“Oh my God, what a brutal existence!” – this is one of the reactions that Haley McGee evokes with her theatrical play Age Is a Feeling, a global hit that talks about aging, life, death and everything that comes in between.
Summer 2024. McGee is performing the play at a festival in Toronto. Her work has already received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe, but this time something is different: During her moving monologue, she hears a baby cry. The baby sleeps for the rest of the play, but for McGee – who was pregnant at the time – everything takes on a new meaning. “I felt like I was speaking directly to that child,” she says. “It was my message for his future life.”
As she prepares to bring the play back to London, McGee imagines her one-year-old daughter as the ideal audience. Age Is a Feeling is written from the perspective of a 25-year-old woman speculating about the future: the choices big and small, the fragile friendships, the loves, the illnesses, the changing body, and the big question of whether life will turn out as she hoped.
“The show is like a bombshell that tells you that life is long and nothing is predetermined,” she explains. “Even if you don’t achieve X or Y, it doesn’t mean your life is worthless.” This message, she says, has also calmed her from the typical anxieties of women in their late 20s and early 30s.
Although he is now approaching 40, McGee writes with the maturity of someone much older. The play has been performed in 10 languages, from China to Chile to Turkey, by actors aged 25 to 55 – and it works everywhere. “In Edinburgh I would see men in their 70s wiping away tears. It was extraordinary to be able to touch people outside my generation.”
She attributes this influence to “anecdotal research.” Before writing, McGee visited hospices, mystics, and cemeteries, as well as collecting stories on social media. The “you’ll find a white pubic hair” joke comes straight from Facebook and always gets a laugh—as does the one about your back “going out of place” from a completely innocent movement.
Formed in improvisation with Second City in Chicago and later part of the London troupe The Free Association, McGee loves uncertainty on stage. The show itself is built on audience choices: postcards with words like “Tooth,” “Bus,” “Ostard” open up different stories. Of the 12 possible stories, the audience hears only six – just like life, unpredictable and multifaceted.
"Sometimes it seems like a rollercoaster ride. Other times you think, 'Oh my God, what a brutal existence!'" she says, recalling that two of her friends saw one of the darker versions of the show.
Over time, her perspective has changed, influenced in part by the loss of her director Adam Brace, who died at age 43 in 2023. Before the Toronto screenings, Brace appeared to her in a dream. “It was comforting,” she says. “We often talked about art as a way to comfort people. Maybe that’s one of the main functions of this show: you walk into the room and accept the simple fact – ‘I’m going to die and you’re going to die’ – but you’re not alone.” /GazetaExpress/
t7 live
