After just breaking up with her boyfriend, a young woman named Mae returns home to take care of her father who has just been diagnosed with cancer. That quick synopsis, in addition to the terrible title “You Got Older,” gets the worst aspect of Clare Barron’s terrific new play out of the way so we can get to the good news: “You Got Older,” which opened Monday at the Cherry Lane Theater, is a bright, really quirky comedy that explores how one can turn the worst things in life into the best — or something close to it. It’s a really shaggy-dog play that meanders all over the place but never fails to fascinate at every odd-ball turn.
Playing daughter and father, Alia Shawkat and Peter Friedman are the kinds of actors who never let us catch them acting. They simply embody their roles. They reveal everything with the tiniest of gestures. It’s the way Shawkat shows her love by cautiously biting into one of her father’s homegrown peppers; it’s the way Friedman nonchalantly waves a mouth sponge from his hospital bed to dismiss a grandson’s cellphone call.
In telling Mae’s story, Barron goes off on lots of tangents that don’t immediately make sense but are often so loopy, if not downright gross, that we can’t help but be engaged. When Mae meets an old classmate (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt) whom she doesn’t remember for good reason, she gets intimate in a way she honed to kinky perfection with her recent ex. When Mae gathers at Dad’s bedside with her three siblings (Misha Brooks, Nadine Malouf, Nina White), they launch into a talk about the family’s most singular, disgusting trait: their rank B.O.
The attention to detail, a hallmark of Anne Kauffman’s direction, is most evident in this family scene. First off, it’s wonderful to see a family of five on stage nowadays; most playwrights, operating out of economic concerns, would make due with one sister or brother. Kauffman’s direction and the actors’ performances quickly establish each of these very different siblings with a mere sentence or two. Barron’s dialogue is that heightened, that stylized while remaining conversational.
Kauffman uses much broader strokes with the recurring motif of Emily’s sex fantasy, a hot cowboy (Paul Cooper) who alternates between treating her frostbite and tying her up. It’s a good thing that Barron is a woman. No male playwright could get away with these scenes or the directions in the script that read “You don’t know if he’s gonna f–k you or kill you.” The cowboy quickly emerges as genuine jerk-off material until he takes off his shirt. Disease permeates “You Got Older,” showing up when you least expect it, often delivered with a perverse wit.
Barron hasn’t given her play a satisfying ending. Then again, that’s just another way in which “You Got Older” replicates reality off the stage. A lot of times life doesn’t make sense, and why should we expect it to?
