Three families shadow box with death

Here's what happens at the end of Michael Cristofer's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Shadow Box": The protagonists all die. For them, there's no secret passage to safety, no last second rescue or miracle cure. John Wayne doesn't ride in with the cavalry. Superman doesn't pull them from death's jaws.

Foreknowledge of the play's finale won't spoil the show. "The Shadow Box" is not a thriller or a fantasy. It doesn't rely on clever twists or superhuman intrusions. Rather, the play is about real human beings confronting the ultimate human challenge: dying. In "The Shadow Box," the protagonists die because death is the way all human lives, great and small, end.

Sound morbid? Absolutely. But director David Brundige '04 has brought to Theatre~Intime a play that's also comic, poignant and uplifting.

Set in a northern California hospice for the terminally ill, "The Shadow Box" tells the story of three families attempting to cope with the impending death of a loved one.

In the first family, Joe (John Portlock '01) seems resigned to the knowledge that he's about to die. But his wife, Maggie (Heather Morr '03), is a case study of denial. She insists that Joe is "fine," that he is recovering. In her strained efforts to make small talk, she dances around the issue of Joe's demise. And she keeps their guitar-strumming son, Steve (Jeremy Chan '05), in the dark about his father's terminal condition.

The second family to face the death of one of its members is not a family at all — at least not in the traditional sense. This family is composed of a former professor, Brian (Ben Rice-Townsend '05) and his gay lover, Mark (Matt Leffel '05). When Brian's alcoholic ex-wife Beverly (Liz Berg '04) stumbles onto the stage, she becomes the third member of the menage.

Photographic memories of more life-filled, though no less lively times plaster the hospice's walls.

Knowing that he will die soon, Brian devotes his remaining time to emptying himself of memories, to wringing himself dry of his thoughts, emotions and experiences.

"The only way to beat this," Brian says, "is to not leave anything behind."

Time is something Beverly has plenty of — she's not dying. But she seems desperately unhappy with her life. She masks this melancholy with jokes, dance and Jack Daniels. Mark, on the other hand, finds comfort in extreme stoicism — he is deadly serious about Brian's imminent death.

Wheelchair-bound Felicity (Barbara Luse '04), the dying matron of the third family, is an octogenarian version of Beverly. She talks like a world-wearied tramp. She sings bawdy songs. And she seems acutely aware of her own decay.

"Roll me over and lay me down," she tells her doctors. "I look like I feel. I smell too."

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The dying aren't death's only victims. The survivors must suffer and cope or else surrender to stultifying despair. Agnes (Melissa Galvez '05), Felicity's unappreciated and long-suffering daughter, tends to her mother. The two of them, along with the rest of the cast, must face the emotionally provocative questions of the hospital interviewer (Jeremy Weissman '02).

"The Shadow Box" bears a title that is unusually descriptive of the play's themes. A shadow box is a rectangular box with a glass front. It is used for holding and protecting items on display. Fittingly, the stage is a funerary display, a shadow box for the dying.

Moreover, to shadow box is to box with an invisible or imaginary opponent. In this play the audience sees all the characters, victims and survivors, boxing with the invisible and inescapable nearness of death.