A bittersweet slice of life to be savored

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.