You Got Older

A tender and darkly comic play about family, illness, and cowboys — and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.

Winner of the 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting, nominee for the 2015 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and a finalist for the 2015 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

After losing both her job and her boyfriend, an unmoored and unsettled Mae returns to her small Washington hometown to take care of her ailing father.

When she meets a mysterious stranger, she has the startling realization that maybe the intimacy she’s been craving is easier with the unknown, rather than with her own family.

Blending reality and fantasy, You Got Older is Obie Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Clare Barron's tender and darkly comic play about family, illness, and cowboys — and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.

This revised edition was published to coincide with the off-Broadway revival at the Cherry Lane Theatre directed by Anne Kauffman and starring Alia Shawkat in February 2026.