"Frozen" Challenges Our Perceptions of Predators

"Frozen"

Written by Bryony Lavery, directed by Adam Zahler, scenic design by Richard Wadsworth Chambers, costume design by Frances Nelson McSherry, lighting design by Karen Perlow, sound design/original music by Jeffrey Alan Jones

Cast in order of appearance:

Agnetha Gottmundsdottir, Adrianne Hewlett

Nancy Shipley, Nancy E. Carroll

Ralph Wantage, Bates Wilder

Like a glacier that moves ever so slowly toward either growth or recession, Bryony Lavery's masterfully written drama "Frozen" marks the 25 agonizing years a woman spends trying to move past her young daughter's kidnapping, rape and murder. Told through the points of view of the mother, the perpetrator, and a noted psychiatrist who has spent years researching the pathology of serial killers, "Frozen" poses but never directly answers the question of whether or not child predators should be forgiven for their heinous crimes.

Tough subject matter, yes. But sensitive direction, combined with extraordinarily sympathetic performances, brings all the grit, pathos and humanity of Lavery's script to life, pulling the audience like a magnet into a world that is excruciatingly painful but also enlightening.

Before any of the three actors take the stage, we are inexorably drawn into a world of stark isolation. A blanket of what looks like frigid Artic snow covers the entire floor. Three narrow, vertically barred cells – empty except for identical black, straight-backed chairs and a few tidily placed props – sit menacingly upstage. Palpable tension fills the air before one word is ever spoken.

For the next two hours, that tension builds almost unbearably to a final crescendo that ultimately shatters any preconceived notions the audience may have about sin, sickness, evil or justice. In three devastatingly truthful and riveting performances, the immensely talented Nancy E. Carroll, Bates Wilder and Adrianne Hewlett find the good and hateful in every one of us.

"Frozen" begins by introducing each character separately through monologues that make us keenly aware of their everyday lives. Carroll's Nancy Shipley is a weary but wise wife and mother who reveals while gardening that her marriage has gone stale and her two teenaged daughters are in the typical throes of adolescent rebellion. Wilder's Ralph Wantage is a bundle of nerves who, with an odd mix of boyish innocence and obsessive menace, describes how he methodically selects his victims and carefully plans to charm them into his van. Hewlett's psychiatrist vacillates between competent and compassionate professional and unstrung individual whose personal life is clearly not as well ordered as her research. When one of Mrs. Shipley's daughters goes missing, their lives all violently intersect.

In scene after scene, Lavery's intelligent and unflinching script chips away the protective shells that initially define her characters, ultimately revealing that – perhaps – there are more similarities than differences between victim, criminal, and healer. As their very different worlds draw closer, the lines between their lives blur. All three, it seems, can be guilty of inflicting pain, and all three can be worthy of compassion.

Nancy Carroll and Bates Wilder are quietly astonishing in their respective roles of parent and pedophile. In the climactic scene in which they finally meet, all of the emotions that have been locked inside them for more than two decades break loose like an ice flow during a spring thaw. Carroll combines the tenderness of forgiveness with a steely resolve to make Wantage understand the consequences of what he's done. Wilder combines a cool, sociopathic detachment with a nervous, childlike vulnerability that makes his despicable actions both frightening and sad. Together they are able to make their confrontation tense, heartbreaking and oddly intimate without ever letting us forget that they are both damaged goods.

Adrianne Hewlett brings tremendous sturm und drang to the very difficult role of the psychiatrist who is as much in need of therapy as her research subject. She manages to avoid all of the stereotypes and pitfalls of portraying an intellectual observer and gives us, instead, a confused, sincere, emotionally torn and ultimately tragic multi-dimensional woman paralyzed by fear at a life-altering crossroad.

The superb direction by Adam Zahler is as honest as Lavery's uncompromising script. The women do not emerge as heroes in this drama, nor is the man portrayed as a total villain. As much as the audience may want to have someone to cheer and someone to boo by the end of two very tumultuous hours, this is not an episode of "Law and Order." It is life. The only thing black and white about the New Rep's "Frozen" is the set. Everything else leaves us sitting uncomfortably in the gray area.

Next at the New Rep: Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Performances: March 5 through 26

Box Office: 617-923-8487 or www.newrep.org