“We’re going to die, you know.” This universal truth is a repeated refrain in every act of Love, Love, Love, now playing at Studio Theatre, and that nihilistic underpinning powers the decades-traversing show. The plot follows Sandra (Liza Bennett) and Kenneth (Max Gordon Moore) from the time they’re teenagers in the late 1960s, to raising a family in the 1980s, to the 2000s when they’re retired and their kids are grown. The family dynamics are true to life, and the play offers some food for thought about generation gaps and the unsustainability of idealism. There are plenty of charismatic performances and funny moments, but a middling script doesn’t quite cohere into something more meaningful.

The play’s first act is the strongest, when the characters and the audience believe that anything is possible. It’s 1960s London, and Kenneth is crashing with his older brother, Henry (Hunter Hoffman). Kenneth is an Oxford student, a lover of rock ’n’ roll, and a dreamer, while Henry has to work a real job and listens to classical music. Henry fails to eject Kenneth from the apartment before his new lady friend Sandra arrives, and it’s immediately apparent that she’s better suited to Kenneth than Henry. Sandra and Kenneth bond over their shared interest in music and pot, and their belief that the world is about to radically change with young people like them at the forefront. (Henry, 24 years old compared to Sandra and Kenneth’s 19, is one of the last vestiges of the old world order, and “might as well be a dinosaur,” according to Sandra.) 

Sandra is an affable if self-centered manic pixie dream girl, and in her mind, it’s the beginning of a new era in which everybody can do exactly what they like, other people’s feelings be damned. She’s far too self-involved to be a truly likable character, but Bennett makes her an endlessly watchable one, and she gets the biggest laughs on stage. Kenneth is slightly more cognizant of people other than himself, and has the decency to feel a little guilty about nabbing his brother’s girl, but can’t resist the pull of this decadent worldview. Moore is well past his teenage years, but inhabits the youngest version of Kenneth well, particularly when he’s performing physical comedy like stretching the length of the stage to reach a scotch he’s set down across the room without getting off the sofa. 

With each subsequent act and decade, the “we’re going to die” attitude becomes less and less appealing. The second act takes place one night roughly 20 years after the first. Unsurprisingly, Sandra and Kenneth have not changed the world or become writers and revolutionaries, but settled into upper-middle-class suburban comfort and high-powered jobs, with a daughter, Rose (Madeline Seidman), and a son, Jamie (Max Jackson). It’s an all too familiar take on a domestic drama, seemingly ticking off the boxes for family strife. Alcohol dependency: check. Child with potential emotional issues that no one wants to talk about: check. Allegations of cheating: check. A moody teenager wailing that nobody understands them: check. This segment aims for a humor that seems out of step with the severity of the scene, and the parts that are played straight are a bit too generic to land squarely.

In the third act, it is revealed that the previous act’s cliff-hanger ending involved an offstage suicide attempt, a nasty detail that is not given the proper gravity by either the characters or the script. Rose comes to visit her parents and perform an airing of the grievances that feels a bit undercooked. It’s unclear whether she’s meant to be a righteous crusader for her age group, or a parody of millennial entitlement. Despite that, Jackson and particularly Seidman believably transform the previous act’s teenagers to adults who’ve been irreparably marked by their family history and their parents’ self-involvement.

The staging of each act is cleverly done: As the generations pass, and the distance between the parents and children grows, the space around them expands as well. The cramped London flat where the play takes place looks like a small, shallow box set on the stage, not stretching to the edges of the curtain and extending only a few feet from the lip of the stage, is tiny enough that Kenneth and Sandra are thrown into close, inevitable proximity. In the second act, the house is large enough for the family to have to constantly shout to each other from various rooms, but small enough to feel claustrophobic when the disastrous fight breaks out. In the third act, set in Kenneth’s cavernous home, the characters are sat practically at opposite ends of the stage, and the sound of the Beatles (a throughline in the narrative, and the source of the show’s title) echoes through the space. The record, and the world, just keep on spinning.

Love, Love, Love, written by Mike Bartlett and directed by David Muse, runs through March 3 at Studio Theatre. studiotheatre.org. $40–$110.