For many couples, making it to their 50th wedding anniversary is something to be celebrated. Families have been built, stresses overcome, mistakes forgiven, or at least made less important with time. If they’re lucky, love is still the tie that binds.
Not so for Bill and Nancy. Now living in a retirement community, the two sit down to dinner after setting the table, silently judging how each is doing it wrong.
“I want a divorce,” says Nancy in the first line of the play. “Alright,” is Bill’s reply.
Such is the setup in Bess Wolh’s 2019 comedic play, Grand Horizons. A show Wohl says was inspired by the divorce of her friend’s 70-year-old parents and the effect it had on his understanding of family and commitment.
Heady stuff, which Wohl strains down into familiar crowd-pleasing comedic territory with light sprinkles of raunchiness. This is a play that thinks it’s far edgier than it is. One you can take your grandmother too as long as she’s cool with older people admitting they have sexual needs and using words like “pussy” a couple of times.
Think the Netflix hit series Grace and Frankie type stuff.
It’s a sweet/cute show that Mildred’s Umbrella, here directed by Jennifer Decker, does a solid enough job with despite some uneven performances.
While Bill (a robust Jim Salners showing why we miss him on stage) and Nancy (Julie Gersib) seem to be taking their divorce plans in stride, their two adult sons are in a tizzy.
Responsible lawyer son Ben (a nicely tense Christian Tannous) and high school drama teacher Brian (Eddie Edge) are shocked and dismayed at their parents’ announcement. Ben tries to control the situation despite his pregnant therapist wife Jess (a fiery Christie Guidry) steering him away from the role of forceable peacemaker. Ben selfishly whines about his parents’ situation to anyone who will listen, including one-night stand Tommy (played with panache by Alric Davis).
Family meetings are held, hands are wrung, secrets revealed, kids learn that their parents are people with normal desires and disappointments. Sex is tee hee’d at. It all goes down easily enough, without much of anything being communicated.
Act 2 (yup, this is a full-length play) brings a little more seasoning to the soup. Wohl’s low-hanging fruit humor doesn’t change; rather, she allows her comedy to be punctuated by a few ideas along the way.
Ben loses his cool, revealing his fears. Jess goes on a feminist rant that amusingly neglects the woman she’s defending. Carla, a friend of Bill’s (played with quirk by Amy Warren) looks at things with open eyes. Bill and Nancy reveal the difficulties of self-sacrifice within the constructs of marriage.
Do we really warm to any of these people? Not really. We don’t dislike them either. They just are. Comedic tropes with some truth bombs along the way.
Of course, Wohl sets things up so that we root for the couple to work it out. What comedy of this genre doesn’t beg for a happy ending? Whether they do or don’t isn’t the point. Just like a 50th anniversary isn’t the point. Marriage, Wohl is perhaps telling us, isn’t the milestones or the fractures, rather it’s the choices you make when you have all the information.
Grand Horizons runs through February 21 at 1824 Spring Street. For more information, visit mildredsumbrella.com $10.
This article appears in Private: Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2026.