‘Empty Nesters’: What happens when it’s just the two of you
What new paths and grown-up risks does a couple face after the last child has left home?
“The Empty Nesters” is at its best, both in the writing and performances by the real-life married couple of JW Walker and Pamela Gaye Walker, at tapping the repeated patterns and accumulating resentments, the petty aggravations and major mishearings that can build up in sedimentary layers over the decades of a long marriage.
Almost anything, whether it’s a jar of barbecue sauce that one of them forgot to pick up at the store or the theme music from ESPN’s SportsCenter, can set off a Pavlovian chain of responses in Franny and Greg.
Staring off in different directions when they’re sitting in a café or on the bed in their hotel room — they’re on vacation after dropping their daughter off at college — the actors convey the body language of a couple that’s become disconnected without either of them understanding quite how it happened or what to do next.
Like Franny and Greg’s marriage, the piece tends to make the same or similar points over and over without mining enough of the material’s comic or dramatic potential.
Franny’s repeated complaints that Greg doesn’t pick up on her unhappiness and wants to solve problems instead of really listening to her has the familiar ring of the “Men Are from Mars, Women Are From Venus” universe of marital advice.
What might have bloomed into something more surprising and emotionally eventful gradually deflates, until a projection scenic coup supplies visually effective if rather artificially induced liftoff at the finish.
Greg and Franny do get to the big topics that they’ve mostly kept at bay: sex, money, their jobs, concerns about their son’s major and sexual orientation.
Credit director Richard Seyd, in his return to Bay Area directing for the first time in 12 years, for a smoothly executed production.
The Walkers play their exchanges with a well-grooved sense of timing, telling vocal stresses and some lightly suppressed sarcasm.