Alia Shawkat and Clare Barron on the Millennial Coming-of-Age Play You Got Older

In the Clare Barron play You Got Older, the lead character of Mae goes home to care for her father who has cancer. In one scene, Mae is masturbating and her father walks in on her—it’s mortifying, it’s cringe. But Alia Shawkat, who is portraying Mae, isn’t embarrassed. Sure, she’s never done the theatre before. Sure, she may have some sex scenes on the stage. But she’s committed, telling Playbill: “For the sake of comedy, I’m willing to make myself look as stupid as possible.”

Shawkat is currently making her stage debut in You Got Older, running to rave reviews at the Cherry Lane Theatre as part of its inaugural season under new owners A24. It runs through April 12. A gifted comedian with a knack for off-kilter work (she was a mainstay on Arrested Development and Search Party), Shawkat wasn’t looking for a stage project. But then came the offer to do the play, and Shawkat was touched by its portrayal of parents and children (Mae’s father in the play is portrayed by veteran actor Peter Friedman).

“It's such a hard time, just getting older. Literally, you got older,” says Shawkat during rehearsals for the play. “For me, the piece talks about how it's so hard for us to be present with our parents. And if you're lucky and you have a close relationship—I have that with my parents but I still struggle so hard to just be kind sometimes, and just be nice and present with them … I’m just thinking about other stuff, things I don't have, things I want, desires, fantasies, and getting lost and busy and frustrated with them. And then all of a sudden, I leave their house and I'm wracked with guilt and wishing that I had just been nicer to them.”

The character that Shawkat is playing in You Got Older, Mae, feels familiar: a 20-something lawyer who is fired from her job, where she was dating her boss. Now at home caring for her sick father, Mae is face-to-face with mortality—how everyone’s bodies are breaking down, including her own. But at the same time, she still feels a little bit horny. It’s a weird confluence of feelings; she puts it, bluntly, while in bed with a date: “I feel like every blowjob I give is one blowjob closer to death.”

Shawkat has a knack for playing that type of millennial woman, a little messy and filled with ennui and listlessness. She can also deliver a funny line with aplomb, even in a dark setting—theatre fans might remember Shawkat because she lip-synced to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voice in a Hamilton-themed episode of Drunk History. “Has a woman played Hamilton yet? There’s always time,” Shawkat says suggestively.

That’s what made writer Clare Barron want to reach out to Shawkat about the play. “There's a tricky thing in the play where the daughter's, like, a little petulant,” explains Barron. “You want her to be really winning. You want to be on Mae’s side, even when Mae is hard to be around. And I felt like Alia had that quality of—there's something about her where you just really like her.”

If Shawkat is the master at playing millennial women, Barron is a master at writing them. You Got Older first premiered in New York in 2014; Barron won an Obie Award for it and became a voice-to-watch in the theatre. Her play Dance Nation, about a group of preteen competitive dancers, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. But Barron admits when she wrote You Got Older, at the age of 27, she had been going through her own personal crisis; like the character of Mae, she had lost her job, her boyfriend broke up with her, and her dad had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Recalls Barron: “My dad was in the bed, and I was on a cot behind a screen while he was undergoing treatment. And I was literally writing the play with him, not thinking about producing it. I was not thinking about my career. I was writing to survive.”

She vividly remembers being in rehearsal for You Got Older with director Anne Kauffman (who is also overseeing this revival), and hearing the news that her dad’s cancer treatment had worked—he is now currently in remission. Barron recalls “getting that text, and face planting into Anne's lap. It was so intense.”

Even though Barron and her father’s story has a happy ending, she didn’t want to provide that emotional release to the audience. It would be too typical, and would tie the story up too neatly. Instead, it’s that state of emotional purgatory that the characters experience in You Got Older, not knowing if dad would live or die and finding small moments of light within that uncertainty, that makes the play unique—even if the reviews in 2014 expressed confusion at its open ending.

“It’s not really a play about grief,” says Barron. “It's not a play about losing someone. It's about those final months before you could lose something—the characters don't know what's going to happen. I feel like there's a lot of plays about grief. There's a lot of plays about loss. But this play is actually about like that weird time in the waiting room where you're sort of like, ‘What's going to happen?’”

Even though the original 2014 production of You Got Older was well-received, it hadn’t been done in New York since, and Barron didn’t think it would be. Which was why she was so surprised when producer Matt Ross and the team at A24 reached out about a remount. Now that Barron has herself gotten older, written more successful plays, and her dad is cancer-free—she can look back on her first play with clearer eyes. “I've always wanted to work on it again. And also to get to work on it when I'm not in the grief cloud of your parent being sick.” She then remarks, with a small smile, “Why it happened now, I don't know, it's witchy. I'm very grateful for it.”

For both Shawkat and Barron, who are now in their 30s, getting to revisit the mental state of a 20-something woman in You Got Older has helped them appreciate their own growth. For Shawkat, she remembers auditioning for director Anne Kauffman early in her career for a play (she didn’t get it, the role went to Cristin Milioti).

Remarks Shawkat: “[Anne] was like, ‘You were so quiet, you were so shy.’ And I was like, ‘Wow, really? Now I'm loud as a truck.'” She’s more confident now, and she is a mom. So why relive her 20s? Well besides the fact that “I only play messed up people—they're more fun,” Shawkat appreciates the emotional release of playing someone who doesn’t have it all together. “I have a kid now, and you can't really let yourself fully fall apart. So it's nice to be able to translate it into performance. The world is such a scary place. And instead of crying alone, I get to just do it on stage, and that feels healthier, I guess.” She chuckles.

For Barron, getting to look back makes her appreciate how she’s taking better care of herself now—she no longer pulls all-nighters to write plays and she found the right medication for her bipolar disorder. She describes feeling in her 20s like “all my nerves were on the outside of my body…It was, like, not possible for me to watch a run of a play without just crying, because I just felt so exposed.” She then adds, marveling, “Anne Kauffman, the director, and I have looked at each other at times during this process, we're like, ‘Oh, we did get older and wiser.’”