| Welcome to The New Moon Rising a contemporary journal of art and politics |
Frozen is a play about the fucked–up world we live in, and how to live in it.
There's a Christmas wreath hanging on the back wall of the rehearsal room on the third floor of the Hippodrome, but there's no cheer about the three actors as they detach themselves from their surroundings and enter a different, desperate reality.
"Bye, home," Jessica Peterson says as a woman we will come to know as Agnetha, while she packs her bags. She's having an anxiety attack, which seems funny and then isn't. Where is she going? Onto a precipice? Or just somewhere in England?
Yes, we know the English. We know their peculiarities. They joined up with us in this crazy war, ergo, they must be just as crazy as we are.
Timothy Altmeyer plays Ralph, who is just a guy, turns out he's a sexual predator, but he's just a guy. "I just do it," he tells us. "It's a rush of blood."
"The virgins are calling you," Mohamed Ata told his buddies before take–off. That's sick. But you can't beat the West for sick. Freud called it Civilization and its Discontents to explain the price we pay for repression.
The sexually deviant are removed to the margins of society, but it is an ever–widening margin. The reason is the same as why there is no longer any center to the universe and why the center will not hold: because the universe is expanding.
We want to know the nuts and bolts of perversion, with a list of sexual predators in your neighborhood just a mouse click away. What need we fear, in an age of terror? In a permissive society where Jessica Lunsford gives her name to the law only after giving her life?
Timothy Altmeyer disappears into his character, never quite crossing the line into likeable. What's a guy to do?
That's just the way he is—this guy, this pedophile, that's just the way his mind works. And this psychologist wants to find out how his mind works. If it works. Oh, it works all right. It's not a question of intelligence. It's a question of misapplication, crossed wires, a short–circuiting.
An unhealthy organism in an unhealthy environment. Crazy man in a crazy world, causing trouble for the sane, the innocent. A sane person in a crazy world must shed his or her innocence and learn to live with insanity. Sanity can put you at a distinct disadvantage, amplified if you factor in innocence.
What role does innocence play? That of victim.
Human sacrifice.
In ages past there was some perceived benefit accrued through human sacrifice. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia so that he might return safely from Troy. And he did—but he couldn't escape his own bathtub when Clytemnestra's revenge found him there.
Is this a play to play upon our fears? Perhaps. Play is preparation for later life. Play is an engagement of our survival instincts for the purpose of honing them. It is a coping mechanism. And, ritualistically, it is an expression of awe.
Moment after moment, in the style of the triptych, like a painting by Francis Bacon, framing ghastly contents, Frozen occupies your thoughts.
It's been five years since the disappearance of Nancy's 10 year–old daughter. We are an informed audience. We know more than the characters do. We know that Nancy's daughter will not be coming home.
Nancy, played by Sara Morsey, thinks she has found a kind of fulfillment in a survivors group. But she hasn't.
The characters occupy frozen psychological states. Ralph bares a Grim Reaper tattoo, having injecting ink into his skin, somehow beneath the surface of ice. We don't even know what we're perverting anymore.
Fellow feeling? Yes, sure, feeling, groping, but you can't trust anyone. There can be no more trust. The age of innocence ended in the Garden of Eden.
"I wish the weather would break," Nancy says. "It's unbearable. Great big storm."
The killer's key word is "obviously." Because it is obvious, to us and to him. At a distance or up close. And Lauren Caldwell has staged it with that purpose in mind. Stark. See Bacon's paintings.
He's been caught. We can catch these creatures. Now, after the fact, is serial killing a forgivable act? Is there such a thing as evil?
The dialogue finally catches. Ralph and the psychiatrist. He's afraid of being touched. There is an inability to adapt. The psychiatrist will meet Nancy. Nancy will meet Ralph and try to forgive him.
An eye for an eye. Community responsibility. Pedophile identification, so that we can protect our kids, give them a chance to grow up and become the pedophiles of the future. Or will there be a future without pedophiles? Not on your life.
"I can forgive, but I can't forget," Sara Morsey says creepliy in two different voices. But she is the one who is afraid. Evil or mental illness? If there is evil, it's in every one of us.
No escape.
There can be no empathic response. We may identify with him, if we have the novelist's generosity of spirit that made Harry Crews climb the tower in Texas to try to see the world through the eyes of the Vietnam Vet who massacred the people below. The novelist has to be the most compassionate man in the world, Harry says. Like Montaigne, who believed the entire human condition lay within him. Good and evil. Or as Harry is wont to say: "We do good and we do bad; it's all part of living."
Will people find this play entertaining? Not bloody likely. Entertaining is not the word. Unless you're into plays of substance, psychology, like a kind of brain candy.
