Clare Barron Selected Works

Penny flirts at a morbid anatomy museum. Kyle tells stories of dismemberment. Sally turns you on with tea and biscuits, and Shareen prepares a mysterious potion. A study in kink, trauma, pleasure, and revenge…

Jeanine is determined to improve her life. With sex. With dance. With new hobbies, like horticulture. But self-improvement is hard. Reclaiming your dreams is hard. And personal hygiene is really, really hard.

Somewhere in America, an army of pre-teen competitive dancers plots to take over the world. And if their new routine is good enough, they’ll claw their way to the top at the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay. But in Clare Barron’s raucous pageant of ambition and ferocity, these young dancers have more than choreography on their minds, because every plié and jeté is a step toward finding themselves, and a fight to unleash their power.

A small house is besieged by an apocalyptic storm. Great trees crack and splinter, garbage shatters windows, a deer impales the car windshield, and the wind hurls a trampoline into the living room. While their family home collapses all around them, an estranged daughter and her devout relatives try to pray their way to safety.

Obie Award-winner Clare Barron’s new play is “a genuinely fragile, complex piece of work” (Time Out New York): a Rorschach test for the faithful and the faithless alike. You’ve never seen a family pray quite like this. But if you enter the eye of the storm with them, you might bear witness to a surreal, harrowing tale of survival and forgiveness.

Do you remember your first cup of coffee? Or how intense it was the first time you took your pants off with someone? Or all the things you promised yourself before you got distracted by the Adult World? Part concert and part archaeological dig about first love, first heartbreak, and how those formative teenage experiences haunt the rest of our lives, I'll Never Love Again (a chamber piece) is created from Barron's actual teenage diary. We track the emotional ups-and-downs of "Clare" as she goes through her very first relationship. It's a chance to spend some time in a real-life teenage brain and with real-life teenage artifacts (drawings from Clare's journals, the actual purple iridescent choir robes from her high school, her baby teeth...), but the goal is to jog the audience's memories and inspire their own personal reflection.

There’s a haunted place between where we started and where we need to be that finds the most tender among us—and breaks them open. In You Got Older, Clare Barron’s bawdy, irreverent and touching new play, Mae, brokenhearted and unemployed, returns home to care for her ailing father and escape the loneliness of a life that just can’t seem to get off the ground.