During the last few years, Los Angeles theater audiences have come to know Michael Cristofer as one of the most gifted actors of his generation. As a dramatist Cristofer is not yet on the same level, but the intelligence and compassion that make him such a versatile actor are also visible in his new play "The Shadow Box."…

"The Shadow Box" covers one 24-hour period and concentrates on three terminally ill patients (all presumably dying of cancer, though this is not specified) living in private cottages on the grounds of a progressive hospital. Joe, a middle-aged working man, has to break the news to his wife and teen-age son. Brian, a failed writer who has completed four autobiographies since learning he is going to die, is living with his homosexual lover when his ex-wife stops in for a visit. In the third cottage a salty old woman named Felicity is being tended by her unmarried daughter, Agnes. The people in the three cottages never meet; their stories unfold simultaneously, and they are adroitly interwoven in Cristofer's text…. When the play begins, the dying patients have already resigned themselves to the inevitable. The drama in each case grows from the struggle of the patients' families to come to terms with death.

Cristofer has a weakness for rhetorical effects—for example, a long, flashy speech about the taste of "yellow, putrid death"—that are awkward and self-conscious. He is best at straight naturalistic writing; his dialogue is witty and idiomatic, flavored with tart flashes of gallows humor, and he has a feeling for dramatic interplay.

Unfortunately, some of the characters in "The Shadow Box" are stock figures. Joe and Maggie, the lower-middle-class couple from New Jersey, are textbook examples of a working class couple. Cristofer's most memorable characters are the most idiosyncratic. The amateur philosopher Brian …, chattering compulsively about metaphysical mysteries, is alternately foolish and dignified, posturing and self-mocking; he is funny, quirky, unpredictable.

At the end of "The Shadow Box" the characters all come to accept death, and in the final reconciliations between the dying and their families or lovers, there is meant to be a tentative feeling of consolation tempering the despair. Cristofer never gets much beyond prosaic home truths on the subject of living and dying, but his genuine feeling for the people gives the play its pathos….

In sum, "The Shadow Box" does not really rise much above the level of good television drama of the "Playhouse 90" school, but it is always intelligent, enterprising and affecting.