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Guilty

Guilty

Guilty

A gripping true-crime thriller born from Iceland's darkest history.

A gripping true-crime thriller born from Iceland's darkest history.

An intense and thrilling chamber play based on an authentic Icelandic criminal case from 1837. A trial transcript from an 1837 criminal case, “the nastiest in Icelandic history,” according to the presiding judge at the time, is the source material for the play. where an eight-year-old girl was molested by a farmhand, who turned out to be the mother's lover.  It presents the audience with a grim tale of fatal attraction in the remote desolate moors of the northern coast of Iceland where fog, sea, and frost merge into an implacable darkness that permeates the soul. The dramatic structure merges a courtroom drama with a memory play using multiple points of view, a bit like “Rashomon,” through which the act of the crime is gradually revealed while our perceptions of the character motivations and the consequences to them are undergoing a blurring and shifting under the presiding judge’s questioning.

An intense and thrilling chamber play based on an authentic Icelandic criminal case from 1837. A trial transcript from an 1837 criminal case, “the nastiest in Icelandic history,” according to the presiding judge at the time, is the source material for the play. where an eight-year-old girl was molested by a farmhand, who turned out to be the mother's lover.  It presents the audience with a grim tale of fatal attraction in the remote desolate moors of the northern coast of Iceland where fog, sea, and frost merge into an implacable darkness that permeates the soul. The dramatic structure merges a courtroom drama with a memory play using multiple points of view, a bit like “Rashomon,” through which the act of the crime is gradually revealed while our perceptions of the character motivations and the consequences to them are undergoing a blurring and shifting under the presiding judge’s questioning.

The play was the Icelandic winner of the Nordic Drama Prize Train in 2014 and had a staged reading in Husets Teater Denmark in 2015. It was produced at the Theatre for the New City, off Broadway NY in 2017.

The play was the Icelandic winner of the Nordic Drama Prize Train in 2014 and had a staged reading in Husets Teater Denmark in 2015. It was produced at the Theatre for the New City, off Broadway NY in 2017.

Original Play

Performed at

Husets Teater

Premiered

2015

NY Theatre Wire "The details of this tale are gradually revealed through the questioning of the Judge who functions as the Narrator while the other characters testify, narrate, remember, deny, and undergo the emotional trauma by partially reenacting or reimagining events of their entanglements. The language vacillates between courtroom matter-of-fact statements and poetic reflections that evoke the Icelandic seascape and the psychic landscape of passion. The Narrator/Judge, now old, re-visits this case over which he had presided as a young man, owns the poetic reflections and closes the play with a beautiful... elegy. Throughout the play, he utters a repeated phrase (with minor variations): “Everything merges with nature, men, sheep, birds…” The dramatic irony of the play is that the characters remain largely isolated from one another, physically on stage, as well as psychologically, despite their terrible entanglement."