I don't know that I have ever before found myself faulting a play for becoming more dramatic than it ought to have been, but that's the situation I was caught in by the time Michael Cristofer's "The Shadow Box" lowered its last lights on a collage of solo voices, all of them softly lamenting the oncoming cloak of death. Death is the exclusive subject of the intelligently written, lustrously performed work …, and during its entire first half I felt myself deeply committed to the restive but intensely realistic victims living out their limited lives in private cottages scattered about the grounds of a hospital.

"The Shadow Box" might easily seem a sociological tract, making the pitch it does for permitting terminal cases to spend their days as normally as possible, taking care of themselves in the company of relations and friends, if it weren't possessed of a psychological vigor that compels us to focus on its tart, talkative, undefeated people rather than its thesis….

[Brian] is not all last-ditch dynamism. He will stop for wryness, for reflection: when a probing doctor tells him there's no hurry about answering a question, he remarks swiftly but simply "Not for you maybe; some of us are on a tighter schedule." And we grow to understand that the fever pitch at which he thinks and speaks is not entirely born of desperation. He was always as he is now, he's just put his foot a bit more firmly on the accelerator….

[Felicity], nearly senile in a wheelchair, is still able to list with a rapid cackle all of the organs that have been snatched from her, one by one. Does her elder daughter—never her favorite—quietly sing hymns as she cares for her? On one lung, she can drown her out lustily with the bawdiest song she remembers. And you feel there are others in reserve.

Of the three who are simply waiting for the known, yet unpredictable, end, [Joe] is the least ebullient, though not the least sturdy. He's come to terms with himself, he flips back the peaked baseball cap he wears as though he were listening to a coach rather than a medical man, he is ready for total candor any time he can persuade his rattled wife to listen. But [his] wife … has willfully, helplessly made herself obtuse. It is plain to her that he is growing better daily, she will not set foot in the bungalow that is surely stealing him from her, she has fussed and fussed to bring him all sorts of delicacies—though his refrigerator is stocked with the same hams, the same fruits. She has brought the unnecessary because it is the only thing she can bring.

At first glance one might consider these introductions to the condemned undramatic, mere character-sketches; the dying, after all, have no external enemy they can meet in an arena, fairly and squarely. There is, however, a fierce interior struggle going on in each case, whatever mask may be worn, whatever energy displayed. And we are aware of the psychic battle that produces an overlay of sassiness, of genuine humor, of unself-pitying facing-up. The evening's first half is warm and arresting.

Then, much to my surprise, I realized that I was resisting precisely those things in the second half that I normally look for, even demand: open clash, fierce exchange, heat. [Brian's] onetime wife, an inveterate playgirl with a party cap, a horn to toot and a collection of bangles and brooches to account for every affair she's ever had, arrives to discover that [Brian's] present companion is a homosexual. There is a slugging match, a face-slapping contest. And each of the flare-ups … rings quite false. As does the ultimate effort of [Joe] to force [his wife] into opening her eyes and mind to the facts; here there is no violence but an undue sentimentality, a begging for tears when begging is the last thing required…. [The] second act acquires a facade of theatricality that denies, or at least damages, the sensitivity of the first.

I think I see why. Until intermission, the play is centered on the dying; their internal struggles interest us and move us and we ask for no more. After intermission, playwright Cristofer turns his attention to the others concerned, the wives and companions standing by. But there is no drama in which these people can reasonably engage; they can only stand by, suffer, offer solace. Sensing this, and not wanting simply to repeat his first act, the author has forced dramatic postures upon the visitors, invented angers and recriminations out of whole cloth. His salute to courage and to common sense is diminished by the gratuitous imposition. He remains, nonetheless, a writer of perception and much promise. (p. 26)