Drama, love and death collide in “The Shadow Box,” a moving dramatic triptych about three terminally ill people bidding farewell to life and loved ones. Cascades Theatrical Company’s production of the play opens tonight with a champagne reception at Greenwood Playhouse in Bend (see “If you go”).

Do not forget your hankies, Kleenex or long sleeves. Under the direction of Jill Stinson-Littlejohn, the cast of this richly human play may well reduce even the most dry-eyed, seasoned theatergoer to a puddle of tears — the better to reflect upon our own mortality.

You may not even notice it happening, but a sort of pre-grief for these cancer patients and their hold on life — and their family’s hold on them — will find a way past your emotional armor.

In 1977, “The Shadow Box” earned playwright Michael Christofer a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play; in 1980, it was adapted into a Golden Globe-winning TV movie directed by Paul Newman, according to Wikipedia.

Set over the length of a day on the grounds of a hospital offering cabins for the dying, the play concerns three families with distinct stories, but overlapping themes colored by a visceral sense of the finality that lies ahead.

At the audience’s left is wheelchair-bound Felicity, played with a dreamy facility by Patty Rosen and her daughter, Agnes (Skye Stafford).

Randy Groden, as “The Interviewer,” speaks to the characters, which allows each to address what he or she is going through directly.

“You wanna talk? Let’s talk,” Felicity tells him. “I feel fine. Is that what you want to hear?”

“We’re only trying to help,” he replies in the dry-ice tone of the infuriatingly clinical.

Felicity’s tragedy, along with her illness, of course, is her fading memory and losing grip on time. Her daughter’s tragedy is that she’s perpetually ranked second in her mother’s eyes, never living up to the sister we never meet but learn enough about. The lengths Agnes goes to in protecting her mother from a cruel truth about her preferred daughter is heartbreaking in its own right.

Center stage belongs to Maggie (Lyryn Cate) and her husband Joe (Justin Mason). Maggie refuses to enter Joe’s cabin, and it’s soon clear that, to her, the cabin symbolizes Joe’s death; her refusal to go in, her denial of his impending fate. Things get ugly, as human emotions can, when she rebuffs her son, Stephen (Caleb Devenny), and emphatically shouts, “I’m not going in there!”

Finally, at right, is the third cabin, occupied by cheerful Brian (Brad Knowles) and his young lover Mark (Brad Ruder). Brian’s glamorous, if boozy, ex-wife Beverly (Audrey Colton Smith) pops in wearing loads of jewelry — and her sexual feats on her sleeve. Mark’s frustration is channeled into a disdain for Beverly, who tenderly reconnects with the fated Brian.

Undergirding all of this death and sadness is life itself, and its fleeting nature, which, most days, most of us happily ignore — until, that is, death, or a well-crafted drama about death, forces us, or enables us, to confront mortality.

Through the characters’ cherished memories, missed chances, imperfections, unrealized dreams, their desire to hold on in conflict with the need to just let go, “The Shadow Box” helps us face death before we slip back to our own lives, perhaps encouraged to live our lives with just a little more awareness.

Think you can’t stomach “The Shadow Box”? Perhaps it will help you to know that no one dies.

Nevertheless — trust me on the Kleenex.

If you go

What: “The Shadow Box”

When: Opens with champagne reception at 7:30 tonight; additional performances 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through March 24.

Where: Greenwood Playhouse, 148 N.W. Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: $24, $18 seniors, $12 students

Contact: www.cascadestheatrical.org or 541-389-0803