Anne Kauffman Meets Her Past Self in “You Got Older”

At the opening night of Clare Barron’s You Got Older at Cherry Lane Theatre. Front: Misha Brooks and Caleb Joshua Eberhardt. Back: Peter Friedman, Paul Cooper, Clare Barron, Anne Kauffman, Alia Shawkat, Nadine Malouf, and Nina White. Photo: Emilio Madrid.

“Recently,” says the director Anne Kauffman, “I’m like, you know what I want to do to make money? I want to revive shows that were very popular Off-Broadway and take them into the commercial realm.”

Kauffman (who is a resident director at Roundabout Theatre Company, where I am currently a fellow in the artistic office) isn’t sure when that idea took hold. She remembers watching Craig Lucas’s plays Reckless and Prelude to a Kiss move from the downtown black-box of Circle Rep to Broadway in the nineties, and says that example gave her the sense that rescaling work was a natural trajectory for downtown theater artists. 

Regardless, that notion has guided much of her recent work: There was Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, the unsentimental portrait of maternal devotion that she directed at New York Theatre Workshop in 2017, and then in its Broadway premiere in 2024. There was Jordan Harrison’s sleek AI elder-care drama Marjorie Prime, which she directed at Playwrights Horizons in 2015 and on Broadway earlier this season. Her latest project, Clare Barron’s You Got Older, preceded those two: Kauffman directed the play’s world premiere in 2014.

You Got Older is a tender, darkly funny play about a woman stalled between adulthood and childhood. Mae, newly dumped and unemployed, drifts back to her rural Washington home to care for her father as he undergoes treatment for a rare cancer. Their halting chats around the house are interspersed with reminders of Mae’s stagnation: an awkward reconnection with a near stranger at a local bar, a series of surreal sexual fantasies involving a dominant cowboy with his own strange illness, and a gathering around her father’s hospital bed with her three siblings. 

Kauffman’s new production at A24’s refurbished and rebranded Cherry Lane Theatre stars Alia Shawkat as Mae and Peter Friedman as her father. In this oddball collage of awkwardness and filial devotion, nothing much happens, yet everything does: time passes, a parent fails, and somewhere in the mess of shame and tenderness, Mae gets older.

Barron’s show shares some connective tissue with Mary Jane and Marjorie Prime — two plays that track how families reconfigure in the wake of medical crises. But those plays have somewhat harder exteriors. In an interview, Kauffman described You Got Older as, variously, “raw,” “primal,” “emotional,” and “visceral.” 

Page 73 co-founder Liz Jones, director Anne Kauffman, and playwright Clare Barron in 2014.

In 2014, she was drawn to the play’s emotion. “My mother had just died, and I told my agent I didn’t want to work for a while,” she recalled over Zoom from a train across Belgium, where she was staging the oratorio Fire in My Mouth. “Then Michael Walkup at Page 73 reached out with a play that he really wanted me to read.” She immediately connected to the family dynamic: “I really felt like there was going to be something healing about doing it.” At the time, those emotions were also fresh for Clare Barron. The playwright went through a breakup and a layoff just as her father was diagnosed with cancer. In 2014, Barron told the New York Times, “It was the only thing I could write about. At the time, I’d been writing a play about a prehistoric fish. Everyone in the prehistoric fish play kept getting cancer.”

Kauffman says she feels more grounded now, but that has made her somewhat nervous: “Part of me is worried that, well, if I’m not as raw, is the piece still raw?” But revisiting the material with Barron has offered her a chance to exercise a new perspective. “We were so inside of our experiences twelve years ago,” she says. “We are definitely looking back at ourselves at that age with a much more distant, critical, analytical eye.”

This time around, Kauffman says she was one of the oldest people in the rehearsal room. “I see the same themes — going home for refuge, not really wanting to be home because you don’t really like being there, but being afraid to leave home and needing to be pushed,” she says, except “I’m now a little bit on the other side” of that journey. Then there’s the fresh perspective that arrives with time: “At the same time, there’s this weird phenomenon where I feel like the further I get away from my childhood, the more time I spend thinking about my childhood,” she says. “So both sides of that lens are very alive in me.”

Danny Burstein, Cynthia Nixon, and June Squibb in the 2025 Broadway revival of Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, directed by Anne Kauffman. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Kauffman’s Broadway productions of Mary Jane and Marjorie Prime were clearly patterned on her earlier work, but this production of You Got Older is substantially different. When Kauffman directed the play at HERE Arts Center in 2014, she was working with a less traditional container. There was no proscenium, and the playing space was level with the audience. 

At the time, she told The Interval that space felt essential to the piece. “You want that porousness between the audience and the action,” Kauffman said. But things have changed in the last twelve years. The director got older, and her preferences shifted. “One thing about having a raised stage is that people can see it,” she says now. “Maybe that’s like growing up: I feel like this [version] has a more practical feeling to it, and I think maybe it doesn’t have the same porousness.”

Anne Kauffman prepping the latest production of You Got Older at Cherry Lane Theatre twelve years after she first directed the play. Photo: David Jacobson.

Even as she restages the show in a more conventional house, Kauffman has tried to keep the audience tethered to the text. “One of the things that’s super important about the play, then and now, is the fluidity of the space, that you can just walk into another scene and not worry about a scene change,” Kauffman says. The Cherry Lane makes that easier “just because of the intimacy — it’s a frickin’ tiny little space!”

The size also prompted Kauffman and scenic designer, Arnulfo Maldonado, to devise new strategies for creating fluidity. “HERE was a very, very wide space,” explains Kauffman, “so Mae had to travel to another space to be in another space.” Maldonado’s set, framed with gliding wooden panels that shift to suggest six or seven locations, is optimized for the Cherry Lane’s narrower playing space. 

In staging the piece again, Kauffman found the characters restricted. “There’s very little space for people to walk around in,” she says. But the set activates that restriction: “Mae can stay in the same place and then be transported to a conflation of two spaces without even having to move.” 

Restaging her old projects also allows Kauffman to be in two places at once: reliving choices she made a decade ago, even as she makes new ones. That’s a rare opportunity in the theater world, which lives only in the moment. But Kauffman says she has loved the chance to sit with her past self, and she can’t wait to do it again. She already has another project in mind: a revival of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit.