Alia Shawkat on Daddy Issues, Millennial Malaise, and Her Off-Broadway Debut

Before taking the stage in You Got Older, her off-Broadway debut, Alia Shawkat prefers to be in her body and not her head. In the acting sense, at least. In real life, it’s a little more complicated. Clare Barron’s 2014 play, currently running at A24’s revamped Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, explores the awkward and mounting frustration of being second-in-command to our constantly aging and impossibly unpredictable bodies. 

After breaking up with her boyfriend and losing her job, Mae (Shawkat) returns home to Washington State to take care of her dying father, played by Succession’s Peter Friedman. In 100 minutes, we watch as an anxious Mae, riddled with rashes, nurses old familial wounds and untimely feels of lust (leading to persistent hallucinations of a sex-crazed cowboy). We’re powerless in life, the show seems to suggest, but there’s something equally profound about trying to dance through it.

For Shawkat, best known for her work in Arrested Development and the generation-defining satire Search Party, it was the kind of script she’d been waiting for. “If I don’t do this,” she thought to herself, “then I’m never going to do theater.” A few shows into the run, she was handling it with aplomb.

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CHARLOTTE ZAGER: Hey! How are you doing?

ALIA SHAWKAT: I’m okay!

ZAGER: Congratulations on everything.

SHAWKAT: Thanks so much.

ZAGER: This is your stage debut, right?

SHAWKAT: Yeah. I did a performance art piece where I was on stage for 24 hours, but this is my first real play.

ZAGER: First play, right. And are you having fun?

SHAWKAT: I mean, I’m definitely having fun. It’s a lot more tiring in a different way than film and TV, where you know when you need to use your energy. This is like, the long game. It’s fascinating and it’s a really amazing piece, so I love doing it every night.

ZAGER: How does the added element of a live audience feel?

SHAWKAT: It’s weird. It’s like it’s alive the whole time. Every show is different because of the audience, which I guess seems pretty obvious but was somewhat surprising to me. Every night, every audience, you just have a different energy that you’re dealing with and learning how to communicate with instead of just speaking in a vacuum. When you’re filming something, there’s so many stages until it’s seen by an audience—and at that point you’re pretty disconnected from it. So the energy you felt when you made it is completely different by the time it’s out and shared with people. Whereas with this one, it’s happening firsthand. The audience is a lot more engaged and involved in the final product.

ZAGER: Have you seen people cry?

SHAWKAT: I haven’t seen it directly because I can’t fully see. [Laughs] I don’t want to look at anyone until it’s over. But I can hear some people crying at the end, and it’s nice to know that it’s landing, at least.

ZAGER: What was the casting process like? Did the script immediately resonate with you?

SHAWKAT: It did. Obviously, I haven’t done theater before, but I read other pieces and this was kind of the first one that I was like, “Oh, I can’t not do this.” The material just really spoke to me, and it was stuff that I hadn’t read in a script or anything else before. Some parts of it made me uncomfortable, and then it made me laugh, and it also made me cry. I knew it was going to be challenging just because it was asking a lot as a performance, and having to relocate and come here and all these things. I was like, “Oh, it’s a big ask.” But I was also like, “If I don’t do this, then I’m never going to do theater.” Because then I’m just saying no to the experience altogether.

ZAGER: What’s it been like working with Peter Friedman?

SHAWKAT: It’s amazing.

ZAGER: He’s an icon.

SHAWKAT: He’s really quite a legend, so kind and giving. And he has been so supportive with this being my first show. He’s a really giving spirit, and he’s so good in the play and so grounding in his energy, so it’s really so fun to play off. He’s just the kindest human.

ZAGER: You guys really seem really related. It feels very real.

SHAWKAT: We have a good chemistry, for sure.

ZAGER: I read your recent Playbill interview and—

SHAWKAT: What did I do?

ZAGER: [Laughs] They wrote that you are the master of playing millennial women. So I’m wondering, how do you attack that type? Is there a certain millennial sensibility that you seek out?

