As the piece progresses, love and violence share the stage with a sense of growing urgency until the love theme is reprised in a minor key, suggesting their tragic deaths.
Maybe the moral of this in-progress love story is that even the coldest hand can be warmed.
Alice Munro, one of the foremost short-story writers of her generation, creates tales that have the scope and amplitude of novels: whole lives are condensed into a handful of pages, the progress of love is charted over the years as passion gives way to restlessness or deeper commitment or something more ambiguous.
The Boston Celtics held hands, calling for "unity, progress and love".
The concert is more than a cry of righteous outrage; it's an ideal vision of collective purpose, progress, and love.
The series tracks, it seems, nothing less than the progress of love during the last desperate yet wonderfully productive period of van Gogh's abbreviated life.
The central story, Noh and Phun's blundering progress toward love, binds the piece together, and the show finally succeeds in constructing an almost painfully real world, which anyone who went to high school will recognize.
Mr. Wolfe saw his point: He decided to make the brotherly hug the penultimate moment, then end the play with Mr. Mantello in the spotlight delivering a short speech about progress and love.
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE: My affection for the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro goes beyond the literary, I'm not ashamed to admit, to the unabashedly sentimental and nostalgic.
Darrieux and De Sica can't stop, but the musicians at the side of the room have had enough; they shrug into overcoats and leave, pausing only to light their cigars or snuff the candles that have illuminated the progress of love.
