FROZEN ASSETS and
Barrie Keeffe’s work was commissioned in 1978 by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Given Keeffe’s economical writing and wide range of characters, that company got a big return on its investment.
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The main–and most moving–character is 17-year-old Buddy Clark. The play, ironically set at Christmastime, traces one furious day when Buddy, who’s been thrown into Borstal (boys’ prison) for stealing a car on orders from a larcenous relative, accidentally kills a prison guard, panics, and scales the wall. His breakout sets in motion a picaresque chain of events full of telling coincidences and symbolic encounters worthy of Dickens–there’s even an all-connecting subplot involving buried jewelry.
Though the ending is abrupt considering the excitement that precedes it (Dickens would have wrapped things up more neatly), Frozen Assets is full of solid stagecraft. Keeffe skillfully interweaves the paths of the many characters (several of whom also confess, quite naturally, their secret hopes) and makes them reveal their souls by their reactions to Buddy. The play also shows a deep compassion for its displaced persons (much like Road and the film Life Is Sweet).
Fortunately, however, the winning play just surfaced–The Ground Zero Club, a late-night Shattered Globe offering that follows Frozen Assets on Fridays and Saturdays. Written in 1985 by 18-year-old Charlie Schulman for Playwrights’ Horizons’ young writers’ festival in New York, this raw and incongruously hilarious one-act assembles a bunch of oddballs on the Empire State Building’s observation deck, where they hope to see our own big bang.
