“Oh my God, what a monstrous existence!” Haley McGee talks about her global success about aging | comedy

IIt’s the summer of 2024 and Hailey McGee is performing “Age is a Feeling” at a festival in Toronto. Its display is in good condition, having already received five-star reviews in Edinburgh. But this performance is different. As she begins her moving speech about life, death, and aging, she hears the sound of a baby crying.

The newborn sleeps through the rest of the show, but the actress, newly pregnant, feels as if she is speaking directly to this child and his young family. “He framed the whole show as a conversation with this kid. And that’s my message to you about your adult life,” McGee says.

Now preparing to revive the play for a London run, the Canadian-born playwright and actress imagines her one-year-old daughter as the target audience. Age Is Feeling is written from the perspective of a 25-year-old girl speculating about her future, considering the choices, both major and minor, that may or may not lead to a fulfilling life. Who can say how things will turn out: the disagreements, the affairs, the health scares, the fragile friendships, the creaking bones?

“The show was a bombshell of saying life is long and the dice have not been rolled,” she says. “And just because you didn’t get

Now, approaching her 40s, McGee writes with the wisdom of someone decades her senior. “Age is a Feeling” has been released in ten languages ​​— in China, Chile, Turkey and beyond — with actors ranging in age from their mid-20s to mid-50s, and in one way or another they are always connected. “When we did it in Edinburgh, I could see everyone’s faces and there were guys in their 70s wiping away tears. It was amazing to touch people who weren’t in my age group.”

She attributes this effect to what she calls “anecdotal research.” Before writing, I spoke to all kinds of people by visiting nursing homes, mystics, cemeteries, and soliciting ideas on social media. “You will find white pubic hair” is a phrase that comes straight from Facebook. She always gets a laugh. The same goes for throwing your back out when doing something harmless like getting out of the bathroom.

She loves this kind of research. “It’s like being a psychiatrist or therapist, putting myself inside other people’s experiences. I cry a lot when I write – so much so that I can’t write in a café.”

The memory of the Toronto kid stuck with her, but McGee isn’t the type to get upset. After studying improvisation with Second City in Chicago, she moved to London and joined the Free Association improvisation troupe. She likes to think on her feet. One of her drama school teachers told her: “You know, Hailey, you do your best work when you don’t quite know what you’re going to do.”

For this reason, age is a feeling that has a built-in layer of uncertainty. The stories you tell depend on the choices the audience makes. Surrounding her on stage are postcards with words – teeth, bus, oyster – each evoking a different story. There are 12 in total and the audience hears six. Like life, age is an unpredictable feeling. It has countless possible variations, ranging from joyful to depressing.

“Sometimes, it feels like there are a lot of highs and lows. Other times, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what a brutal existence!'” Two of my close friends from school happened to watch one of the most depressing versions. Not a single story was chosen that felt uplifting or uplifting. I had to reassure them that this isn’t always the case!

Therefore, the symptom affects different people in different ways. As she grows older, McGee finds her own perspective changing, whether influenced by her usual act of survival or by the tragic early death of her director, Adam Bryce, at the age of 43, in 2023.

Before her run in Toronto, Bryce came to her in a dream. “We were on the roof of a double-decker bus and he was giving me notes. I looked at him and said, ‘Adam, we’ve all missed you so much, but you’re here.'” I don’t know if that’s a mystery or a feeling that he lives in this work, but I found it very comforting. Adam and I talked a lot about the art of consoling people and maybe that’s one of the big jobs of this show. You come into this room and say, “Hey, you’re going to die and I’m going to die!”