Kramer points out the flaws in Shadowlands and explores the personalities of the different characters.

Shadowlands, the William Nicholson play about C. S. Lewis, which ran for a year in London in a production directed by Elijah Moshinsky and starring Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Lapotaire, has just opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It turns out to be a major disappointment. Like the television film of the same name, which Mr. Nicholson wrote for the BBC, the play tells the story of Lewis's strange, doomed love affair with the minor American poet Joy Davidman Gresham. Anyone who has seen the movie version of Shadowlands (it has been broadcast on PBS and on the Arts and Entertainment cable network) knows how poignantly and affectingly this story can be told. She was a married woman with two children (boys), a Jewish convert to Christianity, and a former Communist, who...