Theatre in Review: You Got Older (Page 73/HERE)

	Brook Bloom. Photo: Jenny Anderson

When it comes to identifying fresh new theatrical voices, Page 73 has one of the higher batting averages around and the winning streak continues with You Got Older. The premise of Clare Barron's comic drama -- an at-loose-ends young woman in her twenties caring for her gravely ill father -- sounds like the height of banality, but Barron enlivens it with characters who are both deeply eccentric and instantly recognizable; she also has an eye for details that are simultaneously funny and a punch in the gut. Best of all, she has down pat the cardinal rule of playwriting: Show, don't tell.

Mae is a lawyer based in Minneapolis, who, having just lost her job and boyfriend in one fell swoop, has returned home to the Seattle area to take care of her father, who has cancer of the larynx. It's a shock to see Reed Birney, who plays her father, with his neck stained a vivid red by radiation burns, but it's pretty much par for the course in a play that finds strangeness in the details of the most ordinary lives. Dabbing at a sore on his lips, he dismisses his suffering, stoically commenting on his clan, "I think in general we have acidic mouths."

Mae and her father are close, but everything about this situation is awkward, beginning with a small hassle about which bedroom she should occupy. (She wants to stay in the basement but ends up in the room next door to Dad, thereby guaranteeing that she will have no privacy whatsoever.) Questions about how long she plans to stay at home get vague answers that end in pregnant pauses. When asked if she is currently looking for a job, she snaps that she has severance pay, so she can take her time. She almost sounds as if she believes herself.

In scene after scene, Barron makes clear the complicated tangle of emotions shared by Mae and her father without resorting to overt commentary. We don't need to be told about the infantilizing effects of living at home, because we see Mae sneaking in a beau through her bedroom window for a frustrated attempt at a sexual encounter. Nobody has to point out that Mae can't quite let go of her ex, because we see her knitting a scarf for him. And when her father gently nags Mae about her upcoming job interview -- a conversation that quickly goes south -- we are fully apprised of the tensions raised by adult family members living at too-close quarters. "This is almost like we're camping," says Mae, brightly, at one point. Maybe, but for all their mutual affection, it's a trip neither one of them really wants to take.

Barron is a whiz at supplying oddball details that throw the characters into sharp relief without resorting to the coy or cutesy. In a bar where Mae has escaped for a little private time, Mac, who thinks he went to school with her, tries to pick her up and gets treated to a borderline hysterical rant about her unraveling life. Mae's father, who likes things arranged nicely and neatly, names "Firewood," by Regina Spektor, as the theme song of his illness, producing a recording of it on his smartphone. In the funniest, and yet most truthful, scene, Barron assembles Mae, her brother, and two sisters in a hospital room to watch over their father, who is recovering from yet another procedure. Their batty conversation, which consists of low-level squabbling about their alleged family smell, one sister's wedding prospects, and the quality of the food chosen for their hospital-room meal, is one of the most acute demonstrations I've seen of how adult siblings fall into childhood roles the second they encounter each other.

There are too many plays about young adults worrying obsessively over their prospects for happiness in an indifferent universe, but here, because Mae avoids self-pity like the plague, You Got Older earns the right to contemplate the fragility of daily life and ordinary happiness. And Barron avoids editorializing on her play's theme, instead communicating it in a hundred subtle ways: Every so often, for example, a conversation between Mae and her father will wander into silence, the air heavy with unspoken thoughts. They don't have to say a thing; by this point, we can read their melancholy minds.

Barron is a relatively new playwright and the delicate balance of You Got Older is sometimes nearly overwhelmed by oddities, particularly in a series of dream sequences in which Mae is lustfully manhandled by an anonymous cowboy figure, or when she and Mac flirt with each other by revealing their fascination with grotesque bodily details. But under Anne Kauffman's excellent direction, an exceptional cast finds all of the laughter and sadness in Barron's script. Brooke Bloom's Mae is a marvel of delicacy, an adult marooned in the setting of her childhood, quietly whipsawing between maturity and adolescent acting-out. Birney underplays superbly as the father; in one especially revelatory moment, he takes a bite of cheesecake and the look on his face reveals the pain of swallowing; it's all you need to know about his illness. Later, when Mae announces it's time for her to move on, the relief in his eyes communications volumes. William Jackson Harper is fine as Mac, particularly in that nighttime bedroom encounter that leads nowhere, and Ted Schneider, Miriam Silverman, and Keilly McQuail are delightful as Mae's magpie siblings.

Daniel Zimmerman's set, a large room with stained wood paneling, is made to stand in for variety of locations, including Mae's bedroom, the hospital, a bar, and (with a painted drop that appears) various exteriors. It's not a totally successful strategy, but it allows for fast scene changes, which is the main thing. Russell Champa's lighting is thoroughly solid, especially the inventive use of fluorescent units that appear on the upstage wall in the dream sequences. Ásta Bennie Hostetter's costumes are well-chosen, as are the variety of atmospheric sound effects and pop musical selections by Daniel Kluger, who also composed the incidental music.

Mae doesn't necessarily get her life in order and there are more terrible reversals to come, but before You Got Older is over she seems headed in the right direction. In the remarkable, wordless final scene, she and her siblings, dressed for a wedding, dance, frantically, to the Pitbull/ Kesha hit "Timber." The dance ends in sweat and exhaustion, but it's a powerful picture of people clinging to life at all costs. This play has its excesses, but Clare Barron is a find.--David Barbour