Nancy, the bereaved mother in Bryony Lavery's play "Frozen," really wants to do it.

She wants to visit, in prison, the man who decades earlier kidnapped and killed her 10-year-old daughter. And she wants to forgive this man, who has never expressed remorse for murdering her child, or his several other victims.

Thanks to a marvelously calibrated performance by Lori Larsen, Empty Space Theatre's Seattle premiere of "Frozen" puts you right in Nancy's sensible English shoes. And it straps them on tight.

You might not want to feel the pinch and ache of Lavery's absorbing, probing, discomfiting play. Or revisit the terrible violence against children that's routinely splashed across the popular media.

But "Frozen" does offer something more provocative and enlightening than a rehash of gruesome details, or the predictable guilty/innocent, crime/punishment bromides TV crime series dish out.

Sharply staged and sensitively tempered by the ever-astute director Chay Yew, "Frozen" places us in the shoes of not only Larsen's heroic British housewife Nancy, but also Peter Crook's harrowing compulsive killer Ralph; and Kate Wisniewski's forensic psychiatrist Agnetha.

Each locked in a special kind of loneliness, the three speak mainly via monologues, as their paths crisscross on John McDermott's spare, silvery unit set. And with their vividly human testimony, "Frozen" hacks through the frigid abstractions of legal and moral orthodoxy to consider new theories of violent behavior and alternatives to raw vengeance.

In brief, "Frozen" poses the possibility that murder isn't always the sinful deed of a morally evil person, but sometimes the uncontrollable neurological symptom of a sick one. In particular, Lavery's script follows and quotes the writings of forensic psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who closely studied such serial killers as Ted Bundy.

Lewis has theorized that the murders committed by Bundy and his ilk may stem from neurological injuries and other forms of severe abuse the perpetrators received in childhood — damage which left their brains primed to kill and unable to feel guilt.

If her research findings hold up, then how do we punish these people? Or pardon them? Or find and repair their brains, before they do harm?

A London hit, "Frozen" came to Broadway in 2004 and earned a Tony Award nomination. It also ignited a plagiarism scandal over Lavery's verbatim, unauthorized use of writings by Lewis and New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell.

But "Frozen" is not a lecture: It is a skillful, compassionate work of drama. And apart from a questionably extreme act of Ralph's near the end, the play and this well-acted production avoid melodrama — and mawkishness.

The three personalities are revealed gradually. For instance, it's a while before we understand the grief roiling beneath the armored, assertive professional bearing of Wisniewski's Agnetha.

Crook delivers Ralph's angry outbursts so powerfully, they set your teeth on edge. But he also makes credible Ralph's obsession with order, cleanliness, logistics, all lodged in the overworked left brain that justifies his murders as "operations."

It is Larsen, however, who carries "Frozen" into a zone where a decision to forgive the murder of one's beloved child is profoundly credible. Larsen radiates a quiet stoicism and scrappy intelligence that don't dilute Nancy's unfathomable grief one ounce. And she shows how granting mercy is more than a generous gesture: It can be an act of self-preservation too.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com