In the past year or so, there’s been a rash of pop songs that, lyrically speaking, seem to be about being young: There’s fun. singing “We Are Young.” There’s Taylor Swift waxing merry about being 22 — yay! — and there’s Ke, urging us to party like we’re gonna die young.

We get it. You’re young!

What happens after the party?

What happens is adult life, with its attendant ups and downs. But before we all boo-hoo-hoo into our Metamucil because we’re getting older and those songs aren’t aimed at people over age 25, let’s stop and consider that life and people get more interesting as we age.

Really. Yes, we live in a culture that values youth over experience, perfection over scars, perky over saggy, hubris over humility. But youth, or abs, or whatever it is we like about the young, just can’t be the bottom line.

If being young is really so compelling, why aren’t more great novels, movies and plays about the foibles of being 20-something — first jobs, dating, the curse of being too pretty, etc.?

Maybe it’s just me, but a little experience, some hard-earned achievement, a dose of regret, a dollop of disappointment, the joys and terrors of starting your own family — not to mention the perspective that comes with all those things — can make any seemingly bland person a whole lot more interesting.

In fiction and life, it’s about character.

These thoughts occurred during a rehearsal of “Shooting Star” last week at Greenwood Playhouse, where the comedy opens tonight with a champagne reception (see “If you go”).

Juliah Rae and Ron McCracken are co-directors of this two-person Steven Dietz comedy, in which a well-cast Lilli Ann Linford-Foreman and Don Delach star as former lovers crossing paths at an airport somewhere in the snowy Midwest.

Linford-Foreman and Delach play Elena Carson and Reed McAllister, respectively. Elena is on her way to Boston, Reed’s now-home, to visit a friend having relationship issues.

About 25 years earlier, the two lived together in Madison, Wisc., but after 22 months, Reed left to settle into khaki-colored pants, the workaday world and family life in Boston.

He’s headed to an important meeting in Austin, which, as fate would have it, is Elena’s current home. Heavy snow has shut down the airport. Reed confesses that his boss tells him he lacks the killer instinct to succeed in business, but his sales call is doomed anyway, thanks to the snow.

There’s nothing better to do but reconnect with Elena.

They may be unable to fly, but the rest of us are in for an interesting ride. Along the way, the pair’s long-buried resentments and insecurities get revealed; old attractions resurface as though only temporarily buried by life’s snowdrifts.

Reed has come through well preserved, Elena bitterly notes: “Where were the wrinkles? Where was the paunch? It was lovely and shocking and completely unfair, like time had somehow forgotten to age him,” she says.

We learn that after Reed left Madison, Elena got a job at a record store, then traveled and bartended and dated musicians, landing in Austin, single, still smoking a lot of pot and eschewing modern trappings such as cell phones.

But Reed likes that Elena has let herself go: “What I mean is, she let herself keep going,” he says. Elena appears to be living “like we used to live.”

How they used to live reflected the social mores of their time: They’d opted for an open relationship. As a rule, jealousy was forbidden. Yet the heart wants what it wants, and for Reed, the open-bedroom-door policy led to all kinds of internal turmoil and buried resentments.

However, Elena, too, had loved Reed, and she’d been far less sexually adventurous than Reed had assumed, but she kept her loyalty hidden from him. While their early relationship might have been interesting, it’s the adult perspective that makes it all fascinating to watch. The viewer’s heart can’t help but break a bit for the young people they used to be, so close and yet so far from getting things right.

If nothing had been perfect or easy about their lives back in the ’70s, life has only gotten more complicated as they’ve aged.

Life never took Elena to the woods, where in her pretty, youthful dreams, she’d envisioned a life with a man in a flannel shirt and 15 kids. She’d make nightly pots of soup and play host to a cabin full of friends. Instead, she works in a cubicle in a call center, a headset instead of flowers in her hair.

And if he’d had his druthers, Reed probably would not be dealing with a stormy marriage that trumps the blizzard surrounding them.

It might spoil the fun to reveal more. Suffice it to say, before they part company and shoot back into their respective galaxies, the closure Reed and Elena experience comes off as genuine, complicated and real.

Just like life after the party.

If you go

What: “Shooting Star”

When: • opens at 7:30 tonight with champagne reception • 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through May 12 • special performance at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (6:30 p.m. reception) to benefit Soroptomists

Where: Greenwood Playhouse, 148 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: $24, $18 for seniors, $12 for students; $25 Tuesday

Contact: www.cascadestheatrical.org or 541-389-0803