McCarthy's new play packs all the wallop of his gut-wrenching fiction. "The Sunset Limited," though, is not about blood and guts but about the battle for the human soul.

McCarthy's new play packs all the wallop of his gut-wrenching fiction. "The Sunset Limited," though, is not about blood and guts but about the battle for the human soul.

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made.

In that small apartment, "Black" and "White," as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men-though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.