Theater Reviews

Feb 12, 2006 - “Frozen,” the Byrony Lavery play about pedophilia, opens at Reno's Bruka Theatre

By Jack Neal

Reno’s Bruka Theatre Company has established a reputation for producing daring, offbeat plays. Byrony Lavery’s “Frozen,” about serial pedophilia and murder, certainly fits the company’s modus operandi.

First performed in England in 1998, with a short run on Broadway in 2004, “Frozen” is a step in the sensitizing direction of removing those who sexually exploit children, and worse, from a fate similar to the Salem Witch Trials, when fanatic religious bigotry was rampant in New England.

It’s necessary to protect children from exploitation and horrid ordeals, but a play about the perpetrator as also being a victim is an important departure for a society that considers itself moral and humane, but often doesn’t recognize when it’s neither. Psychiatry has come a long way. That it has much, much further to go in probing criminal and other kinds of mental disorders goes without saying.

The public weeps for abused children who have been horribly mistreated. Then the child is forgotten - until they become of age and carry with them the scars of youth. Those scars can be overcome. Sometimes they are not. Rarely is there sympathy for the older sad soul locked into a mind set that often compells him or her to act out the worst sorts of anti-social behavior. Forgotten is the child for whom society once shed tears.

While fascinating in many ways, Lavery’s play only scratches the surface of the enormous social problem it attempts to explore. Four people inhabit “Frozen.” Only three speak. The guard where Ralph - the pedophile about whom the play is written - has been incarcerated, says nothing. He observes and watches.

Ralph, powerfully acted by Michael Grimm, is being studied by Agnetha a psychologist. La Ronda Etheridge plays Agnetha. Agnetha is a professional who’s clinical about her work. She’s also a woman who’s just suffered the death of the man she loves. Agnetha is both detached and vulnerable. In a sensitive portrayal, Etheridge bridges Agnetha’s emotional highs and lows with numbing realism.
Completing “Frozen’s” trinity of players is the mother of a lost child for whom life has been frozen in place for over twenty years. Holly Natwora plays Nancy, the mother of a young girl Ralph has kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered. Natwora brings a wide range of emotions - hate, love, frustration and confusion - to her realization of a mother’s anguish over loss, and a woman’s struggle to understand why her daughter died and what makes the monster who did it tick.

Grimm, Etheridge and Natwora are individually and collectively superb. This marvelous threesome touch the inner souls and anger of their characters for a moving evening of gripping live theater.

Jim Martin has directed and he fine tunes his actors into a symphony of sorrows and questions. David Simpson s bleak lighting searches eyes for the humanity of each character, as if to find meaning to existences running on empty. Brian Barney s sound design uses music to underscore the poignancy of loss that pervades the production. Lewis Zaumeyer’s set is as stark as the play’s material.

That “Frozen” asks more questions than it can answer is possibly and probably a given. Also a given is the play’s ability to move those who experience it to a new and higher threshold of social and moral understanding.

Bruka Theatre’s “Frozen” plays February 19 and 11, 16-18, and 23-25 at 8 p.m. and February 26 (2006) at 2 p.m. at the Bruka Theatre, 99 North Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada. For information call 775-323-3221.