A play about the last stages of life, about care and caregiving—not necessarily the same thing­—Michael Cristofer’s “The Shadow Box” won the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1977. Were things so good back then that a relentlessly unhappy play was needed as an antidote? Perhaps.

These days “The Shadow Box” is pretty much ignored. Not, however, by Open Book Theatre artistic director Krista Schafer Ewbank who chose it to open the Southgate company’s second season, or by the production’s director Topher Alan Payne. It has long been one of their favorite plays, according to a program note.

A shadow box is defined as a shallow display case but there is nothing shallow about Cristofer’s play, which delves deeply into the lives of three patients at a residential hospice. The title is well-devised: a stage is a living shadow box; the play’s characters, all of them, are living under the ultimate shadow. Then, there is shadowbox as a verb which, besides its athletic denotation, means to evade or avoid direct or decisive action.

Exhibit-A in that regard would be Maggie (played by Ewbank) who has shown up, for the first time in six months, to visit her dying husband, Joe (Sean Paraventi). Joe has a grip on reality: “It happens to everybody, right? I ain’t special,” he says. But Maggie is in such denial that she won’t even enter the cottage Joe is living in and doggedly remains on the porch. And she hasn’t told their teenage son (Ethan Kankula) that his father is at death’s door.

Things are little different next door at Cottage Two, where the refined and very ill Brian (Dennis Kleinsmith) lives with his “friend,” Mark (Bailey Boudreau). The sudden appearance of Beverly, Brian’s very loud, very drunk ex-wife (Lisa Maxine Melinn) stirs up the past.

In Cottage Three, in the play’s most clear-cut story, the ironically named Felicity (Wendy Katz Hiller) resides with her daughter Agnes (Jaclynn Cherry). There is nothing felicitous about either of their lives. In a wheelchair, blind, in and out of reality, and ravaged by her illness and its treatments. Agnes is so devoted to taking care of Felicity that her individuality has almost vanished.

This is a bitter play. The temptation is to say bittersweet, but the sweetness here comes with rough edges. To his credit, Cristofer resists any inclination towards sentimentality; this satisfies the intellect but there isn’t much to assuage the heart. Oh well. Death is hard. Deal with it.

As Felicity, Hiller is especially thorough. With her wild and downcast look, her constant, compulsive rubbing of her right hand to her left arm, she seems so damaged that it’s a relief to see her standing at the end. Or it would be if we hadn’t seen all three “patients” standing in lighted vignettes between acts.

One strength of Payne’s staging is the way the actors often remain onstage silently—in, yes, shadow—while the focus and lights are on someone else. They all stay in character well.

Payne’s production, though, is not without its missteps. A ninth character, called the Interviewer (Jan Cartwright) is a medical professional who asks characters and caregivers about themselves. Cartwright performs in darkness at the back of the house. Over in Cottage Two, Melinn’s drunken Beverly is sometimes so loud that police down the road in Wyandotte may have received calls about strange noises. And at Cottage One, a few too many lines are directed offstage left into the void, indistinguishable to the audience.

Any examination of death is more significantly a look at life and Open Book’s “Shadow Box” never loses sight of that.