Empty Space Theatre is set to open its 36th season with the Tony Award-nominated play "Frozen."

Written by rising British playwright Bryony Lavery, the acclaimed (and controversial) three-actor drama examines the repercussions of a fatal kidnapping on the young victim's mother, an academic researcher and a man with a history of violence against children.

Presented at the Empty Space with a cast of able Seattle actors (Lori Larsen, Peter Crook and Kate Wisniewski), "Frozen" is an uncompromising choice for the long-running Seattle company.

And offstage, lingering questions still hover over the company: Can it build on its successful recent campaign to dig out of crippling financial debt and fund a 2005-2006 season? And what internal changes are needed to shore up the company's long-term viability?

Theater preview


"Frozen" by Bryony Lavery. Previews tonight through

Tuesday, opens Wednesday, runs through Oct. 23

at Empty Space Theatre, 3509 Fremont Ave. N., Seattle;

$20-$35 (206-547-7500 or www.emptyspace.org).

Artistic director Allison Narver says there's a plan for the latter under way. "The most important thing we can do is reinvent ourselves," she contends. "That sounds like a cliché, but what I mean is, we need to be smaller and act bigger ... to have an incredibly tight budget but think in terms of large theatrical canvases, and ambitious, important work that really matters to us."

The company has a new managing director, Melanie Matthews, and Narver says other major shifts ("all good") will soon be announced.

Two plays are definitely on the docket for the Fremont company: "Frozen" and "Forbidden Xmas," a new edition of Rich Gray's holiday revue.

First comes "Frozen," addressing a rough subject the popular media has heavily exploited but few serious dramatists have touched.

By e-mail from London (where her new play based on the Angela Carter novel "Wise Children" is in rehearsals at the National Theatre) Lavery said, "What I wanted to express particularly was the immense journey of a victim of such horror, through [the] impenetrable dark."

And why did she write it entirely in monologue-form? Replied Lavery, "I didn't choose [the form], it chose me! I'd just done a one-woman show called 'Goliath,' a sort of Anna Deavere Smith piece, which had to be in monologues by virtue of having just one actor. I started in on 'Frozen' by writing [ensemble] scenes, but then I just kept cutting away ... so it could be very spare."

The play's title came when Lavery "realized that the piece was about very, very lonely discoveries by the characters. And that they should be kept frozen from each other for as long as possible, until we realize that they all have different lonely chunks of ice inside them."

Mounted on Broadway in 2004, with direction by former Seattleite Doug Hughes, "Frozen" came to Narver's attention via director-playwright Chay Yew, who is mounting it at the Empty Space.

Despite the grim subject matter, Narver insists "Frozen" isn't "a nasty, sensational, 'Hard Copy' headline" of a drama but a rumination on the "nature of forgiveness, which makes it timely and important. In this era of war, terrorism, so many terrible crimes, it's important for us to stop and consider the idea of forgiveness."

Though mostly lauded by critics, the play was also the focus of a 2004 plagiarism controversy. Lavery was accused of using unattributed, verbatim passages from the book "Guilty By Reason of Insanity" by criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, and a New Yorker article about Lewis by Malcolm Gladwell.

The charges were widely reported (though Lavery has not commented publicly on the matter). And it triggered further debate about where creative appropriation ends and literary theft begins.

That's a line not even Lewis and Gladwell can agree on. Lewis has engaged a copyright lawyer and is still pursuing her charges against Lavery.

But in a follow-up New Yorker essay, Gladwell said he found the play "breathtaking," and "instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com