Upon the September death of a friend some eighty-six years ago, poet William Butler Yeats distilled life’s meaning into four simple words: “Being come to sense.” On September 22, at Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, local playwright Robert Biter brings his three characters from confusion and pain to making peace with death and dying.

Biter’s award winning, 60-minute play, “Strangers,” reflects many personal stresses and dilemmas on the part of the playwright, and offers dialogue that touches the hearts of listeners regardless of their circumstances.

“Strangers” is based on Biter’s own experience of losing his father at age 17 and his subsequent epiphanies. Rather than dying the marrow from the bone, the script is a lubricant to communication among the three characters, whose lives intertwine in new ways as death’s shadow creeps closer.

Biter explains his creative inspirations over coffee by quoting the essay “Mortal Lessons” by Robert Selzer: “A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. And that alone should make him kinder to strangers.” Biter met Selzer as a first-year medical student when he began struggling with the urge to combine science and art.

Biter’s point is that often doctors and patients remain strangers while engaging in the deeply person issues of death and dying. To be sure, in “Strangers,” his well-crafted characters use art to imitate this essential life-challenge. During the production, after each character addresses the audience with his or her own strengths and misgivings, they address each other: The patient wants more than a medical chart and wonders if the doctor really knows her. The doctor reveals to his ailing patient that medical school mentors never “tell us where the line is for closeness.” The doctor’s wife moves from a detached posture into a deeper understanding of the wrenching demands that are made daily upon her spouse.

By play’s end, each character’s being has come to sense in a new way.