardy family suffers from acidic mouths and body odor.
Mae wants to move forward but inner and outer forces seem hell-bent on preventing that. In addition to having to move back to the house where she grew up, she has been told by her dentist that she should use a child-size toothbrush, she’s horny like she way when she was in high school, and she sneaks Mac into her bedroom to hide him from her father. She also has a cat named, appropriately enough, Murphy, hinting that everything that could go wrong just might.
Mae (Alia Shawkat) and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) share their likes and dislikes in revival at the Cherry Lane (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
“I hate it when I feel helpless,” she tells her father, who doesn’t mind occasionally not being in control. “I love it when you just get to lie back and let people take care of you,” he says to Mae, who can’t understand that.
When the whole family is finally together, Jenny proclaims, “It’s like we’re on a picnic.”
Not quite.
Barron (Shhhh, Dance Nation), who won an Obie for the play, wrote You Got Older after her father was diagnosed with cancer and she went through a breakup. In a program note, she writes, “This play was written and finished in the middle of a personal crisis — before anything was resolved. And so, for me it remains a kind of play without perspective. The characters are so far inside of something that they don’t know how to explain what’s happening to them. The result is a lot of avoidance.”
While there is plenty of psychological avoidance — most of the characters exist in their own private space — the act of physically touching occurs over and over again, whether it is the application of ointment, hugging a stranger who may be crying, or having sex. The father is the only one who likes to get his hands dirty, as evidenced by the garden he has started where he grows peppers and other plants.
Anne Kaufman (Mary Jane, The Nether) helmed the 2014 premiere, which included Obie winners Brooke Bloom and William Jackson Harper and Tony winners Reed Birney and Miriam Silverman, and she directs the revival as well, keeping things dark and mysterious, alternating between fantasy and reality as Mae tries to find her way in a world that’s letting her down but she can’t get back on track. The transitions between scenes on Arnulfo Maldonado’s ever-morphing set can be as bumpy as some of the subplots, but the challenging narrative makes it all worthwhile.
Shawkat (Arrested Development, Search Party) is alluring as a woman who is as unpredictable as she is appealing. Friedman (Job, The Nether) once again is masterful as a sweet man who remains upbeat as he faces the end, exemplified by the theme song he has chosen for himself, Regina Spektor’s “Firewood,” in which she sings, “Rise from your cold hospital bed / I’ll tell you, you’re not dying / Everyone knows you’re going to live / So you might as well start trying.”
Even as we get older, it’s never time to stop trying.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]