From Haley McGee, the creator of sell-out The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale (now also a memoir published by Penguin Random House) comes a brand-new show inspired by interviews with hospice workers, interactions with mystics and trips to the cemetery. Age is a Feeling is a gripping story about the glorious and melancholy unknowability of human life.
Age is a Feeling charts the seminal moments, rites of passage and turning points in an adult life – your life – from the day you turn 25 through to your death. Every performance, the audience chooses six from thirteen stories, as part of the lifespan that unfolds across the show. The remaining stories are left untouched, as a tantalising reminder of how life’s path can diverge due to seemingly insignificant choices.
It’s not until around age 25 that the human brain reaches maturity, shifting from the impulsive amygdala to the more rational prefrontal cortex, sharpening your ability to assess risk and plan for the future. Celebrating the light and the dark, McGee’s inventive show is a covert rallying cry against succumbing to cynicism and regret. It is a call to seize our time.
This formally inventive show is directed by Soho Theatre Associate Director Adam Brace (Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show, Sh!t Theatre’s Drink Rum with Expats) and produced by Soho Theatre where the show will transfer in September. Age is a Feeling is brought to life by scenic designer Zoë Hurwitz (winner, 2019 Linbury Prize for Stage Design; finalist, 2020 JMK awards) and lighting designer Daniel Carter-Brennan (Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show, Sh!t Theatre’s Drink Rum with Expats). This dynamic team have created a show that wrestles with our endless chances to change course while we’re alive.
Haley McGee, Writer and Performer, said I wrote Age is a Feeling over the last couple of years, witnessing friends and family fighting to stay alive, brushing up against death and bringing new life into the world. My research with hospice workers has also been particularly helpful and inspiring. The show hopes to grapple with how we might resist giving into disappointment and despair, not by ‘positive thinking’ but by allowing ourselves to re-invent and choose a new path, no matter our age.
Adam Brace, Director and Dramaturg, said The central mechanic of the show is intriguing and alive: the stories the audience hear and don’t hear. A manifestation of the unknowability of each of our lives. Age is a Feeling has been developed at Soho over the past two years, stretching back into the middle of the first lockdown. It probably owes a little to the psychological territory of that time, looking at the span of our life, in the context of human loss, what we have done and what we still might do.
David Luff, Soho’s Creative Director and Producer, said Haley’s gorgeously rich and brilliantly funny new show grapples with life and mortality, in a stylish, daring and inventive production. We’re tremendously excited to premiere this fantastic new piece of theatre in Edinburgh before its Soho transfer in the autumn.
