Mae is awkward and messy, and so is the play she is in, a revival that is the second theatrical production at the Cherry Lane Theater under its new owners, the A24 movie studio.
Portrayed by “Arrested Development” alumna Alia Shawkat making her stage debut, Mae is back in her hometown living with her widowed father (Peter Friedman), who has cancer. It is an awkward situation for her, and it comes at a terrible time, “the second worst moment in my life so far,” as she explains at great length to a guy named Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) who she runs into when she sneaks off to a local bar while her father is sleeping. “My dad has cancer,” she begins, and describes how rare and aggressive it is. “Also this dude who was like the love of my life dumped me. And he was my boss. So he fired me,” she adds. “…So I don’t have a job anymore. Or health insurance…Or an apartment.” And her sister just had surgery. And “I’m horny as hell” but she has a large rash, from her shoulder to her ass “and also under my boob.”
Mac is unfazed by her oversharing: “Can I see it?” – he means the rash. ”I like pus, I like things like that,” he explains.
In such moments, playwright Clare Barron establishes herself as our poet of bodily fluids, which she also demonstrated in “Dance Nation,” a later, better play of hers for which she is best known, and in “Shhhh” even more graphically. In “You Got Older,” some of the blunt scenes are dryly comic; some are just shocking. Beneath them, we come to understand that Mae is dealing with her grief, or not dealing with it. When Barron wrote “You Got Older” in her twenties, as she tells us in a note in the program, she was in the middle of an unresolved “personal crisis” – she actually wrote it (as she’s said elsewhere) while in her father’s hospital room. “The result is a lot of avoidance” on the part of the characters, Barron tells us. “Avoidance through sex, avoidance through celebration, avoidance through logistics and banality and worrying about other things.”
When the play was first produced in 2014, Barron was heralded as a fresh new voice, and won an Obie. But in the years since “You Got Older,” Barron has gotten older, and better, and too many of the scenes of avoidance in this early play feel as aimless or out of sorts as the characters.
It makes psychological sense, perhaps, that Mae would escape into a sexual fantasy while in a bedroom right next to her father’s in her childhood home. But the disturbing scenes of a cowboy (Paul Cooper) apparently taking Mae hostage and possibly raping her feel as if they belong in a different play.
The awkwardness between father and adult daughter is a sound insight, but did we need quite so much banal chatter? These scenes might have been more effective had Shawkat portrayed Mae more expressively; as less of a cipher.
The gathering of Mae and her three siblings around her father’s hospital bed after another surgical procedure offer some distinctive characters, and a suggestion of what the dynamic among them was like when they were kids. They discuss penises, much to the embarrassment of younger brother Matthew (Misha Brooks), discuss at length whether they all have a “family smell,” and what it consists of (“Mold, Mildew. Musty. BO. And egg,” suggests older sister Hannah, portrayed by Nadine Malouf.) If it all goes on too long, there are satisfying comic moments here. But what’s missing is an evident sense of anger or resentment, or much more than a nod to anxiety and sorrow. Sister Jenny (Nina White) hands out baseball caps so that they can put down the visor to cover any crying. Rather than a further example of the play’s avoidance, perhaps this is deliberately a portrait of a more stoic family than any family I know.
Under the efficient direction of Anne Kauffman, who also helmed the 2014 production, “You Got Older” serves as a showcase for the always reliable Peter Friedman, and nails some of the more straightforward emotional scenes, such as a later, sweet and funny encounter with Mac. Mac thought he’d known Mae since fourth grade, but turns out to have known her older sister Hannah. Mae makes Mac sneak through her window so her father can’t hear, just as she used to do with boyfriends in high school. (awkward!) She agrees to allow him to put the ointment on her rash. (messy!) The entire tentative relationship has the kind of telling details that might help explain the continuing fondness for this imperfect play.
Still, for its next production, I’d love to see the Cherry Lane, which has a new sign out front declaring itself “The Birth Place of Off Broadway,” give us something new.
“You Got Older” is at the Cherry Lane Theater through April 12.
