One man, one plan: At 54, Clay Hausmann moves boldly into making art about his family experience

Every 10 years or so, Clay Hausmann feels a tug.

As a marketing professional and family man in Scotts Valley, he leads a rich and rewarding life. But, generally, it’s not what you would call “artistic.” So, about once a decade, he dives headlong into the kind of longshot project that most people leave to creative types looking to strike gold. In his 30s, it was a novel; in his 40s, a screenplay.

Now, at 54, Hausmann is at it again. And this time, he’s taking to the stage.

This past summer, Hausmann unleashed onto the world his one-man stage show, a comic monologue titled “Empty Nest and All the Rest” at The Landing in Scotts Valley. That first show sold out, so he did it again in the same venue a few weeks later. 

“Empty Nest” is an engaging piece of stagecraft, employing Hausmann’s best efforts at both the tried-and-true beats and dynamics of old-fashioned storytelling, and the audio-visual delights of modern tech, to mine the comedic gold (and the sentimental diamonds) of the universal experience of all parents — watching your children fly off into adulthood. 

It helps that, as part of his career, Hausmann is intimately familiar with the corporate presentation and is comfortable and casual in front of audiences. It also helps that he is possessed of a square-jawed, dad-next-door charisma that’s hard to deny. 

But — and this is his glory — he’s a complete amateur, a guy on a lark, someone doing something creative and meaningful to him, but without the usual superstructure of a performing artist: the manager, the agent, the publicist, the inevitable attitude that he is “talented” and that the world is demanding he share that gift. 

His initial impulse was not even self-centered. He was friends with the local entrepreneurs who decided to open The Landing, giving Scotts Valley a comfortable performance venue, and thought he might be able to help out. 

“So, [I thought], what if I scratch my 10-year creative itch by trying to pull off a one-man comedy show called ‘Empty Nest and All the Rest,’ that raises money for the theater and brings a whole bunch of people together. What if I do that?”

The show’s title came to him first. Then, he began writing down bits about his family life and his and his wife Christie’s experience as their son, Bode, and daughter, Jade, grew up and left the nest. At the first performance, Bode, now 23 and living in Seattle, introduced his dad with a kind of warm-up bit.

“I really wanted this to be a love letter to family, and in my case, it totally was,” said Hausmann. “I even got my whole family up there bowing with me at the end.”

Hausmann wasn’t interested in the joke-joke-joke shape of a traditional stand-up set. He wanted something more thematically cohesive, more theatrically thought-out. The modern one-person monologue is certainly nothing new, going back to the heyday of Spalding Gray’s “Swimming to Cambodia” and Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” Hausmann’s own inspiration was comic Mike Birbiglia, who has forged a headlining career out of thematic shows like “Sleepwalk With Me” and “The Old Man and the Pool.” Birbiglia’s warmth and essential decency is the connective tissue to his shows, the main ingredient that compels his audience to stick with him as he builds a theme around his anecdotes and jokes. 

Even if he’s several leagues below Birbiglia in prominence and career throw-weight, Hausmann is a worthy student in the lessons of the one-person show. One of the most crucial of those lessons is mastering self-deprecating humor, the art of poking holes in the very sense of grandiosity that makes you think you deserve the attention of an audience in the first place. In “Empty Nest,” Hausmann brings several feints in that direction like, for instance, carrying his on-stage water in his freebie AARP-branded cooler. “I’m going to take in the mind of the husband, for a second,” he says at another point in illustrating the occasional frustrations of husband-wife communication. “It’s not a deep pool. You don’t have to put on swim trunks, just roll up your pant legs a couple of inches.”

Stand-up comedy, in 2025, is expected to carry a distinct edge, presumably sharp enough to draw blood. The frame of the one-person show allows performers to sidestep that obligatory cynicism or sarcasm. That’s even more the case when the show is themed around the dynamics of family. “Empty Nest,” Hausmann said, is not the forum to be snarky.

“Although I’m spending 80 minutes on stage making fun of myself and my family and telling jokes about us, it’s meant to be with warmth,” he said. “I’m going to really ridicule different aspects of [empty-nest syndrome], but it has to be with the right tone. If it ever gets too acerbic or too sharp, I want it out of the show, because it shouldn’t be that way.”

But if snarky is not the path forward, neither is smarmy. Hausmann’s job is to sell the value of family, allowing humor to keep sentimentality at bay. “There are parts where it gets very heartfelt,” he said. “And I wanted to catch people off guard with that. What gets the biggest laughs is because they’re just not ready for it. I’ve gotten them to lower their guard and get emotional about what it’s like to see one of your kids leave the nest and go off to college. But then I call back to something and it hits them with something funny, and that’s probably been one of the most rewarding parts of doing the show.”

So, what’s next for “Empty Nest and All the Rest”? Because an audience member from out of town who had connections in their hometown saw the show, Hausmann is scheduled for an Oct. 17 performance in the East Bay town of Pleasanton. Otherwise, he is learning about the challenges of booking and scheduling. (“I’m learning about the back-end process as I go.”) He had one, then another date planned for Santa Cruz, but had to cancel each one because he felt he didn’t have enough time for planning and publicity. He is shooting to perform the show in Santa Cruz probably, he said, after the beginning of the new year to avoid the holiday chaos. (You can keep up with developments regarding the show at its website.)

Now, Hausmann wants to do what he can to build on the show’s early promise. He wants to get the show in front of discerning eyes and to be open to constructive criticism. (The limited reviews of those who’ve seen the show include this one, from an audience member: “I can’t imagine the amount of work and forethought it took to get something so polished, so funny, and so thoughtfully composed. I watched comedians work over years and not get even close to where you were last night.”)

“It was great for what it was,” he said of the Scotts Valley performances. “But I just don’t have a gauge. That’s what I’m trying to get, whether it’s like more experienced theater voices or booking agents or managers or reviewers, tell me where they think this lands from a quality standpoint, so I know how much to lean into it or not.”

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