THEATER REVIEW : ‘Freeze’ Connects Through Disassociation of Characters

Murray Mednick’s play “Freeze” exerts a strange fascination, especially during the scenes staged from behind the windows of a large building on the USC campus. Sitting on chairs outside on the grass, the audience watches harshly lit actors who resemble mannequins in a department store display. They stare out at us, their disembodied voices coming from a speaker outside of their glass encasement.

This is the most inventive site-specific staging in the two-night Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival, which features three plays per evening, all of them set on different spots throughout the campus. In “Freeze,” the windows represent the disassociation of the characters at the center of Mednick’s parable. “Freeze” tells the story of a young unmarried woman from the Christian right and the Jewish couple she cons into paying for the expenses of her pregnancy.

Kurt (Michael Matthys) impregnates Tracy (Amy Raasch), a beautiful, lost soul. Her father (David Weininger), a hypocritical Christian talk-radio host, and mother (Denise Poirier), kick her out of the house. For appearances’ sake, they continue to play the role of her parents but offer no guidance or support.

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She turns to her malevolent friend Jamie (Antoinette Valente). Jamie suggests that Tracy find an infertile couple to pay her medical expenses in the expectation they will adopt the baby. “You can always change your mind after the birth,” she assures her friend. Tracy finds the perfect couple, the Goodmans, who enter into a good-faith agreement with her for the baby, and even Jamie manages to weasel a little money out of the Goodmans for herself as well. The only characters who are really vulnerable and human in this brittle, funny, disturbing play are Tracy--who begins to feel a haltering allegiance to the couple--and the Goodmans themselves, who never appear in the play. They are constantly evoked, though, as we learn their story through the other characters. No one seems bothered by the awful shell game played on them, except for Tracy, whose awareness of what she is doing grows as steadily as the being in her body. The play is a bit heavy-handed but effective thanks to the staging, by Guy Zimmerman, and to a nice, glassy-eyed performance by Raasch.

“The Chemistry of Change,” written and directed by Marlane Meyer, features Lee (Kathleen Cramer), a tough woman, an unlicensed abortionist, who oversees a troubled, dependent brood of grown-up misfits. She allows a rough carny worker to seduce her while waiting around for her fiance. The play’s self-conscious eccentricity is sporadically funny--but it seems sprawling, as does the staging on a hilly, awkward piece of campus.

Finally, “Steak Knife Bacchae,” written and performed by Joe Goodrich, is a fever-dream poem told from behind a shower curtain. Goodrich performs his convulsive retelling of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” using cardboard puppets held up by steak knives. Only at the end does he pull aside the curtain, and we spy the author, a severe-looking hairless man, looking like a descendant of the rock group Devo.

Goodrich veers back and forth between the bloody Euripides tragedy and his own inventive commentary, a kind of mad wordplay, which culminates in a poem about the infinite choices in life. Each stanza ends with the line “You will sleep soon enough.” His ultimate message, it seems: We all have this vast past of pain, contained within the Euripides tragedy and in the course of our own human lives, and we should all move on and just live. Because we’ll sleep soon enough. True enough.

* “Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival: Series B,” USC, Gate 5, Bing Auditorium, Jefferson Boulevard and McClintock Avenue, Sat.-Sun., 7:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 13. $20 ($35 for both series). (213) 466-1767. “The Chemistry of Change” by Marlane Meyer. With Kathleen Cramer, Van Quattro, Dendrie Taylor, Steve Keyes, Mark Fite and Ryan Cutrona. “Freeze” by Murray Mednick. Directed by Guy Zimmerman. Music by Tom Lloyd. With Amy Raasch, Denise Poirier, Antoinette Valente, Michael Matthys, David Weininger. “Steak Knife Bacchae” written and performed by Joe Goodrich. Directed by Michael Hacker. Running time: 3 hours, 40 minutes.