Of a Certain Age: Aging and the American Theater

“Because I thought that you know

I thought of aging as just something we do

at the end of life 

that only involves depression and loneliness and diapers and decline

and

we are aging from the minute we’re born.”

–Ashton Applewhite in Of A Certain Age (2018)

These are the words of Ashton Applewhite, a writer and activist who has dedicated much of her career to writing about and dismantling ageism in the United States. NYU’s Verbatim Performance Lab interviewed Applewhite in 2018 for a piece of documentary verbatim theatre created by Dr. Joseph Salvatore. The play was aptly titled Of A Certain Age, a very direct reference to one of a plethora of terms utilized to falseheartedly blunt the potential “harm” of calling someone ‘old’ or ‘aging.’ The series of interviews, commissioned by the Waldman Room for Senior Activities of the Actor’s Fund (today the Entertainment Community Fund), explored the experience of performers as they age. In the ‘notes about the process’ Dr. Salvatore describes the research question as such: 

“What are the experiences of becoming an older performing artist or arts professional (over the age of 65)? How can gaining a clearer understanding of these experiences of older performing artists and professionals help to combat ageism within the population at large?”

In an increasingly ageist society, my curiosity as an early-career theatre maker is how research-based theatre can invite audiences to consider new perspectives on aging. Pulling from Dr. Salvatore’s questions to the performers he interviewed, I want to know how theatre can help audiences gain a clearer understanding of the vast and varied experiences of aging in the 21st century –-and ultimately if theatre can begin to dismantle ageism in the process.

Investigating Age via Verbatim Theater

In 2022, US life expectancy was 77 years. In 2024, the oldest living woman in the US died at the age of 115. Due to advancements in medicine and better quality of life, Americans are living longer and longer. And yet, in many parts of the West, the concept of aging brings up conflicting connotations: wisdom, for some, but for others, senility and impending death. In light of this conflict of perception, what might theatre tell us about aging and its futurity? Can the theatre be a place for aging to be generously explored, without prejudice? These questions seem even more prescient in 2024 in light of the recent US election which saw Donald Trump re-elected, whose second term “could result in a far more limited government role in the care of frail older adults,” according to Forbes. 

Research based theatre making methods such as the investigative theatre of The Civilians or the interview-based verbatim work of Anna Deaveare Smith and Moisés Kaufman, is a particularly important methodology for representing aging onstage. The advantage of these plays, of course, is that they stem from conversations, interviews, and research with and about the people who they are representing onstage. Verbatim theatre, such as the work of Dr. Salvatore and the Verbatim Performance Lab at NYU has an IRB-approved interview protocol and specific stipulations on ethical conduct ingrained into its very way of working. Dr. Salvatore teaches a kind of theatre making that is care and curiosity based, with the prompt to “do no harm,” as a foundational principle. Anna Deavere Smith, my own teacher and mentor at NYU, has interviewed thousands of Americans while working on what she describes as “becoming America” as she hears and later (re)presents the words of real people, from young children to older adults.

In this model of theatre making, actor-researchers of all ages play the people they have interviewed and speak their words verbatim. The choice to ‘cast across identity’ invites the audience to reckon with what verbatim theatre makers describe as a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance.’ This happens, for example, when the audience hears the words of an 86 year old puppeteer spoken by a woman in her mid 20s. The audience cannot solely rely on what they are seeing, but this potential dissonance offers them the opportunity to hear the words in a new way, which often prompts them to examine their own proximity to the words being spoken. Since the actor onstage may not look or sound like the person that they are (re)presenting, an audience can not rely only on their visual biases, and hopefully, their awareness of the content is heightened.

“The undeniability of human life, fragile and rageful, is perhaps a starting point for reframing aging from decline to life’s biggest truth and most enduring reality. “

Words in verbatim theatre, evidently, are of the utmost importance. And one of the ways in which Of A Certain Age was very successful in examining ageism, was in putting onstage the words of a real person experiencing aging. Ashton Applewhite, aforementioned participant and character in the play, quite succinctly responds to how she thinks about aging in her late 60s, saying: 

“One of my many pet peeves is when parents in particular or celebrities or baby boomers

are described as aging

partly because in this culture

it’s

a pejorative which it shouldn’t be but also everyone is aging and the adjective in most

cases should be older

right? You’re older parents.

