Forty Winks

Synopsis

Don returns after many years to see his old friends Diana, Howard, and Charlie, as well as Diana’s daughter Hermia. Don had been in love with Diana when they were young, but she left him for Howard. Now a widow, Diana rekindles feelings for Don, leading to an intimate moment between them, unbeknownst to Howard. Don then spends time alone with the narcoleptic Hermia, who shockingly reveals she has been having sexual fantasies about Don since encountering him on the Heath. In a haunting final scene, Don returns years later to scatter his mother’s ashes only to be confronted by an aged, disabled Howard and Hermia’s daughter Celia, who is the spitting image of the young Hermia. The play explores themes of lost love, repressed desire, the cruelties of chance, and the inescapable grip of memory.

With its non-linear narrative and poetic dialogue, the play has an almost dreamlike, circular quality as it meditates on loss, regret, nostalgia, and the ways the past bleeds into the present