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Writing for Us
A CurtainUp Review
Frozen
By Elyse Sommer
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Frozen Transfers to Broadway It's been barely two months since I reviewed this play during its New York premiere downtown. Now, with the Tony Awards season at high heat, it's moved to the Circle in the Square-- cast and creative team intact. The Circle is an understandable choice since, like the Thirteenth Theater it has a thrust stage-- so that the main change is that the theater seats considerably more people and is not as intimately enclosing -- and of course there's a lot more riding on the production in its new location. Below are the current production notes. I'll let the previous review speak for the play and the performances. --- Elyse Sommer Frozen Written by Bryony Lavery Directed by Doug Hughes. Cast: Swoosie Kurtz, Brian F. O'Byrne, Laila Robins and Sam Kitchin (a guard) Set Design: Hugh Landwehr. Costume Design: Catherine Zuber Lighting Design: Cliff Taylor Original Music &Sound Design: David Van Tieghem Make-up & Tattoo Design: Angelina Avallone Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis Running time: 2 1/2 Hours including an intermission Circle in the Square, 1633 Bway (at 50th St) 212/239-6200 Tue @ 7pm, Wed @ 2pm & 8pm, Thu & Fri @ 8pm, Sat @ 2pm & 8pm, Sun @ 3pm From 4/28/04; opening 5/04/05 |
--- The Original Review
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My chosen expedition {as a psychiatric explorer} will be . . .The Arctic frozen sea that is. . .the criminal brain ---Agnetha, in a lecture about her ten-year study of serial killer in a play focusing on the "the frozen sea" of one such brain and how grief and hatred have kept the mother of one of his victims in a frozen state. |
Laila Robins & Brian F. O'Byrne
(Photo: Dixie Sheridan)
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Briony Lavery's Frozen, which won London's prestigious Barclay Award for Best New Play of 1998 and is currently being given its American premiere by MCC Theater Company, is about the horror of pedophile serial killings. Not a play to make you forget your troubles by losing yourself in someone else's story! Neither does it move forward at a bracing gallop. In fact, the first eleven of its thirty-one scenes are alternating monologues in which the speaker is bathed in a curtain of light while the rest of the stage is cast in blackness.
If all this sounds too dark, depressing and slow, hold up on pressing that click-off icon and dismissing Frozen from your must-see list. Ms. Lavery is a sensitive and skilled enough writer to overcome monologue tedium and the unpalatable subject of child abuse and murder. By the time the monologues evolve into dynamic duologues she has humanized the killer without sentimentalizing him. She also has us rooting for Nancy, the mother of one of his victims, to unthaw her frozen by despair existence.
It is Nancy who will pull you into her story, a twenty-year odyssey of anguish and rage. While getting to know her is painful, and occasionally unbearably so, it engenders considerable rewards. Lavery has given Nancy a dry sense of humor that provides some tension-relieving chuckles; most importantly, she has Nancy soften just enough to satisfy our need for a hopeful ending, but without compromising character consistency and credibility
Director Doug Hughes adeptly orchestrates the shift from the andante tempo of the monologues to the more allegro-paced prison meetings, first between killer Ralph and research psychologist Agnetha, later between Ralph and Nancy. In the end he again slackens the tempo for a finale which completes the cycle of Nancy's tragedy with a satisfying absence of bathos.
Swoozie Kurtz
(Photo: Dixie Sheridan )
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In keeping with Lavery's aim to explore the nurture-over-nature aspects of pedophelia and murder, Brian O'Byrne is an unforgettable Ralph, portraying him less as a thriller style menace than a damaged personality who can no more cope with remorse than with the inner demons that triggered his monstrous acts.
Laila Robins has the most difficult role as the psychologist who has spent ten years developing her theory of serial killing as a "forgivable act." She is something of an authorial device for dramatically presenting factual information (I'm assuming that some of the theories Agnetha posits are based on authentic research?). It's a credit to Ms. Robins' acting that she has convincingly woven the sadness of her own story of loss into her cool researcher's persona since that subtext is the least persuasive unfreezing aspect of the play.
Hugh Landwehr's scenic design consists of a couple of chairs and a metaphoric blue backdrop of cracked, freezing water under which people like Nancy are trapped. While I'm not fond of the film-maker's technique of spotlighting actors against pitch black backgrounds, it's well executed by lighting designer Clifton Taylor. Kudos to costume designer Catherine Zuber for both Kurtz and Robins' outfits. Not since Master Class can I recall anyone looking as smashing in a tailored pants suit as Robins does here.
I saw Frozen just a week after another killer saga, Adrian Hall's In the Belly of the Beast Revisited. While Hall's docu-drama is grittier and more propulsive, Lavery's three-way focus is more emotionally engaging. As I walked out of Frozen, I found myself imagining Agnetha studying the society nurtured killer instinct of John Henry Abbott and having a conversation about it with Abbott's misguided champion, novelist-essayist Norman Mailer.
For a CurtainUp review of another of Byrony Lavery's plays, The Magic Toyshop, go here
| Frozen
Written by Bryony Lavery Directed by Doug Hughes. Cast: Swoosie Kurtz, Brian F. O'Byrne, Laila Robins and Sam Kitchin (a guard) Set Design: Hugh Landwehr. Costume Design: Catherine Zuber Lighting Design: Cliff Taylor Original Music &Sound Design: David Van Tieghem Make-up & Tattoo Design: Angelina Avallone Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis Running time: 2 1/2 Hours including an intermission MCC Theater at 13th St. Theater, 136 East 13th Street, 212-279-4200 2/25/04 to 4/11/04; opens 3/18/04. Reviewed by Elyse Sommer based on 3/13 press performance |
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