Don't Ask Forever

Then as Now In this coming-of-age story of passionate love and poignant loss, Levi Jordan and Laura Brinson are not star-crossed lovers, but they might as well be. Originally from the same small town in south Georgia, he from the poor part, she from the privileged, they are as different in their temperaments as they are in their feelings about region, race, class, and other such polarizing conflicts of the time, including America’s quagmire of a war on the other side of the world. Although quite loving with Laura, Levi is in general inward-turning, guarded, and unyielding in his ways, whereas she tends to be outreaching and open to new ideas and experiences. The time of their story, however, is not the present or the immediate past. It is very specifically the winter and the spring of that historically eventful year of 1968, in Boston and in their hometown in the rural South. Even so, the polarizing conflicts of that year are largely of a piece with the ones of 2017, thus making Levi and Laura seem as much a part of our time as they were of theirs. DON’T ASK FOREVER is therefore like all good period pieces in telling a story that, although far from new, will never be old. That which shall be is at least somewhat like that which hath been, and perhaps even in America there is no completely new thing under the sun.