In her program notes for “You Got Older,” playwright Clare Barron shares her “optimistic belief that there is profound comfort in just living privately together. Life and desire can persist even if all we can muster up is the courage and time to sit together with something unspeakable between us.” It’s a beautiful articulation of what this 2014 play—now receiving a revival at A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre—wants to be: an exploration of how families navigate terminal illness through avoidance, deflection, and the small intimacies of shared space. The problem is that profound comfort requires characters profound enough to sit together. Anne Kauffman’s production, hampered by Barron’s fundamentally underwritten script, offers neither intimacy nor its meaningful absence—just a sluggish 105 minutes with people we never quite come to know.

The setup is familiar: Mae (Alia Shawkat, making her stage debut) returns to her small Washington State hometown after losing both her job and her boyfriend—he was her boss, so the breakup meant unemployment too. She’s come home to care for her father (Peter Friedman), who’s undergoing treatment for laryngeal cancer that has metastasized throughout his body. The play opens in Dad’s vegetable garden, where they discuss peppers and mysterious greens that start with “A.” It’s meant to establish their dynamic through mundane avoidance—they talk about everything except what matters. But avoidance only registers dramatically when we sense what’s being avoided. Here, on Arnulfo Maldonado’s clunky set—with Friedman pulling wagons containing gardens and fire pits on and off the stage like a stagehand in a high school production—it’s hard to tell if we’re watching meaningful deflection or just thin writing.

Barron attempts to dramatize Mae’s psychological state through fantasy sequences featuring a mysterious Cowboy figure (Paul Cooper)—a Canadian trapper who rescues Mae from a blizzard, ties her up, threatens to “obliterate” her through violent sex. These scenes are meant to externalize Mae’s loneliness, her desire to be destroyed rather than deal with the emotional complexity of her father’s illness. But the sequences feel tacked on rather than integrated, trivialized rather than revelatory. When the Cowboy appears later as a hospital nurse and Mae responds with a moment of recognition, the moment plays as silly rather than psychologically revealing. More fundamentally: who cares if Mae is “horny as hell” (her words) when she’s supposedly come home to care for her dying father? The sexual fantasy material doesn’t deepen our understanding of Mae’s crisis—it trivializes both the cancer story and whatever loneliness Barron wants us to see.

The play’s centerpiece—a long hospital scene with all four Hardy siblings gathered around Dad’s bed—has received universal praise from other critics as “beautifully observed family dynamics” and a “gorgeous dramatic fugue.” What I saw was lifeless. The siblings spend more time discussing the “Hardy family smell” (musty, dank, like mildew, maybe mothballs?) than grappling with their father’s illness. Hannah (Nadine Malouf) pressures Mae about job hunting. Jenny (Nina White) worries about missing the ceremonial gong-ringing. Matthew (Misha Brooks) unpacks avocados and complains about Oregon beating Washington at everything. There’s extended discussion of penis size. It’s all meant to be richly evasive—look at this family avoiding the unspeakable thing between them!—but evasion only works dramatically when we sense what’s being evaded and who these people are to each other. Here it just feels like wheel-spinning.

A late-night encounter between Mae and Mac (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt), a former schoolmate who climbs through her bedroom window, should be charged with awkward intimacy—two people fumbling toward connection. Instead it falls completely flat. Mac has been drinking (Mae can smell it, wishes he hadn’t). There’s no condom. He falls asleep. The scene is meant to dramatize failed connection, but Kauffman’s staging is so inert, with such oddly extended pauses, that audience members were left wondering if actors had gone up on their lines. When the Cowboy appears immediately after to “obliterate” Mae through violent fantasy sex, the juxtaposition reads as unearned rather than psychologically revealing.

The performances across the board are merely adequate, which in a production this intimate feels like a failure. Shawkat maintains essentially the same expression throughout—a kind of blank affect that might be meant to signal dissociation but reads more as a lack of range. There’s no chemistry between Mae and her father, none among the siblings. These aren’t characters who feel like they’ve known each other for decades; they’re actors dutifully delivering lines. Even Friedman, a veteran stage actor who recently gave a searing performance in “Job,” can’t make Barron’s material cohere into something meaningful. When a performer of Friedman’s caliber—pulling literal wagons of props across the stage—can’t locate the emotional architecture of a role, the problem is larger than performance.

The issue, finally, is one of authorial intention versus execution. Barron has described “You Got Older” as “a kind of play without perspective,” written in the middle of a personal crisis before anything was resolved. “The characters are so far inside of something that they don’t know how to explain what’s happening to them,” she writes. “The result is a lot of avoidance.” But there’s a crucial distinction between characters who avoid intimacy because they’re trapped inside overwhelming emotion, and characters who simply haven’t been written with enough psychological depth to avoid anything meaningfully. A play about the impossibility of intimacy still requires characters intimate enough—to themselves, to each other, to us—to fail at intimacy in ways that register. Without that foundation, we’re left watching people talk around feelings we never believe they have.

Which makes the play’s final moments all the more frustrating, because they reveal what Barron is capable of when the writing sharpens. Mae’s closing monologue—delivered after she’s returned to Minneapolis—finds her walking through a Polar Vortex, discovering the last pair of snow boots in the city (Sorels that run big, one size too small but they fit), encountering an old woman in her building’s elevator who makes pea soup for Bob the doorman (“That’s what friends are for!”). Standing alone in her apartment wearing her new boots, Mae experiences an unexpected moment of grace: “What is this feeling? Happiness / For no reason at all.” It’s genuinely moving writing—Barron capturing how joy can arrive unbidden through mundane human kindness, those small gestures of connection that persist even when everything else collapses. The phone call that immediately follows—Dad crying, barely able to speak, the cancer now in his lungs and stomach—lands with devastating force precisely because of the happiness that preceded it.

But then the play asks us to make one final leap: a wedding dance, all four siblings drunk and sweaty and joyful, dancing like they know it’s the last dance of the night, confetti stuck to their faces. “DAD is not there.” It should be the play’s emotional culmination—grief and celebration collapsed into a single moment, life persisting in the face of death. But after 105 minutes of underdeveloped characters and failed intimacy, the dance doesn’t earn its cathartic weight. The monologue proves Barron can write powerful material; the production’s staging of what follows cannot deliver the payoff that material demands.

Barron’s belief in finding “profound comfort in just living privately together” remains compelling as an artistic vision—there’s real insight in the idea that families can sit with the unspeakable and find grace in merely being present to each other’s suffering. But insight doesn’t become drama without characters vivid enough to embody it, and direction confident enough to realize it on stage. This revival, A24’s second theatrical production at the newly reopened Cherry Lane Theatre, suggests that the studio’s distinctive cinematic aesthetic—naturalism punctuated by surrealism, discomfort, and dark comedy—doesn’t automatically translate to the stage. What works in a two-hour film with close-ups and editing rhythms requires different architecture in live performance. “You Got Older” needed characters we could believe in, a production design that served rather than undermined the material, and direction that could locate the emotional through-line Barron promises but never quite delivers. Instead, we get a play that mistakes thinness for ambiguity, and calls it profundity.