A review of Frozen

City Circle - Have you ever looked into the eyes of a serial killer? Not in some hokey Hannibal Lecter film. In person?

Go see City Circle's production of Frozen for an idea of what you’d see staring back at you.

Though its subject matter may be half-CSI and half-Lifetime movie, Frozen is mostly unfettered by salacious gore or maudlin histrionics. Credit for avoiding these pitfalls goes to the playwright, the director, and the actors, who conspire beautifully in this production to create honest, convincing characters in extraordinary circumstances.

If you drew a picture of Frozen's plot, it would be a Venn diagram. The sparse, blue-white set even reflects this structure with its overlapping platforms.

In the center, the principal character, Ralph, resides. He is a serial murderer and pedophile. He kills ten-year-old Rhona, whose mother, Nancy, occupies the stage left circle. At stage right, a third circle is populated by Agnetha, a slightly neurotic American academic at work on her thesis, “Serial Killing—A Forgivable Act?” who finds Ralph to be an intriguing subject.

You can't blame Agnetha for being drawn-in.

Matthew James’s performance as Ralph is the most striking element of the production. The lights cast a charming gleam in his blue eyes early in Act I as he coaxes a little girl into his van with a distinctly pre-meditated intention of assaulting and killing her. Through James's performance, we see simultaneously that Ralph is human, putting on hand lotion and complaining about his landlady, and that he is horrible, planning and carrying out tortuous acts on young children with no remorse. Or perhaps it is just that he does horrible things. But how to separate these concepts? And why?

This question was first put to me in an undergraduate seminar on Holocaust literature. “To say that Hitler was an animal lets us all off the hook and preserves our sense of humanity,” went the professor’s argument. If we can put Hitler in the “monster” category, we are free to go about living our own lives untroubled by the depths of his depravity—for we have nothing in common with him.

To admit that Hitler was human, on the other hand, indicts us all for the acts he committed; it indicts our very concept of humanity. This admission must make us all look into our own eyes and see not just the capacity for the sublime or the banal, but the capacity for hate, violence, and perversion.

How to deal with “the monsters” in our society? What do we make of them intellectually? How do we respond to them emotionally? Even physically? Where do we put our “monsters”? Do we lock them up? Torture them for information? Kill them? Forgive them?

These are essential questions at any time in history, but seem to have particular resonance in the epoch of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the anti-American villain du jour.

It would be gratifying (and even miraculous) to leave the theatre with answers to these questions. My experience, instead, was to depart with a string of unconnected thoughts groping for connections across the synapses of my brain.

In some sense, watching this play was like seeing a woman with a butterfly net poised to catch the secret of the universe capture only an empty chrysalis. I'm game for disappointment in life - and even in art.

But I couldn't resist feeling that some truth escaped the threads of Lavery's net because she wasn't able to balance the gravity of Ralph's and Nancy's stories with Agnetha's comparatively trivial dilemma.

This issue in the script threw the production off balance for me. There was one moment in particular when Agnetha's neurotic fit eclipsed my ability to make sense of the theories she was offering regarding Ralph's capacity for remorse and insight. Maybe this was the intention, but it was a moment that pulled me out of the spell of the play.

There were very few other moments like this—the most unfortunate of which had to do with poor Mister James's perpetually peeling, shiny mustache. To see such a remarkable performance dogged with such an absurd issue was like watching a bald eagle soar head-on into a pole.

Still, if the biggest hitch in a complex and challenging play like Frozen is an uncooperative piece of synthetic facial hair, I would call the production a success.

A unity of vision and directorial insight was apparent throughout, from the ethereal pre-show music, to the tow-headed young stage hands, clad in gossamer white, simultaneously running props and serving as visual voids, sad placeholders for the children taken from their existence by the “monster” of the show.

Go see Frozen. At the least you will witness riveting and skillful performances and arresting theatrical moments such as when Nancy confronts Ralph as her daughter's murderer. At best, you will leave with new questions about forgiveness, guilt, and responsibility. And if you find any answers, please let me know.

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

(The above photo was taken by Wayne Carlson. Pictured are Matthew James and Deborah Gideon.)