Theater Review

Out of Steam

The title refers to a bunch of foreign correspondents embedded into the soldiery, and therefore drilled by a sadistic officer who, however, loves musical comedy and mentions David Merrick. (How three-dimensional can a character get?) Oh, yes, more inventiveness: The character closely modeled on Jessica Lynch is called Private Ryan, as an hommage to you-know-whom. The play is not so much taken from the headlines as taking headlines for drama. There is preaching to the converted that even the converted will find too preachy. Robbins, who also directed, may labor under the delusion that his play is Brechtian; if it is, then so is “Little Orphan Annie.”

Frozen, by the British play-wright Bryony Lavery, is the third play about a pedophile we’ve gotten in rapid succession. However, this pedophile, Ralph, preys on girls, not boys, and also kills his victims. Despite these additional twists, the play has better claims on a moratorium than on production. The author alleges that Frozen is about forgiveness, that, as the American academic Agnetha, researching her thesis on serial killers in England, declares, “the difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is [that] between a sin and a symptom.” But I see more revenge than forgiveness in the play; if there is forgiveness, it stems from Agnetha, the outsider, and not Nancy, the mother of 10-year-old Rhona, who has been ravished and slain. Anyhow, understanding does not equal forgiveness, and the person who lets his lethal sickness loose on society rather than seeking help is as sinful as anyone.

I believed less and less in the play as it became more and more twisty. Even an adultery subplot, dragged in from left field, struck me as contrived and manipulative. And the metaphor of freezing, extending from “the Arctic frozen sea that is the criminal mind” to Agnetha’s being Icelandic-American, and, beyond that, to the scenery and sound effects, smells strongly of a forced conceit. So too does the antifreeze of the final stage direction: “The sun breaks through, birds twitter, music plays,” which the savvy director, Doug Hughes, pretty much ignores. He has, though, inserted a kiss that I thoroughly disbelieve, but then, why not, given that such crucial scenes as Nancy’s visit to Ralph in jail, with its fatal consequences, are well past the credible?

What Frozen has, however, is first-rate acting. Swoosie Kurtz (Nancy), Brian F. O’Byrne (Ralph), and, in the least well-written part, Laila Robins (Agnetha) could not be better, and if superb performances are enough for you, so is this play, which, by the way, is written in verse—as is also Charles Mee’s Wintertime. I am not sure whether such delusion of grandeur is a sin or a symptom, but, either way, it is not to be encouraged.