'Frozen' acting heats up Zoo stage

Author: Colin Foss

"Frozen" is a play about self-discovery, but not of the lighthearted Disney Channel variety. It focuses on the events following the arrest of a pedophilic serial murderer as well as on the people drawn to him and his disorder. It traces both an uncomfortable expedition into a diseased mind and presents natural humans emotions that show up in the most inhuman places.

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British playwright Bryony Lavery begins her play with a collage of monologues. The three isolated characters do not meet onstage until their stories seem to cross paths - each of them remains "frozen" in their own consciousness until dialogue brings them together. The structure of the play, therefore, decided its theme. Initially, these monologues were unrelated, and so were difficult to paste together to form something coherent. Lavery's choice to present "Frozen" as a series of monologues necessarily separated the action, but a viewer could not focus long enough to enjoy the nuances of these first scenes. When the dialogue began, I was so entranced by its richness that I felt I had been ill-equipped for it at the beginning of the performance.

What made this final "coming together" more revelatory was the clearness of the performance. Rishabh Kashyap '08, in the role of the killer Ralph, gave the performance the dexterity and intelligence that his role desperately needed to check the audience's contempt for him. Kashyap did not allow his character to be easily categorized and analyzed on a psychologist's couch (like so many Freud-fed audiences would). The pathos that he exacted was a testament to his formidable understanding of both his role and his acting abilities.

Along with Kashyap, Stephanie Strohm '08 has been working on her last theatre project at Middlebury. In "Frozen," Strohm presents some of the material that she has expressly chosen to tackle. Her character, Agnetha, works in New York as a psychologist who travels to England in order to study Ralph. Agnetha's inclusion in the play seemed cumbersome or poorly qualified. The play includes some scenes between her and Ralph high with sexual tension - not because Ralph's advances are unwanted, but because Agnetha finds herself appallingly interested by them. Is her interest a product of a diseased Eros? Lavery lets us question these scenes, but it detracts from some of the genuinely connective moments between the two of them. When Agnetha brought Ralph a cookie, I was left wondering what kind of intimacy she is looking for.

Nancy, the mother of one of Ralph's victims, comes to visit him in prison, a decision that leads to some of the most poignant scenes in the play, moments that greatly benefited from the tenderness of their direction. Michaela Lieberman '10.5 kept Nancy within the realm of reason despite the difficulties inherent in her situation. Their meeting hailed the most relevant thawing of emotion in the play and also functioned as a portal to more difficult introspection in the play's second half.

This is where the separateness of the play finds its footing. Where? Agnetha ,with her complicated sexuality, sees something in Ralph that she recognizes in herself. She cannot treat him as an object of study if she sympathizes with him - even if it is in a strictly human-to-human way. She describes his mind as a frozen waterway, with its appropriately profound icebergs and treacherous passages. However, Agnetha's instability rivals, in a symptomatic way, Ralph's disease. She breaks down in front of an assembly, imagines an in-flight massacre and sends e-mails to her dead lover. From her very first appearance in the play, she seems capable of committing some kind of atrocity that would make her a candidate for psychological study on the same level as Ralph.

In terms of staging, the audience was separated in two, facing each other, with a sort of runway between them and a small stage at one end. The configuration seemed appropriate for the earlier monologues but at other points concealed or encumbered the action. I felt conspicuous waving my head around to see the dispersed stage. The discomfort passed beyond the subject of the play and entered into my enjoyment of it, as I remembered too often my position as a voyeur to the performance.

Levine has written a play that is serious without being hackneyed or simple. The playwright's use of monologue to give the structure of the play some of its effect may not have been easy to follow, but content was not sacrificed for style. The real highlight of the performance was the quality and variety of acting, which steered the seriousness of the subject matter away from melodrama and legitimized its difficulties. It is always bittersweet to see the final performances of senior actors, but if for every Kashyap and Strohm we are left a Lieberman, I think the math will work out fine.