InterAct's "Frozen'

An unlovable criminal's unforgivable crime

JIM RUTTER

“I want you to know that I forgive you for killing my daughter.” In Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, this statement by a victim’s mother serves as the culmination of a heartrending journey that began 20 years earlier. But to the distant scientist Agnetha (Catherine Slusar), it’s a meaningless remark, and one that bears no application to the brain damaged killer Ralph (Jeb Kreager).

Frozen abounds with ideas about the nature of justice and the psychological costs of forgiveness. It provided me with some of the most thought-provoking theater of the year, and forced me to ask big questions.

As a first question, I’m wondering whether it’s even a play.

Frozen combines two stories: that of the scientist Agnetha, which Lavery sets in the present, and of the victim’s mother Nancy (Mary Martello), which begins 20 years earlier and only intersects the first story late in the play. Thanks to Whit MacLaughlin’s compelling direction and Matt Saunders’s intelligently designed set, they merge seamlessly.

But Lavery has composed her work largely with monologues that consume most of the script: Nancy delivers a long address to the assembled members of a children’s advocacy group; and Agnetha spends the bulk of her stage time delivering a scientific lecture that Lavery could have just as easily written into a research paper or short story.

The season’s best performance

Initially we see Ralph alone on stage as well, coaxing Nancy’s (unseen) ten-year old Rona into the back of his van before (thankfully, also unseen) raping, killing and then burying her under the dirt floor of his shed. As Ralph later explains, only a slip-up in his meticulously planned “efficiency” (also well-detailed in monologue) leads to his arrest and capture. The rest of the time, he’s repeating the word “obviously,” though it’s very disturbing what’s obvious to him.

Indeed, it’s amazing the type of performance that Kreager manages from this role— in my opinion, the best of the season, and far more chilling than any stage (or screen) villain than I’ve seen in a long time (easily more so than Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning turn in No Country for Old Men). When Kreager remarks that the only thing he regrets is “that it’s not legal, killing girls,” his casual honesty tells us not only that he’s unforgivable, but also that it’s impossible to feel sorry for him.

Of course, this doesn’t stop Agnetha from trying. Agnetha sees Ralph as someone who’s suffered severe neurological trauma, and as a result, is incapable of forming proper judgments. In the long (aforementioned) monologues, she details the precise areas of Ralph’s brain that repeated physical abuse has damaged: his battered and shrunken cortex leaves him incapable of making “proper” judgments, and the injuries to his hippocampus make it difficult for him to even, later in life, learn and assimilate new information that could form the basis for better moral judgments in the future.

A two-legged animal

Which is fine; Lavery actually “borrowed” most of this material as well as the basis for her character Agnetha from psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis’s 1998 book, Guilty by Reason of Insanity. But in the play, Lavery has Agnetha express these views in action by showing a clinical contempt for Ralph that almost mirrors his own murderous detachment (her reply to his lies about a “happy childhood” are alone worth seeing), and later, kissing Ralph on the back of the head while whispering to him that none of what he’s done is his fault. It’s an almost grotesque act, not because of the consistency of Agnetha’s beliefs that motivates such an action, but because of the sheer inhumanity of a gesture and belief system that reduces Ralph to the ethical status of an animal. In Agnetha’s view, to paraphrase Orwell, some two-legged creatures are more equal than others.

But the most disturbing moment of all occurs when Agnetha displays more fellow-feeling for Ralph than for Nancy, and tries to protect Ralph’s fragile psyche from one more moment of trauma when Nancy asks to visit him in prison. At the very least, shouldn’t Agnetha protect Nancy, advising that Ralph’s condition makes the “closure of forgiveness” impossible to obtain?

In making Ralph so vicious and Agnetha so committed to approaching his behavior rationally, Lavery sets up the toughest possible sell for forgiveness. But she also manages, perhaps unintentionally, to show the inhumanity required by a psychological-scientific approach to morality— an effect that Slusar’s detached performance as Agnetha achieves with a near vicious force.

Having it both ways

Lavery wraps up her play with Nancy’s statement of forgiveness (which I mentioned above), throwing in a twist that forces an emotional break in Kreager’s character (which I won’t spoil, but which is completely out of sync with how he licks the stamps for his letter of apology to Nancy). But though this break achieves the feel-good ending that Lavery wants, it completely contradicts Agnetha’s thesis that, to her— and perhaps Lavery—justifies forgiving Ralph in the first place.

So which is it? Either Ralph’s incapable of learning new behaviors because of his neurological condition (and therefore blameless, as Agnetha suggests), or he can be brought to recognize the difference between right and wrong, with all the moral categories that implies. But if it’s the latter, then Lavery can no longer advocate forgiveness for a child-raping serial killer because he’s suffered brain damage from abuse.

So either Frozen is a fantasy whose ending couldn’t happen in the real world, or Agnetha’s position logic is faulty and none of us, including Nancy, should forgive Ralph’s actions. But Lavery, ever the playwright, wants it both ways.

Frozen enjoyed critical success in New York, including a Tony nomination for best new play. I can see why: Though it’s riddled with contradictions, Frozen nonetheless affirms a certain set of beliefs with the same type of incoherence with which those beliefs are held. It’s a fantasy, but for most theatergoing audiences, it’s the right kind of fantasy. And in that sense, Frozen is a play after all.