Dead Girl's Dance
By Caridad Svich
Frozen
By Bryony Lavery
Circle in the Square
50th St., W of Broadway
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Frozen is a three-handed portrait of
a pedophile/murderer (played by Brian F. O'Bryne), a criminal psychologist
(played by Laila Robins), and the mother who has lost her child at the
hands of the pedophile (played by Swoosie Kurtz). It is a clear-eyed,
restrained, and intelligent play about how stricken individuals contain
their grief--and moreover contain their emotions generally for fear
of losing themselves to rage, vengeance and pain. Twisting the knife,
as it were, with delicacy and nuance, Lavery builds her play on a contrapuntal
structure of alternating monologues by each of the characters, bracketed
by tense duets between the murderer and psychologist, and the psychologist
and the grieving mother. The play culminates in a strange, eerie meeting
between the murderer and his victim's mother. Throughout all the interlocking
solos and duets is felt the presence of the victim herself: a ten-year-old
girl named Rhona who has disappeared on her way to her grandmother's
house (not unlike Little Red Riding Hood), never to return. Rhona is
the play's driving force even though she is absent from the stage. Her
death serves as the catalyst for the three characters' emotional awakenings.
Throughout the course of the play the image which continues to haunt
even the most mundane of conversations is that of this innocent girl
who has been violated and killed by a seemingly ordinary man.
Much has been made of the subject of pedophilia
and its representation on stage, film and television in the last several
years. Todd Solondz's Happiness and Clint Eastwood's Mystic
River are just two examples of eminent films centered on pedophiles
as anchor points for their narratives. Neil LaBute's Your Friends
and Neighbors used the pedophiliac impulse of one of its lead characters
as a turning point in its story of suburban loneliness and misanthropy.
Week after week on television, docudramas and fictional shows in the
police, law and crime genres ("Law and Order," "CSI," etc.) feature
murder and abuse of young children or adolescents at the hands of pedophiles.
The sensationalistic focus on aberrant behavior in these mainstream
dramas has an oddly prurient quality, despite its moralistic overtones.
TV coverage of the unresolved Jon Benet Ramsey murder, for example,
was notable not for the details of the child beauty queen abducted and
killed in the night, but rather for the entertainment context, the near
giddiness with which reporters both reviled and leered at the child's
beauty-queen photos and video clips. The "Lolita syndrome," branded
so eloquently and devastatingly by Vladimir Nabokov in his classic novel,
and reinterpreted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne in their film versions
of the story, is unhealthily alive in the media's alternately salacious
and puritanical coverage of young people (girls in particular) meeting
their deaths in acts of abuse and violence.
Dead girls seem to animate our psyches in ways
that dead and victimized boys do not. Iphigenia, Antigone, and Cassandra
haunt our collective Western dramatic imaginations much more than, say,
Medea's two boys. Deborah Warner's staging of Medea in the
UK and US devoted impactful stage time to the murder of the children
as Fiona Shaw, playing Medea, dragged their limp bodies across the stage,
staining the walls of the palace with their fresh blood. But even the
artful, and empathetic (to the victim) demonstration of violence and
its effects in such a renowned story failed to swerve our attention
or compassion away from the character of Medea. Susan Smith's murder
of her sons, while horrific and scandalous, was almost overridden in
media coverage by Smith herself. Her sons remained somehow nameless
in the public mind. The 1993 death of the three-year-old English boy
Jamie Bulger made the front pages of world newspapers and internet news
services, I propose, not because of the killing itself but rather because
Bulger was murdered by two ten-year-old boys mere yards away from a
shopping center. The story there was about boys killing another boy.
Yet even that story failed to hold the public imagination for long.
It did not have the legs, for instance, of Princess Diana's untimely
death, one of the most potent (and profitable) dead girl fantasies in
recent memory.
We live in a world where what is recorded by
a video camera (security, military, or otherwise) miles away, a continent
away, co-exists with our immediate physical surroundings. In a culture
of watching and being watched, how an audience views actions on film
and stage is altered. As a culture, we have become increasingly conditioned
to view images of violence and abuse with disaffection and pleasure.
