Frozen

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

She’s scattered, hurried, harried, packed and ready to leave. She’s moving, worried about forgetting things, losing important papers, in a staccato rush of adrenalin. Something eats at her. It just isn’t clear what.

Diana Dresser and William Hahn in a scene from Frozen at Curious Theatre Company. Photo by Michael Ensminger

He’s mumbling, disoriented, thinking out loud, musing, attracted to pretty girls. He just wants to say hello, and he wants them to say hello to him. He’s charming even though you know something about him makes the skin crawl.

She’s a mother of two girls who constantly compete for her attention. The one always claiming she loves the other one best.

One went to visit her grandmother and never came home. Where is she?

In the 1980s these three live in different places, have never met, and yet their lives become intertwined over a 20-year period feeding and draining each other of emotional lifeblood.

Frozen, written by Bryony Lavery, plays at the Acoma Center by Curious Theatre Company for a regional premiere. Directed by Anthony Powell, former Associate Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company, he asks the three actors to wear their hearts on their sleeve, and then asks to replace that with the hearts of their characters. They give. He asks for more. They give more.

Laced with humor, this play digs deep into the criminal mind of a serial killer and the people affected.

Diane Dresser wears the mettle of Agnetha, an American criminal psychologist, who with her partner delved into research on the criminal brain. Now she has opportunity to investigate some of their theories by interviewing Ralph, an unrepentant serial killer. Only now she doesn’t have her partner to shoulder responsibility. Through most of the play it isn’t known why she is angry, vulnerable, at times unsteady, at times unglued, at times unprofessional, while other times she stands strong and forceful. Dresser follows Agnetha’s emotions in symphonic measure.

Cunning, oily, charming, elusive, William Hahn carves Ralph into pieces and then carefully puts him together in a giant jig saw formation. One minute he elicits smiles, the next a chilling run up the spine, the next empathy for cruel treatment, the next fear of what he will do next. Will he stay on the stage where he belongs to keep his distance? Hahn stepped into the role late in the game. Christopher Leo who had been preparing for the role since June felt it necessary to bow out of the production. Leo, a dynamo actor with magnificent credits to his name, who always raised the bar with artistic expertise bravely admitted to compounding stage fright. Climbing into Ralph’s skin would have to be a frightening adventure for any actor. It is with all of our hope and good will Leo will find his way back to the stage. He is a prize for the theatrical community, and if nothing else, he needs to know that.

For Hahn to come face to face with Ralph, enveloping the psyche of this tormented man, and then giving Ralph to the production in the frightening and pathetic manner he does is a major accomplishment. Ralph is not a pretty sight, and that after all is the point.

While Agnetha struggles with the success of her professional life, and the dismantlement of her personal life, Ralph lives through the twists and turns of his bruised and damaged brain, and Nancy, an English housewife, clings to sensibility with the mysterious disappearance of one her daughters. Kathryn Gray delivers a stunning performance as a mother weaving her way through catapulting emotions of frenzied guilt, the helplessness of not knowing what happened, the thunderous grief in discovering her daughter was murdered within sight and sound of her home. Gray grabs the heart and soul of Nancy and lays her at our feet. We laugh and cry and hold our breath along with her as she grapples for strength, beats herself up, wades into a devil may care mode, wraps herself in a robe of guilt, then defiantly confronts the man who stole her daughter from her, coming face to face with Agnetha who tries hard to keep Nancy and Ralph apart. She knows something Nancy doesn’t understand.

Frozen is a slice of life that may live in your house, across the street, around the corner. Brilliantly written, compassionately directed, and presented in full view with insightful artistic grandeur.

On an intriguing curious set of almost see through walls with props tucked neatly into pigeon holes for easy access and constant reminders, Susan Crabtree sets the stage for time and space to melt away as cagey moments, and heart stopping minutes turn into years of unfolding mysteries and emotional explorations.

By all means this is a production that needs to be on the must see list because it’s educational, insightful, informative, because the reality lives with us every day, because it haunts and hunts and demands attention. Because Dresser, Hahn, and Gray provide astonishing performances, because Powell has driven right straight into the heart of the matter, because Leo opened his soul to us and welcomed us into a slice of theatre life that rarely gets attention.

Because the artistic endeavors of everyone involved stand at the very top of why theatre is so valiantly vital in our complicated roller coaster world.