The play opens with a haunting scene paraphrased from Faust, transposed into a boxing ring in late-twentieth-century New York. Shorty, an African-American boxer in his thirties, is alone in the ring, fed up with his own imperfections and fruitlessly working to improve his fighting. This image is accompanied by the music of a jazz quartet, which Kwahulé instructs to play something from "within the Coltrane universe."
A shadowy figure, aptly named Shadow, appears at the edge of the ring, offering Shorty his aid: he offers a dramatic increase in skill, ostensibly acting as a manager but really representing something much darker. Shorty realizes the man's under-worldly nature and calls him "devil," but in the end he relents, accepting the man's offer to serve him in this world on the condition that Shorty will serve him in the next. This "deal with the devil" is taken from the old German legend of Faust, which has been most popularized by Goethe's play Faust, and from which this story takes its foundation.
It is implied that in the next few years, Shorty becomes world-famous as an unbeatable boxer, led from the shadows by Shadow. He's starting to get tired of winning all the time without experiencing the thrill of uncertainty: he knows he's going to win, so boxing isn't exciting for him anymore. At a press conference concerning his upcoming match against African-American star Eddie Jones, Shorty's childhood friend and rival Todd Ketchel runs up into view of the camera and begins shouting at Shorty, claiming that he won't fight him because Shadow is prejudiced against white people. Todd, formerly known as the "Great White Hope," is the only one to ever have beaten Shorty (although that was presumably before Shorty's deal with Shadow), but he has lost his reputation, possibly because of Shadow's destructive interference. Todd leaves angrily with his wife, Susie.
Throughout the play, Shadow is seen in the ring acting out scenes from Faust, ironically, directed by Shadow and co-starring his sister, Angie, in the role of Gretchen, Faust's love interest. After Shadow leaves after one particularly intimate rehearsal, Shorty expresses his growing disillusionment with Shadow and the boxing world, as well as his realization of Shadow's true nature. Angie doesn't quite understand, but she encourages Shorty by saying that he's an inspiration to all the young African-American children who are looking for a role model.
In Angie's jazz club, Chuck (Todd's manager) sees Shorty and offers to be his new manager. Shorty declines, and then Todd comes to confront him. He's drunk, and he barely makes it away without a fight, guided by Susie and Chuck. In the end, Shorty decides to stand up to Shadow, refusing to live by his rules any more, but Shadow takes his end of the bargain, reducing Shorty to little more than a living shadow who must continue his career in the ring rather than the one he truly desires, which is the life of an actor. In a sense, though, Shorty is forced into the role of a real-life actor, a man pretending to be someone he isn't. The play closes with an image of Shorty shadowboxing in the ring, striving to find meaning and beauty beyond his rigidly constrained world.
