Craig Dickerson and Sandra Weingart in Bryony Lavery’s Frozen. Photo by Kim A. Tolmon.

By Ben Sinclair

Agnetha the psychiatry student asks her colleagues in Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, “Can serial killing be considered a forgivable act?” From that premise Lavery displays the challenging psychology of three characters, brought together by evil and forgiveness.

Act one contains little interaction between these different players. Mostly we’re given three monologues that seem to swirl together from the actors’ separate platforms. In act two the weaving and interacting gets going, and the Venn diagram of perspectives really comes together. The overall effect is challenging. Lavery asks us whether our own values of right and wrong might be as ‘frozen’ as those of someone who’s physically unable to adapt to human society.

Agnetha is seeking to show the physical nature of the violently criminal mind. Nancy’s daughter has been kidnapped and killed. Ralph is the killer, an extreme case, in fact, a very deranged serial killer, a physically damaged loner-type who takes to killing an average of one teenage girl every year in a small English countryside town.

With white roses over the left third of the stage, square blue platforms holding the players at different angles, Ralph screams, “hand over my brain! Hand over my native intelligence!” He’s ruined lives with the acting incentive that it’s okay so long as he’s not caught. Agnetha has an explanation as to why. He sustains himself on fantasies and tattoos, but the police catch up to him through his local parlors and put him away.

Agnetha comes to examine him. She becomes dangerously close to him under secure conditions. Craig Dickerson’s performance as Ralph is so grotesque I couldn’t find much humanity in my perception of him, but I may have been predisposed to not feel the need to forgive him anyway. His jerky movements are fantastic though. Again this may come back to predisposition, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying most of the time — and I take pride in being able to decipher weird stuff.

Agnetha is the catalyst between their lives, where the serial killer is really the meat of the play because they both need something from him, psychiatrist and mother alike. Agnetha has a thesis to prove. Ralph is confronted with the information that he may not be able to tell right from wrong, and that this may be physically determined. “If the patient doesn’t blink three times, he cannot adapt to circumstances, as if he is frozen in an arctic state,” says Agnetha.

Nancy mourns the death of her daughter, until she is ready to tell Ralph, during his examination period that, in an absolutely magnanimous offering that speaks of the depth to which reconciliation for this woman was so needed, she forgives him.

To comment on the grace of the play as a whole, its tone is consistent, and it allows for a dark sense of humor that helps it move. As to the epic length, I have high standards for long narratives, since I tend to get myself through films, plays and television the same way I react to an automobile taking a sharp left turn when I’m in the passenger seat. Often the narratives that make an impact on me, the ones that tend to retain a presence in my mind, are those that, when first viewed, inspire a simmering distrust for me, as a viewer, in their quality, until they end and a period follows of processing that reveals my true feelings. I tend to constantly question the whole way, resisting the inertia whether out of fear or habit, until after, and I see I really did enjoy getting through that left turn, that this narrative just did drill something into me, that this was the feeling of love, not distrust.

So in the case of Frozen, this controversial, poignant and macabre tale set today in the midlands of England left me not questioning but further exploring my at times dark disposition toward the value of human life. I admired these characters for their ability to work hard at forgiveness. Fortunately, I didn’t feel the need to assimilate this into my own moral code. Certainly human life is a resource with the most potential for value in the universe, per unit, still, it also seems finally expendable. While Frozen made an impact on me, and I loved what the characters were able to do, it didn’t inspire brotherly love in me for violently deranged people, and that’s okay.

Frozen, by Eastenders Repertory, in association with Eureka Theatre, continues through September 14 at Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson St., SF. Tickets  ($15 to $25)are available by phone at (510) 568-4118 or at ticketweb.com.