You Got Older Doesn T Try For Wiser

T
his play has an embarrassingly autobiographical origin story,” says
playwright Clare Barron in the program for You Got Older, running
now at Steppenwolf Theatre. And she runs down the real-life parallels to
prove it.



And so it goes. We meet Mae’s siblings—bossy older sister Hannah, lesbian
PC-language-policeperson Jenny, big friendly lug Matthew—all of whom live
outside Seattle and bear a zeitgeisty resemblance to the Tim Robbins-Holly
Hunter brood in HBO’s Portland-based Here and Now. They sit around
Dad’s bed at the hospital, post-op, demonstrating their family dynamics as
well as some sub-Sarah Ruhlian wackiness. Mae herself is engagingly
uninhibited when it comes at least to talking about sex: she declines to
give any more blow jobs, she says, not for the usual reasons but because
they remind her of her mortality as they pile up toward the horizon.

Through 3/11: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$89.