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Ring of fire melts the chill of ‘Frozen’
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Reviewed by MARGI HERWALD ZITELLI, City Editor
Could you forgive a murderer for taking away someone you love? Does forgiveness really help victims move on? And is it worth it, even if the offender hasn’t earned absolution?
These questions are examined compellingly in British playwright Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen.” It’s running at The Beck Center for the Arts through June 24.
Lavery’s script is a smart, intricate and evocative work about a pedophiliac serial killer and two women whose lives are altered by him. The Beck production, however, is uneven, hitting extraordinary highs and lows over its two-and-a-half hour duration.
The highest high in “Frozen” is the performance of Derdriu Ring as a mother whose 10-year-old daughter is abducted and murdered by the serial killer. Ring endows her character with pathos, humor and layers of complexity as her soul “freezes” (to use the play’s central metaphor) and ultimately thaws over the course of 20 years.
Nancy, the grieving mother, is one of a trio of emotionally frozen characters in the play. She shares the stage with Ralph (Jason Markouc), the sociopath who abuses and murders several young girls before being nabbed by London authorities, and Agnetha (Liz Conway), an American psychologist who is studying Ralph as part of her research into what makes a serial killer. Agnetha is also grieving for the recent loss of her colleague and is faced with the terrifying prospect of how to forgive herself for her actions prior to his death.
Agnetha meets Ralph 20 years after he is apprehended. Her studies seek to prove that chronically abused children, like Ralph, who suffer traumatic head injuries are psychologically, neurologically and hormonally predisposed to violence. Thus, their venal crimes are “a symptom, not a sin.”
No research or reasoning can help Nancy. After her daughter’s disappearance, she spends years building her own nonprofit organization for families of missing and murdered children. Her surviving family bonds together and then falls apart, waiting decades for some closure, as Ralph’s solicitor draws out his appeals in a country with no death penalty.
“Frozen” is constructed as a series of vignettes. The three characters appear alternately in solo monologues addressing the audience throughout the first act, eventually pairing up in two-person scenes as their paths cross. This structure mostly works. In the Beck production, director Sarah May breaks each vignette with an energy-stopping blackout, rarely taking the opportunity to have one scene flow into the next. The constant stop-start of the blackouts interrupts the pace of the play, occasionally making the production feel stilted.
Ring is the show’s heart, and she is ably matched by Markouc, who turns in a solid performance as the show’s dark side. His Ralph is chilling but also oddly childlike and pitiable. Covered in intricate tattoos (which ultimately play a role in his capture), Markouc fleshes out Ralph with a slouching posture and with fascinating obsessive-compulsive tics. When Nancy and Ralph finally meet in the show’s climactic scene, the result is electrifying.
Conway struggles as the far less intriguing character of Agnetha. She plays the grieving and guilt-ridden doctor as a bit of an hysteric, a choice that mostly doesn’t work. She is also stuck in the script’s most tangential and least interesting role, saddled with long stretches of dense technical dialogue as Agnetha explains her theories on frontal lobe damage in serial killers.
Scenic designer Don McBride has filled Beck’s small Studio Theater stage with a jagged gray set recalling sharp and shattered slabs of ice. It’s a very cool (no pun intended) non-literal set for a concept play in which the story jumps forward and backward in time and the actors break the fourth wall. However, it doesn’t mesh with Jenniver Sparano’s frumpy, realistic, ’80s- and ’90s-style costumes, the few found-in-the-prop-shop tables and chairs brought on as set pieces, or the actors’ naturalistic performances. These representational elements clash remarkably with the presentational set, making it feel like the wrong choice.
Conflicting choices and weak moments aside, “Frozen” raises intriguing questions while also telling an absorbing story. Moreover, it is worth seeing for Ring’s phenomenal performance alone.
mherwald@cjn.org
Could you forgive a murderer for taking away someone you love? Does forgiveness really help victims move on? And is it worth it, even if the offender hasn’t earned absolution?
These questions are examined compellingly in British playwright Bryony Lavery’s “Frozen.” It’s running at The Beck Center for the Arts through June 24.
Lavery’s script is a smart, intricate and evocative work about a pedophiliac serial killer and two women whose lives are altered by him. The Beck production, however, is uneven, hitting extraordinary highs and lows over its two-and-a-half hour duration.
The highest high in “Frozen” is the performance of Derdriu Ring as a mother whose 10-year-old daughter is abducted and murdered by the serial killer. Ring endows her character with pathos, humor and layers of complexity as her soul “freezes” (to use the play’s central metaphor) and ultimately thaws over the course of 20 years.
Nancy, the grieving mother, is one of a trio of emotionally frozen characters in the play. She shares the stage with Ralph (Jason Markouc), the sociopath who abuses and murders several young girls before being nabbed by London authorities, and Agnetha (Liz Conway), an American psychologist who is studying Ralph as part of her research into what makes a serial killer. Agnetha is also grieving for the recent loss of her colleague and is faced with the terrifying prospect of how to forgive herself for her actions prior to his death.
Agnetha meets Ralph 20 years after he is apprehended. Her studies seek to prove that chronically abused children, like Ralph, who suffer traumatic head injuries are psychologically, neurologically and hormonally predisposed to violence. Thus, their venal crimes are “a symptom, not a sin.”
No research or reasoning can help Nancy. After her daughter’s disappearance, she spends years building her own nonprofit organization for families of missing and murdered children. Her surviving family bonds together and then falls apart, waiting decades for some closure, as Ralph’s solicitor draws out his appeals in a country with no death penalty.
“Frozen” is constructed as a series of vignettes. The three characters appear alternately in solo monologues addressing the audience throughout the first act, eventually pairing up in two-person scenes as their paths cross. This structure mostly works. In the Beck production, director Sarah May breaks each vignette with an energy-stopping blackout, rarely taking the opportunity to have one scene flow into the next. The constant stop-start of the blackouts interrupts the pace of the play, occasionally making the production feel stilted.
Ring is the show’s heart, and she is ably matched by Markouc, who turns in a solid performance as the show’s dark side. His Ralph is chilling but also oddly childlike and pitiable. Covered in intricate tattoos (which ultimately play a role in his capture), Markouc fleshes out Ralph with a slouching posture and with fascinating obsessive-compulsive tics. When Nancy and Ralph finally meet in the show’s climactic scene, the result is electrifying.
Conway struggles as the far less intriguing character of Agnetha. She plays the grieving and guilt-ridden doctor as a bit of an hysteric, a choice that mostly doesn’t work. She is also stuck in the script’s most tangential and least interesting role, saddled with long stretches of dense technical dialogue as Agnetha explains her theories on frontal lobe damage in serial killers.
Scenic designer Don McBride has filled Beck’s small Studio Theater stage with a jagged gray set recalling sharp and shattered slabs of ice. It’s a very cool (no pun intended) non-literal set for a concept play in which the story jumps forward and backward in time and the actors break the fourth wall. However, it doesn’t mesh with Jenniver Sparano’s frumpy, realistic, ’80s- and ’90s-style costumes, the few found-in-the-prop-shop tables and chairs brought on as set pieces, or the actors’ naturalistic performances. These representational elements clash remarkably with the presentational set, making it feel like the wrong choice.
Conflicting choices and weak moments aside, “Frozen” raises intriguing questions while also telling an absorbing story. Moreover, it is worth seeing for Ring’s phenomenal performance alone.
mherwald@cjn.org
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