Getting Older with Clare Barron and Anne Kauffman
Mortality has a way of sneaking up on you. For the playwright Clare Barron, the wake-up call came in 2013, when her father was diagnosed with Stage IV head-and-neck cancer. She had just been dumped by a boyfriend who was also her boss; at loose ends, she took trips to Washington to be with her dad and started writing through it. She gave these overlapping crises to Mae, the protagonist of “You Got Older,” which premièred at HERE Arts Center, in Manhattan, within a year of the events that inspired it. Barron was twenty-seven. The other day, she surveyed her old venue, her gaze alighting on a tree-filled courtyard next door. “I remember having a lot of tearful conversations right here,” she said brightly.
Both the original production and a new one, now running at the Cherry Lane Theatre, were directed by Anne Kauffman, known for her work with such playwrights as Amy Herzog and Jordan Harrison. Kauffman arrived at HERE with her husky mix, Eleanor Roosevelt, in tow. “Hi, honey bunny!” she said to Barron. She wore a rust-colored tank top, her hair in a ponytail. Barron, less optimistic about the early spring weather, was buttoned into a long red coat.
The pair set off on a walk, Eleanor sniffing the pavement as they went. Their first encounter twelve years ago was, Kauffman said, “very blind date-y.” She’d taken a break from directing. “My mother had just passed away,” she said. “I didn’t want to do anything.” Then she read “You Got Older.” The tragicomic look at two lives on hold struck a chord; its depiction of a family bickering and bantering, and of the risks of intimacy, felt specific and true. Kauffman, fresh from a divorce, was drawn to Mae’s plight: “I thought, I have to do this play.”
Barron’s dad was finally declared cancer-free during rehearsals. She hadn’t shown anyone in her family the script. “One of the most terrifying nights of my life was my parents coming to see the play,” she said. (Beyond the real-life trauma, there was the fact that her heroine, unmoored and horny, fantasizes about a cowboy who’s into B.D.S.M.) In the end, her dad got it, and Barron won an Obie. Though the show could run only a month, she and Kauffman kept in touch and schemed about reviving it.
Their stroll ended at the Cherry Lane, where the front-of-house staff cooed over Eleanor. Barron and Kauffman entered the adjoining restaurant, the Wild Cherry—retro vibe, painted ferns creeping up the walls—and settled into a green booth. Over drinks (Barron’s a white Negroni, Kauffman’s a spicy Paloma), they reflected on the new run, which stars Alia Shawkat and Peter Friedman. This time, the chief source of anxiety had been a pivotal dance sequence improbably set to Pitbull’s “Timber.” At HERE, they hadn’t asked his permission, and Barron was alarmed when the Cherry Lane insisted that she reach out. “But I did write a letter to Pitbull saying, Hey, we’re doing a play about cancer. Can we use this? And Pitbull said we could.”
In between the two productions, Barron moved to L.A. and became a Pulitzer finalist for another semi-autobiographical play, “Dance Nation.” Kauffman made her Broadway début and was later nominated for a Tony. Other things remain the same. “I’m still myself, and by that I mean there’s still a ton of drama and angst in my life,” Barron said. She met her partner in the writers’ room for a TV show—a guy who, like the ex from “You Got Older,” started out as her boss. “Something he does not love is that I’ve dated many of my bosses,” she admitted. “I just like a power dynamic!”
Her next project will also be with Kauffman. The new play is about, as Barron put it, “a thirty-year affair,” and “the myth of the soulmate.”
“It’s about marriage, and it’s about love, and it’s about art,” Kauffman said. “In my own life, I feel like all of those things were thrown into question after we worked together, and we bonded over that.”
The evening’s performance was about to start. Both women had loved ones in the audience, but this time Barron’s parents weren’t among them. They were on a long vacation to Italy, born of the near-death experience that had inspired “You Got Older.” When her dad recovered, she explained, he and her mother thought about what they wanted from the rest of their lives. “They’re sending me fifty photos a day on WhatsApp of the Sicilian countryside,” Barron said, smiling. “Nothing makes me happier than knowing they’re living their dream instead of seeing my play again.” ♦