FROZEN
At the East 13th Street Theater, 136 E. 13 St. Through April 10. Ticket Central, (212) 279-4200.
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‘FROZEN” deals with three people who have become, in the judgment of the play’s author, Bryony Lavery, rigid, fierce and ungiving in their attitude to life. At first we see them moaning and feeling sorry for themselves in isolation; later, they interact somewhat gingerly with each other.
Of course, in this 1998 English play, things are not that simple.
The man, Ralph, is a nervous, glib, self-justifying type perfectly gotten by Brian F. O’Byrne (best remembered from the Martin McDonagh plays “Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “Lonesome West”).
Ralph sells porn movies involving young girls. He also abducts, rapes and murders them until he’s finally nabbed and sent to prison.
Speaking to us also in this symphony of the wounded are Nancy (Swoosie Kurtz), the heart-sore mother of the vanished, 10-year-old girl Rhona; and Agnetha (Laila Robins), an American professor of criminology who flies to England to deliver a lecture on the criminal mind and to interview Ralph in prison.
The more these people open up, the more we learn about them. Agnetha’s people, for instance, come from Iceland, which she calls “a frozen place.”
Her full name is Agnetha Gottmundsdottir, her married lover was recently killed in a car crash and she wants to investigate the “frozen sea that is the criminal brain.”
Nancy wants vengeance, although her surviving daughter believes in the Indian doctrine of forgiveness. Ralph suffered dread things from his father in his childhood. And so on.
These psychological factors are not given time to develop.
All three riveting performances testify as well to the kinetic skill of director Doug Hughes, who has only a bare stage to work with. Pity the play itself amounts to little more than a sentimentalization of the criminal mind.