This play, with its dual time scheme, seems to start and stop, over and over again, with the primal scream that issues from a dead child's mother.
I asked Sara Morsey how she got there, to that scream that seems to come out of nowhere and shocks the heart, and she said, "Hey, I'm afraid your question is too hard for me. I don't know how to go there. It just happens with the writing and the story and, I suppose, an inborn maternal instinct. I wish I could say something profound, but Ms. Lavery's already done that. Actor as conduit."
Spinoza got there long before Freud did. "A man is born ignorant of the causes of things, and he has a desire of which he is conscious to seek that which is profitable to him. He thinks himself free because he is conscious of his wishes and appetites, while at the same he is ignorant of the causes by which he is led to wish and desire."
Bryony Lavery is roughly David Mamet's contemporary. She was born in England in 1947, the same year Mamet was born in Chicago.
There is now Mametspeak, a pattern of language so recognizable that you can hear the master's voice in it. Bryony Lavery went another way. She likes to clip stories out of the newspaper and make dramas out of them. Nothing wrong with that. Done that myself.
Lavery's plays are topical, issue–oriented, in the news.
So it turns out that Bryony Lavery cribbed a major part of Frozen from the New Yorker. What of it? The author himself said he didn't mind all that much. Of course the lady whose character she stole didn't feel quite the same way. Been there too.
It's a question of intellectual property. It's a question of creative license. It's a question of plagiarism. Ultimately, it's a question of bullshit. It's a question that really doesn't matter when you're watching a play and considering the matter at hand, which is pedophilia.
Harry Crews would whale on the notion of researching your novel. He'd just picture some guy descending into the bowels of a library and emerging with a novel. What you really wanted to do was imagine things truly, not look them up.
After a middling career, (I say from the safe distance of having spent the last 20 years as a public school teacher), Ms. Lavery hit it big with Frozen, a hit in London and then in New York, moving from Off–Broadway to Broadway, where it ran for 126 performances.
"A major play …thrilling, humane and timely"—The London Times.
"Consistently surprising and even bravely comic&…The almost thriller–like promise of the play's climactic confrontation is like a time–bomb ticking in the back of your head."—The Independent ( London).
"[A] big, brave, compassionate play about grief, revenge, forgiveness and bearing the unbearable." The Guardian.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in the November of 2004 issue of the New Yorker called "Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?"
Dorothy Lewis didn't find out until Frozen hit Broadway that Bryony Lavery had lifted her life for dramatic purposes.
"I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realized that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen—I don't believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence."
"The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness," Gladwell wrote, "is the difference between a sin and a symptom." That line is in Frozen. It's one of the best lines.
"I got a copy of the script for Frozen," Gladwell explains. "I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn't supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause. In late September, the story broke. The Times, the Observer in England, and the Associated Press all ran stories about Lavery's alleged plagiarism, and the articles were picked up by newspapers around the world. Bryony Lavery had seen one of my articles, responded to what she read, and used it as she constructed a work of art. And now her reputation was in tatters. Something about that didn't seem right."
Lavery tried to explain: "What happens when I write is that I find that I'm somehow zoning on a number of things. I find that I've cut things out of newspapers because the story or something in them is interesting to me, and seems to me to have a place onstage. Then it starts coagulating. It's like the soup starts thickening. And then a story, which is also a structure, starts emerging. I'd been reading thrillers like 'The Silence of the Lambs,' about fiendishly clever serial killers. I'd also seen a documentary of the victims of the Yorkshire killers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who were called the Moors Murderers. They spirited away several children. It seemed to me that killing somehow wasn't fiendishly clever. It was the opposite of clever. It was as banal and stupid and destructive as it could be. There are these interviews with the survivors, and what struck me was that they appeared to be frozen in time. And one of them said, 'If that man was out now, I'm a forgiving man but I couldn't forgive him. I'd kill him.' That's in Frozen. I was thinking about that. Then my mother went into hospital for a very simple operation, and the surgeon punctured her womb, and therefore her intestine, and she got peritonitis and died. She was seventy–four, and what occurred to me is that I utterly forgave him. I thought it was an honest mistake. I'm very sorry it happened to my mother, but it's an honest mistake. In a lot of ways, Frozen was an attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness," she said. "I wanted a scientist who would understand. I wanted it to be accurate. I thought it was O.K. to use it. It never occurred to me to ask. I thought it was news."
"It matters how Lavery chose to use my words," Gladwell realized. "She was writing a play about something entirely new—about what would happen if a mother met the man who killed her daughter. And she used my descriptions of Lewis's work and the outline of Lewis's life as a building block in making that confrontation plausible. Isn't that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in the service of a new idea aren't the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea."
