[Ice] enjoys the one distinction of managing, in a much shorter compass, to be about as offensive as [Losing Time]. In fact, Ice recalls Losing Time with a similar wallowing in obscenity and scatology, a like reveling in human vileness, violence, and abjection equally unconvincingly portrayed, and in an almost identical inconsistence of characterization. But Cristofer adds his own brand of insufferable pseudo-poetry and obfuscatory symbolism that symbolizes nothing, as well as a highly developed pretentiousness to which the author of Losing Time can as yet only aspire.

Ice concerns Murph, a young man who has bought a shack and some land in Alaska, where he proposes to lead a pure and authentic life close to nature and laced with quart bottles of whiskey. He takes in, first, a tongue-tied wino, Ray, then a pretty female drifter, Sunshine. The former promptly becomes an articulate, indeed voluble, pseudo-philosopher; the latter, a tragicomic nymphomaniac. Each first shares Murph's bed, then proceeds to cuckold him with the other, preferably while Murph can listen to their moans and grunts through a thin partition. Sample dialogue from Murph: "You may look like a piece of shit, you may smell like a piece of shit, but inside you're beautiful." From Ray: "The color of my urine is near perfection; I fart only after meals, upwind …" and "Love makes an arsehole taste like a fudge sundae." From Sunshine (about her mother's warning that she might get raped and murdered): "I could be murdered and not raped, and that would be worse" and "I'd screw my brains out all day and night, and the next day I'd wake up horny—not even depressed, just horny…."

To make things a little less appetizing yet, Cristofer douses them with profundities, conundrums, symbols: Seemingly dead men rise from the ice, a man hallucinates that someone is undressing him and masturbating him exclusively with his or her teeth, an ax is used indiscriminately to slice a cake and chop up the floorboards, and someone will say. "You want nothing from me, and nothing is what you won't get—nothing is too much to ask." Entire scenes consist of actions or inaction whose sole purpose seems to be to flagellate the audience as much as the characters torture one another. Ice is the kind of play that requires not public performance but immediate close confinement.

I am both sorry and pleased to say that the contriver of this morass is the Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning author of The Shadow Box, which my colleagues extolled and to which I, in a heated moment on television, applied one of Mr. Cristofer's own favorite epithets. Let the lovers of The Shadow Box reexamine that play in the light of this one (which, under a slightly cooler surface, it closely resembles); they may now find themselves unable to muster enough love to make either work taste like a fudge sundae. (pp. 130-31)