Millennial anxiety runs deep in Clare Barron’s You Got Older, which is getting an insightful revival at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Alia Shawkat stars as Mae, a thirtysomething who decides to nurse a painful break-up as well as the loss of her law firm job by moving back in with her dad (Peter Friedman) outside Seattle just after he receives a cancer diagnosis. This is not something that dad requested, and he’s more accommodating than euphoric about the visit. repeatedly nudges her to find a way to move on with her life.
Shawkat, who carries herself on stage like the human personification of a shrug, paints the perfect picture of a young woman in a state of suspended animation. We see this clearly in her awkward interactions with her dad and with a former schoolmate (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) that underscore her desire to hit pause on her life but also her sexual appetite. Despite the flirting, and the offer of a booty call, Mae seems more satisfied expressing her sexuality in masturbatory fantasies involving a rugged cowboy (Paul Cooper) who will hogtie her into submission.
Barron offers a millennial spin on the adage that you can’t go home again — one that’s highlighted by the likelihood that dad might just barge into the childhood bedroom at any moment. They’ve both grown accustomed to being alone, even as they find some solace in each other company. Under Anne Kauffman’s clear-eyed direction, Shawkat and Friedman play their interactions with a lived-in naturalism, never milking the humor for easy laughs. An underlying sense of familial love emerges even as they argue over issues both mundane and substantial, as when dad begins to urge Mae to seek a new job and move on with her life.
In one remarkable scene, Mae gathers with her brother and two sisters — about whom we’ve heard very little up to that time — in their dozing dad’s hospital room as he preparing to be discharged following extensive chemotherapy. The conversation meanders around the bigger questions, instead focusing on quotidian matters like the family’s characteristic smell (“Mold. Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg,” says one). When baby sister Jenny (Nina White) announces she has to leave, she rushes her dad and her siblings through the treatment-ending gong ceremony even though they can’t find the nurse who oversees such things. It’s the sort of move that kid sisters get away with, and that the rest of the family indulges.
You Got Older nails the complicated dynamics of families, and how patterns of behavior can calcify as well as evolve over time. The play’s title seems both to reflect Mae’s surprise that parents don’t just freeze in place when children move away — and that adult children too need to free themselves from the familiar tug of their childhood cocoons. As this absorbing and deeply human drama suggests, getting older cuts both ways. ★★★★☆
YOU GOT OLDER
Cherry Lane Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 12 for $99 to $209
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