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(Tenured Radical)

Monday, September 27, 2004

IT PAYS TO READ REVIEWS



"[W]hy does Frozen leave me so cold? Two reasons, I think. First, Lavery stacks her deck a little more deliberately than she needs to. The arc of the play is apparent within ten minutes — Lavery doesn't grow characters so much as manipulate them, and us right along with them. I felt myself being very consciously guided to a conclusion all the way through Frozen; I prefer it when a playwright trusts me to reason things out on my own.

Second, and possibly even more problematic, is Frozen's structure. A great deal of the play is told through monologues — indeed, Nancy has only one scene with Ralph and only two with Agnetha; Ralph and Agnetha interact only in formalized interview settings. Thus, we're denied the chance to see these people interact in human ways (which contributes to that manipulation I just mentioned). And Lavery proves very ineffective in solving the chief problem of the confessional structure, i.e., who are these people talking to? Especially when Nancy was speaking, I never knew. If the playwright can't place her characters inside some kind of reality, how are we supposed to?"


Martin Denton
newyorktheatre.com



"I believed less and less in the play as it became more and more twisty. Even an adultery subplot, dragged in from left field, struck me as contrived and manipulative. And the metaphor of freezing, extending from “the Arctic frozen sea that is the criminal mind” to Agnetha’s being Icelandic-American, and, beyond that, to the scenery and sound effects, smells strongly of a forced conceit. So too does the antifreeze of the final stage direction: “The sun breaks through, birds twitter, music plays,” which the savvy director, Doug Hughes, pretty much ignores. He has, though, inserted a kiss that I thoroughly disbelieve, but then, why not, given that such crucial scenes as Nancy’s visit to Ralph in jail, with its fatal consequences, are well past the credible?"

John Simon
New York Magazine

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Playwright Lavery Accused of Plagiarism

Playwright Bryony Lavery Accused of Plagiarizing Parts of Tony-Nominated 'Frozen'

The Associated Press



NEW YORK Sept. 25, 2004 — English playwright Bryony Lavery has been accused of plagiarizing passages from a criminal psychiatrist and a magazine writer in her Tony Award-nominated play about a serial killer and his psychiatrist.

Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker said they had found at least 12 instances of plagiarism in "Frozen," which earned a Tony nomination for best play this year.

Biographical and thematic details had also been taken from a New Yorker profile Gladwell wrote about Lewis in 1997 and from Lewis' 1998 book "Guilty by Reason of Insanity," the two charged.

"Had she asked for material we would have given it to her, but what she has done is a theft," Lewis' lawyer, Martin Garbus, told The Associated Press Saturday.

One passage in Gladwell's article, quoting Lewis, allegedly is included almost verbatim in Lavery's play. It reads, in part: "I just don't believe people are born evil. To my mind that is mindless. Forensic psychiatrists tend to buy into the notion of evil. I felt that that's no explanation."

For the play's character Agnetha, a criminal psychologist, Lewis charged Lavery used several biographical details from "Guilty by Reason of Insanity."

"If you look at the incidents in the play, you'll see every one of them comes from the book or the article," Garbus said.