SHAWKAT: Am I, though? [Laughs] It’s so funny, actually. It’s come up a couple times. This play is supposed to take place in 2014, so it’s of that era, and I guess the characters I play are women going through a certain ennui. I don’t really relate to being a millennial, even though I am one, obviously. I don’t necessarily see myself as a generational spirit. But I could definitely see how there’s a connection there. Especially with Search Party, which was completely commenting on millennials.

ZAGER:  I was going to ask about Search Party. What do you think allowed the show to grow such a passionate fan base?

SHAWKAT: Well, I’m so proud of that. And I hope it does. I mean, we got five seasons, which was amazing. We couldn’t have asked for anything more. But you never feel like it’s enough. And I was always like, “Are people actually watching this show?” But I’m so proud of it. I think it’s such a well-written show. It’s so funny, it’s a true satire, and I think a lot of things like to think they’re satires and they’re not. It’s a fine line to do it well, satire, and I think Search Party accomplished it. People saw themselves in it, and each season evolved and got more wild than the last and never did what you expected it to do. It was a new genre every season, and I think that was kind of new at that time. Like, it’s a comedy, but there’s a mystery! And then all of a sudden, I felt like I saw that everywhere. Everyone was doing a version of it and that’s a good sign.

ZAGER: In a previous interview about the show, you said something about not playing the humor.

SHAWKAT: Yeah, I think that’s kind of one of the rules of comedy to a degree, not to make it sound like I’m the fucking comedy doctor. But if you’re too inside the joke, it’s not as funny. If you watch someone across the street and they trip and they don’t see that you see them trip, and then you see them pretending like they didn’t trip, it’s hilarious. But if they are watching and trying to make you laugh, it’s not as funny. So for Search Party, the more real we played it, the better it worked. And we were also trying to create a very specific tone on that show. John Early and me and everyone, we were all on different kinds of notes, but it just sounded good together. Whereas in a play, it has to be a lot more harmonious tone-wise because it’s not controlled by music and editing and directing. We’re doing the editing. We’re building the timing together. Peter’s pauses and my looks, we choose it in the moment. And I’m still trying to find that balance, honestly.

ZAGER: Well, I was laughing.

SHAWKAT: Good. I’m glad.

ZAGER: I also wanted to ask you about the cowboy, because I thought it was funny and such a specific choice. Do you think it was purely a sexual fantasy, or maybe a manifestation of something deeper?

SHAWKAT: I think it’s both. It’s definitely the latter. He’s a projection. He’s an amalgamation of her fears of disease, of the sickness she thinks she carries, of how she judges her own sexuality and how you can feel like you’re gross for wanting something. I think he represents desire, or a fantasy that she’d rather live in than reality. And then I think the upsetting part is that he starts to have a mind of his own and he becomes something quite scary by the end.

ZAGER: I also felt he represented the possibility of feeling so many conflicting things at the same time. You can be horny, and your dad can be standing right outside the door. We see this on stage.

SHAWKAT: Yeah, 100%. When I read this play for the first time, I was like, “Wow, I haven’t read anything that communicates that so well.” That weird balance of family and our own sexuality and how murky that can be. And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m not going to talk to my dad about what I masturbate to, but why is it so gross?” So it really communicates that well, how we can’t be present with our family and this discomfort. We just have to keep lots of ourselves really private.

ZAGER: It’s true.

SHAWKAT: And then there’s death. Sex, death, family. Good times!

ZAGER: My last question: how have you gotten older over the course of this?

SHAWKAT: Well, I was smoking cigarettes every now and then, and I quit. I’m just like, I can’t do it anymore. So I am getting older. It’s so bad for me. I’m definitely not drinking and going out as much because I have a kid, and I have to go home to be with him, and I want to be awake and be with him. Every other day, my throat’s always a little dry. I have to be really good at setting boundaries and being in a bar like, “I can’t talk to you tonight.” So it’s just like, let me take care of myself a little bit more to do the play justice.

ZAGER: That’s good. You got a little older.

SHAWKAT: We always joke about that Christina Aguilera song, “Come On Over.” We always sing: You got older. You got older, baby. [Laughs]