'IceBound' - FROZEN at Spotlighters

Psychiatric researcher Agnetha Gottmundsdotir (Stephanie Ranno), professorial in her well-cut business suit, strides the four corners of the Spotlighters tiny stage, lecturing to the audience on the "artic frozen sea which is the criminal mind." For her, a pedophile murderer like Ralph Wantage (Frank Vince) cannot truly be called evil, since his unspeakable actions are really the result of brain trauma and childhood abuse.

Wantage's sins are merely symptoms. His affliction has placed him on a path from which he cannot deviate. There's a "rigidity" here...he is "icebound."

But then again, so is every character in Bryony Lavery's work, FROZEN, which won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2004.

Frank Vince's Wantage is fussy and twitchy, a Felix Unger of death. He speaks of "logistics" and "organization" as he explains everything from his pornography collection, to his assorted tattoos, to his method of hunting children. He refers to the shed where he kills and buries his unfortunate victims as his "base of operations." He is detached from any feeling, besides his own pain.

Debbie Bennett's Nancy Shirley, mother of one of Wantage's victims, is also detached, but in a different way, consumed with the anguish of loss. If Wantage is frozen, Nancy is ablaze, almost literally, as she leads an activist group for missing children called FLAME.

Ranno's Gottmundsdotir suffers too, grieving the loss of a colleague, friend and lover, and tries to rise above it by throwing herself into her work...which in this case is a prolonged study of Wantage while in prison. EVen Daniel Douek's mute Prison Guard is isolated, in this case, by his silence and his one dimensional role-as Wantage's jailor and punisher.

But are these characters truly trapped in "perpetual night"? Is there no way to be free of these icy bonds? Wantage asks, "What is remorse?" and one senses he truly has no conception of the word. In Dante's Inferno, Satan is pictured as immersed in ice, frozen up to his chest-is this a good description of Wantage or can something actually touch his pitiful excuse for a heart? Will Nancy be free of the burden of her hate toward Wantage? Can Agnetha get past her own loss and appreciate the nature of human beings as something more than an equation to solve, a paper to publish?

Spotlighters provides the cast with the simplest of sets-a blank stage with four chairs-and the actors do a tremendous job in transforming this blank slate into everything from a tilled garden to a child's room to an airliner (I particularly liked how Ranno created the illusion of walking down a crowded airplane aisle, resting her hands atop nonexistent seats).

Kudos to the lighting and sound team (Fuzz Roark, Michael Spellman, Fred Nelson) as the use of light, music and sound effects were crafted to each character, enhancing mood, and signaling the passage of time as the play bounces between the present and past, spanning 20 years.

FROZEN runs now through July 5th at the Spotlighters, 817 St. Paul Street in downtown Baltimore. For tickets/information, call 410-752-1225 or visit www.spotlighters.org.

 

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