[Ashes] is astonishing—it affirms life without lying. The story is simple and ordinary, but touches on every major private and public concern; it is wonderfully written and structured with meticulous care, but its artfulness is never ornamental or self-serving….

This is really Colin's play, about his fight against death. He loses his heritage and his inheritor; he no longer can place his hope for meaning either in past or future; the present is all that exists. [He] sums up his severance from the past by wryly transmuting a basic taunt: "Phoenix yerself!" That is: Rise up out of your own strength, be born of nothing. Of course the phoenix is the bird resurrected from ashes, but it has other senses, all appropriate: "Phoenix" means the blood-red one, according to Graves, "a title given to the moon as goddess of death-in-life," and Phoenix was the name of Achilles'...