STUCK.("Frozen")(Movie Review)

There is probably no greater horror than that of a child being abducted from his mother and having his barely formed life cut short. And there is probably no actress with greater skill at conveying wounded gentility and moral confusion than Swoosie Kurtz. As Nancy in Bryony Lavery's extremely well-crafted play "Frozen" (at the M.C.C.), Kurtz plays a mother who walks about in a stunned silence brought on by the kidnapping and murder of her little girl by a pedophile named Ralph (the brilliant Brian F. O'Byrne).

It makes no difference that Nancy's daughter was killed twenty years before the action of the play: Nancy is defined by mourning. She is--as the title of the play suggests--frozen by grief. And if to add color to the gray absence at the center of her life she chatters endlessly about the mundane--cocktail parties and the like--so be it. She likes the sound of her own voice; it's like the radio, distracting her from the sound of her daughter's cries, which echo in her imagination, like the sorrow songs.

Set in present-day England, "Frozen" is essentially a series of monologues describing the locked-in lives of three characters. In addition to Nancy and Ralph--who, at the time of the play, has been arrested for a new spate of child-abuse crimes--we have Agnetha (Laila Robins), a slightly younger than middle-aged criminologist who has travelled from the United States to deliver a group of lectures on the physical and emotional characteristics of the criminal mind. Although Agnetha is giving the lectures on her own, her work is a joint effort between her and her late lover, David. When, during the lectures, Agnetha wants to make a point that belongs to David, she rolls tape, and we hear his deep, sonorous voice. It's measured, steady, authoritative--a dream lover's voice. For Agnetha, it is the saddest of lullabies; her eyes fill with tears, as her body, which can't distinguish between public presentation and private pain, remains rigid.

Agnetha is just as paralyzed as Nancy, but, because she is a scientist, she must feign disinterest at all times, especially when she meets and interviews Ralph. As she sits in Ralph's cell, measuring his cranium and describing the criminal personality to the audience--instructing, she attempts to retain some measure of control--we can see her grief begin to seep through. Like the love and the despair that Agnetha will forever try to keep at bay, Ralph and his murky, cruel inner workings remain at a mysterious distance.

Agnetha tries hard to keep it together (and her demeanor can be annoying), but there's a braveness, a vulnerable pluck to her character, especially as it is played by Robins. Her thin frame cuts across the nearly bare stage; she has a deadpan focus and a passion for acting, but she's no showoff. While she is entirely convincing during her various monologues, you can tell that she prefers the relatively brief exchanges that take place when her character interviews Nancy about the crime and when she examines Ralph.

Ralph's repetition compulsion--to sexualize little girls and then silence his guilt about his fetish by dispensing of the victims--is the gravitas that makes the play deeper, and more troubling, than the first act leads you to expect. Lavery does little to explain Ralph's compulsion, except to have him reveal, during one of his unbearably intense monologues, that his father beat him when he was a child. Killing is a supreme act of revenge. By murdering Nancy's ...