THE SHADOW BOX
The Shadow Box can’t make sense of collective insanity–not even All Quiet on the Western Front could do that. But its fully felt portrayal of dying humans can restore, if temporarily, the emotional proportion between massive body counts and death’s eternal singularity.
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All three are interviewed documentary-style by an unseen clinician (who resembles Zach, the gentle interrogator of the “gypsies” in A Chorus Line). The interviews pull out confessions, a bit schematically, which the scenes that follow emotionally amplify.
Brian lives in the second cottage. A failed writer, he’s determined to die at the last possible moment and not a second before. He wants to “leave nothing undone” and to “use it all up.” Intent on sticking to essentials and seizing whatever opportunities remain (“You always think you have more time–and you never do”), he’s writing like crazy–four autobiographies and 136 epitaphs. (This could be another form of denial, of course, but medicine is where you find it.)
Like Thornton Wilder in the valedictory third act of Our Town, Cristofer delicately interweaves these different ways of dying, contrasting Felicity’s death-in-life with Joe’s difficult surrender with Brian’s desire to blaze before the darkness. Their accommodations ring true in Deborah Maddox’s staging, an honest and concentrated revival by Acme Arts Company (in conjunction with Hobo Theatre). Maddox, who also designed the efficient multilevel set, evokes in her mainly young cast the illusion of years of hard-earned experience.
