While [Michael Cristofer's] first play, The Shadow Box, was concerned with a group of people faced literally with death, Ice deals with the equally terrifying living death of contemporary man's "frozen" existence. Murph, an impotent, talkative male model, leaves the pressures of city living for Alaska, where he buys a cabin surrounded by acres of barren land. He desperately befriends an alcoholic ex-teacher, Ray, and a sexy "free soul," Sunshine; the three live together and create a shifting network of relationships that end with Sunshine's violent death and Murph's and Ray's reversal of personalities.

Cristofer has an actor's feel for the visceral poetic rhythms of good theatre. Although influences of Beckett, Pinter, and Shepard are evident, he is an original talent. The play suffers from some overt symbolism—the metaphoric story of "winterkill" and Murph confronting himself dead in a cake of ice—and from some easy one-liner laughs. However, the majority of the play is a rich barrage of tragicomic repartée and self-realization by people submerged in "a hole filled with water," desperately trying to gasp for air through interpersonal "connections."…

Ice is the "love story" that Cristofer labels it; however, its love is as ironic, haunting, evasive, and frightening as twentieth-century life. The play, like its title, is crystal-sharp, resonating theatre: intellectual yet visceral, continually comic yet ultimately moving. (p. 264)