REVIEWS ...
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
'Frozen' full of fire, passion
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Part of the glory of theater is its mutability. Movies are forever frozen in time, but a play's script becomes a road map for each new director and cast, a singular journey traveled by the artists and their audience. Interpretation can make huge differences in two productions of the same play.
The production of Frozen now at GableStage vibrantly illustrates that truth. Director Joseph Adler and three smart, gifted actors bring so much passion to Bryony Lavery's disturbing drama that the title no longer quite fits. "Fiery" is more apt.
Nominated for the best play Tony Award last season (but recently mired in plagiarism charges), Frozen takes a fierce look at a heinous crime, the history that factors into the killer's culpability, the soul-deep scars left on the victim's family.
First in monologues, then in scenes, a criminal psychiatrist, a murderous pedophile and a victim's mother tell their stories, which become entwined.
Agnetha (Bridget Connors) is an American psychiatrist of Icelandic descent. She and a fellow researcher have studied the brains of murderers, seen the damage in men severely abused as children, and she has come to England to deliver a thesis she calls Serial Killing... A Forgivable Act? It's a title designed to startle, and it does.
Nancy (Lisa Morgan) is a down-to-earth woman who loves to putter in her garden (the deft, character-delineated set is by Jeff Quinn). Nancy's 10-year-old daughter Rhona has gone missing, and she tells a funny story about how she came to send Rhona off to deliver some garden shears. She speaks of her certainty that somehow, someday, her younger daughter will return. That someday never comes.
Ralph (Gordon McConnell) is the man who links the two women, becoming another of Agnetha's disturbed subjects, forever altering Nancy's life. McConnell's ferocious portrayal of a man who murders young girls is so powerful that it slams you back in your seat. You may feel loathing for Ralph or, if you share Agnetha's more liberal-analytical viewpoint, a shred of sympathy, but McConnell's rich work doesn't allow indifference.
Connors makes Agnetha a woman who's coolly scientific only when she's engaged in her professional life; otherwise, she's all-over-the-place emotional. It's a contrast that jars at first, but finally fuses into the portrait of a complex woman.
And Morgan? She's brilliant. The British-born actress is tonally perfect as Nancy. Her humor and tears are always precisely enough, and it is she who infuses what would otherwise be a very grim play with its redemptive heart.
Friday, October 15, 2004
Frozen at GableStage
By Tony Guzman, Critic at Large
GableStage has kicked off its 2004/2005 season with the sort of expertly presented example of drama as serious thought that we too-infrequently see at our other local theatrical venues. Frozen, by British playwright Bryony Lavery, thrusts us in gripping fashion into a lucid and searing examination of the problem of evil - and the conflicting stratagems for accounting for it in terms of free will or determinism. Structured largely as a series of monologues addressed to the audience by the play's three main onstage characters - until their paths cross dramatically towards the end - Frozen deals with the long-range emotional effect on her mother of the brutal murder of a young English girl by a serial child predator. We come upon Nancy, the mother of the at-the-time listed as missing Rona; Ralph, a Brit variant of the vaguely creepy neighborhood loner; and Agnetha, an American psychologist who explains socio-pathological violence in terms of childhood abuse and the attendant brain dysfunction - all just going about their lives. Gradually, the picture of what's really happened, and is happening, starts to come into focus. (The play's title seems to refer Agnetha's view of herself - she's of Icelandic heritage - as an intrepid explorer of the "frozen" landscape of human psychopathology.) Much of the propelling interest through much of the play is just figuring out what's going on - seemingly mirroring Agnetha's premise that to learn the past is to understand the present. On the other hand, the action spins off in surprising, and emotionally wrenching, directions towards the end (largely via the off-stage presence of Nancy's surviving daughter, a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism). Like all truly convincing renderings of the central dilemmas of human life, Frozen offers no easy answers, but presents the issues forcefully and compellingly.
Gordon McConnell's performance as Ralph is bound to be as caviar to anyone who's even marginally a connoisseur of superb acting. Neither resorting to facile "bad guy" posturing nor exculpatory pleading, his Ralph is virtually the epitome of "the banality of evil" while subtly and sure-handedly affording vistas of heart-rending depths of emptiness and pain. Similarly cool-in-the-saddle, given the emotional intensity of the material, is Lisa Morgan as Nancy. She rises to the challenge - always the bugbear of technically proficient British actors - of rendering deep emotion convincingly, without indulging in pathos that would muddy the lineaments of the play's theme. In a cogent, convincing performance as Agnetha, Bridget Connors captures the emotional messiness and irrationality seething just below the surface of the scientist seeking surety in scientific objectivity and brain scans.
You'd have to look deep to really take the measure of director Joseph Adler's accomplishment with this production. While fully rendering the visceral impact of the material, he maintains an even-handed clarity in his approach that illuminates the play's subtlety of thought. Frozen has received rave reviews in London and New York, but it's hard to imagine a more intelligent handling of this powerful play than the one currently on view at GableStage.
