High Ice

MTC's brilliant 'Frozen' explores the icy terrain between illness and evil

Reviewed by David Templeton

With more than 55 active theater companies doing their thing this side of the Golden Gate, North Bay live theater fans have plenty of offerings to choose from--some good, some decidedly not so. Every two or three years, however, there comes a play that is so good, so powerful and intelligent, so sharply and brilliantly written and directed, so astoundingly and near impossibly well-acted, that it instantly makes every other show around seem amateurish and anemic and trivial in comparison. Marin Theatre Company's new production of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, directed by Amy Glazer, is such a play.

For good or ill, this is the show I will be comparing all others to for the rest of year, and that's too bad for everyone else, because--despite subject matter which will possibly keep some audience members away--this show is going to be damn hard to upstage, oh, yes! oh, yes!

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes." That's the terrifying, chilling catchphrase frequently uttered in a hoarse and knowing whisper at the end of the sentences uttered by convicted child killer Ralph (played with concentrated, damaged-goods intensity by Rod Gnapp). Frozen, which was nominated for four Tony Awards (including Best Dramatic Play) in 2004, begins in London with Ralph's unforgivable crime and then leapfrogs through the aftermath over the ensuing 20 years, charting the relationship between the murderer, the murdered girl's mother, Nancy (a magnificently evolving Lorri Holt), and an emotionally stunted American psychologist, Agnetha (the always riveting Stacy Ross).

Agnetha's research into the brain development of serial killers has brought her into contact with Ralph, around whom she seems strangely comfortable, and Nancy, whose grief she finds difficult to be near. The immensely humane script by Lavery is an emotion-encompassing amazement, forcing each character--and the audience with them--to ponder the difference between illness and evil, to witness the powder-keg potential of bottled-up remorse and to test the boundaries of what we humans believe, and do not quite believe, about the power and limitations of forgiveness.