In Frozen, Lavery is savvy enough to save the descriptions
of violence in her story for when they will register most profoundly
with an audience. The writing is pointillistic in design. Details of
Rhona's disappearance and of Ralph's obsessive psychotic behaviour emerge
slowly, at times off-handedly. Lavery focuses our attention on what
makes up a life instead of what destroys it.
Frozen has the boldness, and the modesty,
to scale down its characters to a recognizably human level. Ralph is
a natural monster, not a supernatural one: he is quiet, efficient and
nondescript despite being disturbed and pathologically disassociated
from his feelings. Agnetha, the criminal psychologist, is ambitious
and forthright to a fault. In seeking scientific greater good, she has
nearly barred herself from connection with other people. While her character
is part of a long line of female figures in contemporary drama that
are both burdened and chastised for their professional ambition, Lavery
is deft in her portraiture. She doesn't take the all-too-easy and familiar
road of making Agnetha an aggressive careerist detached from her feelings.
Agnetha possesses wit, intelligence and passion, if perhaps a slight
disregard for the effect her words or actions may have on others. Nancy
is the immediate audience connective, and knowing this, Lavery draws
her coolly at first. Nancy is isolated and disconnected. She is placid
in her grief, and her chattery nature is a mask for the deep well of
pain she is in from the loss of her child: her other self.
Lavery does not flinch from looking at the nature
of aberrant behavior, but the strength of her work is in her ability
to go beyond a case-study approach to aberrance. Lavery broaches the
difficult subject of forgiveness, by her characters and her audience.
As she put it in a recent interview with me:
I think Frozen presents both forgiveness
and revenge as options...and I think it is fairly clear that the two
roads have difficulties...but I think if we can encourage our audiences
to rehearse the act of mercy...it feels good in our fibre and bones
and guts.
Witnessing Frozen we are asked to rid
ourselves of the fantasy of the beautiful dead girl, of the sacrificial
innocent of myths and stories, and contemplate with exactness and lack
of morbidity the consequence of death in our lives. Lavery does not
ask the audience to exonerate the murderer but she does ask that we
come to a more comprehensive understanding of the workings of the human
brain as we examine the events of the narrative. Using elements of the
detective and horror genres (both of which deal with human mortality),
Lavery sets up an atmosphere of quiet dread rather than suspense. Her
craft is to steer the audience as much as possible away from pre-conditioned
reflexes toward stories of interrogation and investigation seen many
times before. The murderer, after all, is a solitary drifter, cut from
the cloth of characters instantly recognizable from crime stories: the
outsider, outlaw, the lonely, volatile male figure roaming the primal
landscape at one with its random, casual violence. Under Doug Hughes's
astute direction, however, O'Byrne is encouraged (as Ralph) to underplay
the mad-marauder aspects of the role and concentrate instead on his
ordinariness and fierceness. This works to the play's advantage. Indeed,
the entire cast is called upon to deliver a particular kind of poetically
exact performance. Lavery's play is not realistic in the Victorian sense
of so much contemporary drama but rather poetic, with a heightened and
remarkably precise speech and manner. The language does not ape everyday
speech but exacts and essentializes it.
Ralph is remorseless. Agnetha is curiously drawn
to him while she examines him. Nancy is enraged, desperate, determined
and strangely calm once the gears of the story are set in motion (from
Rhona's disappearance, to waiting for her return, to receiving word
after twenty years that in fact Rhona will not return, since her remains
are found in Ralph's shed). The play is by turns blunt and discreet
with its portrayal of grief. When Nancy mimes holding Rhona's skull
before her remains are finally laid properly to rest, Nancy remarks
to the mortician, "It's beautiful." It is an unexpected moment in the
play, for it asks us all, as collective witnesses to this story, to
hold the dead girl in our hands, and consider what it means to do so.
Frozen refuses the gamesmanship and
showmanship of contemporary life. It is full of silence and sorrow,
even in its moments of amusement at the peculiarities and eccentricities
of the human condition. It is a play of steady power that forces us
to question the value we place on life itself. It posits, in effect,
that if we rehearse our acts of mercy enough, mercifulness may not seem
extraordinary but natural instead.