So aging is how we move through life

and interact

with each other so it is the biggest canvas

there is.”

Applewhite frames aging as “the biggest canvas there is,” a line of poetry that perhaps would never have been uttered were it not for the piece of investigative theatre that prompted it. And this framing of aging is a much more convincing one, in my opinion, than Shakespeare’s famous lines from All’s Well That Ends Well: “And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages”–a decidedly masculine, medieval, and productivity-based read on aging, rooted in the Middle Ages’ view of life being ‘seven ages’ leading ultimately to oblivion. This view of aging, not coincidentally and not alone, has influenced many of the Western perspectives of aging and death, as a slow march toward uselessness, particularly in the United States where older adults are the fastest growing group experiencing homelessness.

Research, Rage and Reframing

The Civilians’ R&D Group has recently supported research based theatre makers to bring to life two pieces that deal with aging: ASSISTED and The Single Raindrop. Adam Chanler-Berat and Julian Hornik’s ASSISTED explores memory and metatheatricalizes a memory care unit in an assisted living facility. This piece of docu-drama adds another existing layer of ‘cognitive dissonance’ in its being a musical, entering the canon of perhaps lesser-known verbatim musical theatre which includes musicals such as London Road. The Single Raindrop, developed by playwright Zachariah Ezer and director/dramaturg Dominique Rider, dramatizes the last survivor of a “drowned town” (like majority-Black town Oscarville, GA, flooded to make Lake Lanier) who now lives in a senior care center, and explores the dangers of forgetting and ontological violence. Research based theatre provides audiences with theatre that is undeniable, at least it hopes to be.

The undeniability of the “real” is one of the most difficult things to explain when it comes to verbatim theatre, but also one of its most powerful theatrical tools. It is what distinguishes research based verbatim theatre from fictional plays: the liminal space the audience is placed in by watching actors perform real people’s words. An audience is forced to reckon with these words, utterances, and cries for help–without being able to distance themselves from it because it’s “made up.” This discomfort is what prevents “the audience from hanging up their brains with their hats” when they enter the theatre to use Bertolt Brech’s phrasing. The undeniable fact that though an audience is watching a ‘play’, they are also listening to someone’s personal truth.

Outside of the realm of research based theatre, the people best suited to write about aging and combat ageism, it seems, are older playwrights themselves. One such example is the work of Caryl Churchill who was 78 when she wrote Escaped Alone in 2016. The play takes place in the back garden of a small British house, itself a bubble from what seems to be the end of the world. On four chairs in the back garden, four women of “at least 70” drink tea, and chronicle their lives. The play is absent of stereotype and shows the four women as people who fear, dream, love, lust, and rage. The women describe the aches in their bodies, their agoraphobia, their fear of cats, their days in prison, their tiny joys, and indeed their “terrible rage,” a line one character repeats a dozen times with tears streaming down her face.

There is some undeniability at play here too I believe. Churchill, now 86 years old and still writing new work, puts aging undeniably on display in Escaped Alone, but does not make it a another character in the play. Instead, like Ashton Applewhite in Of A Certain Age, she lets the characters in the play speak for themselves–firmly and without equivocation or apology. They are brave and rageful and funny and ultimately, undeniably human too. Three dimensional, not relegated to senility or uselessness, but capable of screaming and desiring. 

Churchill’s work alongside the work of Salvatore, Ezer, Rider, Chanler-Berat, and Hornik begin, at least, to paint a different picture on this canvas called aging. And the undeniability of human life, fragile and rageful, is perhaps a starting point for reframing aging from decline to life’s biggest truth and most enduring reality. Theatre that prompts us to, once again in the words of Ashton Applewhite: “Be less afraid of aging. We are aging life long. It is a beautiful, powerful process that we are all embarked on. As we age, we continue. We absolutely continue to grow.”

Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.