Sweethearts (Version 2)

What becomes of first love after thirty years of silence? W.S. Gilbert's "Sweethearts" examines this question with quiet, aching tenderness. The play opens on two young neighbors, Harry and Jenny, whose futures seem inseparable as they part in Act One. Then time collapses and expands all at once: Harry departs for India, and we jump forward three decades to find them reunited, middle-aged strangers wearing the faces of who they used to be. The "dramatic contrast" Gilbert subtitle's his work with cuts between past and present, between memory and the present moment, asking whether the love they shared has survived or merely survived as something they both remember differently. This is not Gilbert of the comic operas, though his wit surfaces in the ironies of middle age. This is a playwright interested in what time does to tenderness, and whether the people we become can still recognize the people we were. A brief, bittersweet meditation on the roads not taken, for anyone who has ever wondered what happened to the ones they left behind.