Delving into the mind of a murderous pedophile

Like so many of the plays director Joseph Adler chooses to do at GableStage, Bryony Lavery's Frozen is anything but simple.

Its subject matter is distressing, often horrifying: the unending ache of a mother whose child disappears; the damaged mind of a murderous pedophile; hope turning into bottomless grief. Its themes -- that a killer's own childhood could explain his acts and merit understanding, that closure comes only through forgiveness -- will resonate with some and alienate others. And, as of two weeks ago, the Tony Award-nominated play itself became shrouded in controversy, as a magazine writer and a psychiatrist went public with charges that Lavery plagiarized their work.

Frozen, which opens at 8 tonight at GableStage, is what Adler calls "a cage-rattler. It's enlightening and disturbing. It's very, very unnerving."

In other words, it's a perfect example of the kind of theater that gets Adler's blood racing.

"There is ambiguity in it. It doesn't answer all the questions. It provokes the kind of discussion that theater should," he says.

Recently, that discussion has been about the writing of the play itself.

Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a criminal psychiatrist, and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell said two weeks ago that Lavery had incorporated material and quotes from both Gladwell's 1997 article about the conclusions Lewis and her fellow researcher, a neurologist, had come to through their work with murderers, and Lewis' 1998 autobiography.

Frozen, first produced in England in 1998, transferred to the Royal National Theatre in 2002, then was produced in New York in 2004. Lavery hasn't commented on the plagiarism charges, but her London agent, St. John Donald, told Adler, "There is no lawsuit at present. The claim is in the hands of lawyers and will be resolved, we are confident, amicably."

Truth be told, there are a number of similar or identical passages in Gladwell's piece and Frozen, from descriptions of tests for brain damage to the history of injuries suffered by the play's killer to specific lines. Gladwell's article, for example, includes the sentence, "The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom." In Lavery's play, the psychiatrist utters those same words in a speech on her views about murderers.

Adler was in rehearsal with his trio of Palm Beach County-based actors -- Lisa Morgan as Nancy, the victim's mother; Gordon McConnell as Ralph, the killer pedophile; Bridget Connors as Agnetha, the American psychiatrist -- when the plagiarism story broke. But he says nothing would have changed his plans to do Frozen.

"I think the play is an extremely meaningful and important piece. However the situation is resolved doesn't change that," he says. "It's a very strong statement against capital punishment... It says the only way to get closure is through forgiveness. And it says that human beings can survive anything."

Adler, who saw the Broadway production at the vast Circle in the Square, says he wants to give audiences in his theater's more intimate space a production that is "more emotionally charged."

His cast has burrowed toward that place, traveling from surface facts to their characters' deepest sorrows.

At first, McConnell says, "I jumped on the obvious choices, which gives you a two-dimensional character at best; because of the hurricanes, I'd been doing yard cleanup and plastering a wall where a tree went through it. But last Sunday, I focused only on the script, and I came in with Ralph on Monday. Other than the fact that he's a raging monster, which could be very boring, underneath he's very complicated."

The British-born Morgan, who says she's doing a "soft kind of Calendar Girls accent" as Nancy, runs through her lines again and again as she makes the 90-minute drive from her home to Coral Gables. It isn't an untroubled commute, she says: "The way the material is written evokes a lot of emotion. I'll say one line and just cry. It gets me."

But onstage, control is everything.

"It's hard to play. Getting onstage and bawling isn't useful to anybody. The piece would fall flat with actors who don't know what they're doing," Morgan says.

As the scientific Agnetha, Connors is navigating her way through "a very difficult, complex" character who, like the others, undergoes a huge change over the play's 20-year time span.

"She lives in the world of the brain and spends her life with serial killers... She has a clinical, scientific, objective approach to murderers and is able to remove herself from the emotional aspects of their lives and their victims' lives," she says.

"But then the parts of her life begin to collide and jar each other -- so what happens? The play explores what it means to be frozen, or each character. Each is thawing out. Or breaking apart."