You Got Older
Opening Night: November 7, 2014
Closing: November 22, 2014
Theater: HERE Arts Center
Mae returns home to help take care of Dad and — maybe (a little) — herself. Written by 2014 P73 Playwriting Fellow Clare Barron, directed by Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman, and featuring Tony Award nominee Reed Birney (Casa Valentina, House of Cards) and Brooke Bloom (Somewhere Fun, Alpha House), You Got Older is a tender and darkly comic new play about family, illness, and cowboys — and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.
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November 6, 2014
Like the aging process, there is no modesty in Clare Barron’s new play You Got Older, a Page 73 world premiere now running at HERE. A recent recipient of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the bold young playwright blends fantasy with a level of brutal candor that few would even dare to bring into conversation with their closest relations. Yet in Barron’s boundaryless world, her central character, Mae, can neurotically rant to a stranger about her emotional and dermatological woes, and conjure images of wild sexcapades with a spectral cowboy. At times these cringe-inducing scenarios seem to be put on the stage for the sole purpose of making her audience squirm — but in the midst of this jarring explicitness, Barron uses her unique voice to build a quirky and sincerely touching family story. Mae, played by the talented Brooke Bloom, finds herself at the dysfunctional center of this family saga. A recently single and unemployed lawyer, she is beckoned home to care for her father (a beautifully sympathetic Reed Birney) while he undergoes cancer treatment — an unfortunate yet welcome opportunity to escape her crumbling life. However, her father’s illness paired with her own sexual frustrations brings a heightened awareness of her own bodily functions and malfunctions. She seethes with paranoia over a lump under her jawbone, obsesses over her grotesque back rash, and hosts many an early-morning visit from her phantom cowboy, with whom she acts out violent sexual fantasies (that is until her father awkwardly interrupts with quiet knocks at the door).
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November 7, 2014
Clare Barron’s extraordinary You Got Older moved me as few new plays have. As a critic, I can usually shake things off fast—it’s a coping mechanism—but for some time after the play’s wrenching finale, I found myself literally shaking. This reaction took me by surprise; although the story is about a lost young woman named Mae (a terrific Bloom) whose aging father (Birney, masterfully gentle) is being treated for cancer, it unfurls mostly in the mode of weird, funny character comedy, with detours into gnarly and frustrated horniness. But whether Mae tries to escape into banality (small talk, smaller tasks) or fantasy (a taciturn cowboy “obliterating” her, or holding her, or both), time’s one-way arrow keeps piercing through.
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November 7, 2014
Among the pithier observations from that eloquent philosopher Blanche DuBois was the idea that death is the opposite of desire. Those opposites attract, after a fashion, in You Got Older, a new play by Clare Barron about a young woman returning home to care for her father, who’s learned he has a rare and aggressive cancer. Sleeping in the room next to him, Mae (Brooke Bloom) finds her fearful imaginings for his future shoved aside by wild sexual fantasies involving a mysterious cowboy. The play, at Here in a staging directed by Anne Kauffman for Page 73 Productions, blends offbeat, sometimes raunchy comedy into a slowly fused drama about an ailing father (Reed Birney) and an emotionally battered daughter trying to recapture some of the closeness of earlier years. Ms. Barron, who was recently named the recipient of the Vineyard Theater’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, has a dry, understated voice that sometimes lets us absorb subtext a little too generously: The father-daughter talk takes a while to move beyond awkward chatter about his new vegetable garden, or her lack of a toothbrush. But Ms. Barron is not afraid of the occasional flight of fancy (hence the randy cowboy), and still more startling surprises. (“I like pus,” one character confesses.) While Mae has come to nurse her father back to health, she’s reeling from some of her own recent wounds. As she puts it to an old acquaintance, Mac (William Jackson Harper), whom she meets in a dive bar where she’s gone to get a break from the fraught atmosphere at home: “This dude who was like the love of my life dumped me. And he was my boss, so he fired me.”
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