2 hours ago
1
It is the summer of 2024 and Haley McGee is performing Age Is a Feeling at a festival in Toronto. Her show is in good shape, having already raked in five-star reviews at the Edinburgh fringe. But this performance is different. As she launches into her poignant monologue about life, death and the business of getting old, she hears a baby cry.
The newborn sleeps through the rest of the show, but the performer, who is newly pregnant herself, feels as though she is speaking directly to this child and its young family. “It framed the whole show as a conversation with this baby,” McGee says: “This is my message for you about your adult life.”
Now preparing to revive the piece for a run in London, the Canadian-born playwright and actor has been imagining her one-year-old daughter as the target audience. Age Is a Feeling is written from the perspective of a 25-year-old speculating on her future, considering the choices, major and minor, that may or may not lead to a fulfilling life. Who can say how everything will play out: the feuds, affairs and health scares, the fragile friendships and creaking bones?
“The show was a bomb to say life is long and the die isn’t cast,” she says. “And just because you don’t get X or Y, doesn’t mean your life isn’t going to be tremendously valuable. It calmed me down about some of the boring anxieties that women my age tend to face.”
Now approaching her 40s, McGee writes with the wisdom of someone decades older. Age Is a Feeling has been performed in 10 languages – in China, Chile, Turkey and beyond – by actors ranging from their mid-20s to mid-50s, and somehow it always connects. “When we did it in Edinburgh, I could see everybody’s faces and there would be men in their 70s wiping tears. For it to be moving people who weren’t in my age bracket was amazing.”
She attributes this effect to what she calls her “anecdotal research”. Before writing, she spoke to all kinds of people by visiting hospices, mystics and cemeteries, and soliciting reflections on social media. “You will find a white pubic hair” is a line that comes directly from Facebook. It always gets a laugh. So too does the one about throwing your back out when doing something as innocuous as stepping out of the shower.
She loves this kind of research. “It’s like being a psychologist or a therapist, getting to put myself inside the experience of other people. I cry so much when I’m writing – to the point I can’t write in a cafe.”
The memory of the Toronto baby has stayed with her, but McGee is not the kind of actor to be fazed. Having studied improvisation with Second City in Chicago, she moved to London and joined the Free Association improv troupe. She loves thinking on her feet. One of her teachers at drama school told her: “You know, Haley, you really do your best work when you don’t quite know what you’re going to do.”
Because of this, Age Is a Feeling has a built-in layer of uncertainty. Which stories she tells depends on choices made by the audience. Around her on stage are postcards with words on – Teeth, Bus, Oyster – each triggering a different story. There are 12 in total and the audience hear six. Like life, Age Is a Feeling is unpredictable. It has innumerable possible variations, ranging from the joyful to the bleak.
“Sometimes it feels like there are a lot of highs and lows. Other times it feels like, ‘Oh, my God, what a brutal existence!’ Two of my good friends from school happened to see one of the most depressing versions. There was not one story chosen that had a sense of uplift or joy. I had to reassure them it wasn’t always like that!”
Consequently, the show hits different people in different ways. As she gets older, McGee has found own perspective shifting, whether influenced by the regular business of being alive or the tragically early death at 43 of her director, Adam Brace, in 2023.
Before her run in Toronto, Brace came to her in a dream. “We were on the top of a double-decker bus and he was giving me notes. I looked at him and said, ‘Adam, we’ve all been missing you so much, but you’re right here.’ I don’t know if that is a mystical thing or a sense that he lives in this piece of work, but I found it very comforting. Adam and I talked a lot about art consoling people and maybe that’s one of the big functions of this show. You come into this room and it’s, ‘Hey, you’re going to die and I’m going to die!’”
-
Age Is a Feeling is at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, London, 5–7 March
