Haley McGee on her global hit Age Is a Feeling

In the summer of 2024 Haley McGee was performing Age Is a Feeling at a Toronto festival when a baby’s cry changed the evening. Newly pregnant, she found herself imagining the newborn and its family as the audience for her monologue about life, death and getting older, later picturing her own one-year-old daughter as the target for the piece when she revives it in London.

Written from the viewpoint of a 25-year-old speculating about the future, the show explores choices big and small — feuds, affairs, health scares, fragile friendships and creaking bones — and insists the die isn’t cast. Performed in 10 languages and staged by actors from their mid-20s to mid-50s, it has moved unexpected audiences: McGee recalls men in their 70s wiping tears at Edinburgh.

She built the script from what she calls “anecdotal research,” visiting hospices, mystics and cemeteries and soliciting reflections online.

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