Dressed in a black suit, with a salt and pepper mane fanned around a stern countenance, Tony Award-winning performing artist André De Shields closely resembled the great American statesman Frederick Douglass when he performed on stage in Manhattan last winter.

The influence of nature versus nurture, the difference between forgiveness and forgetting, the existence of good and evil: these paradoxes were invoked by a cast of three actors against a spare backdrop in Monday night’s Island opening of Bryony Lavery’s Tony award-nominated drama Frozen. The story involves a grieving mother, a psychiatrist, and the murdered child who connects them.

The house was full, as ever, when 95-year-old Helen (Hellcat) Lamb took the stage at the Camp Jabberwocky studio. The sweltering heat was amplified by the spotlight that ignited her usual white blouse and matching, freshly styled shock of white hair. She looked out into the crowd sternly, and waited for a relative quiet to settle on the room before beginning: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe . . ..”

Memory House: Real Talk, Real Pie

In the time it takes to bake a pie — and much less time than it takes to write a college entrance essay — a mother and daughter can weave themselves together with a lifetime of loose ends.

In Kathleen Tolan’s sparkling and delicately sharpened script for Memory House, this seems the only way to do it: just spread it out, mix it up, knead it, heat things up and see if you get burned or something sweet at the finish.