MISERY THE PLAY STRUGGLES TO SUSTAIN SUSPENSE
Some kinds of genre fiction translate better to the stage than others. The cerebral murdermystery novel has a long history in the theatre. Think Agatha Christie. Whodunnit? How’d they do it? And why?
But gothic thrillers? Stephen King may be an all-time bestselling author, but his list of stage adaptations is remarkably short and his successes even shorter.
Carrie: The Musical (1988) lasted all of five performances on Broadway.
Misery, currently playing at the Arts Club’s Granville Island Stage after touring the Lower Mainland, has done marginally better. Adapted from King ’s 1987 novel and 1990 movie by Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman, Misery the play reduces the cast to three.
The play is set entirely within
the isolated Colorado farmhouse of Annie Wilkes (Lucia Frangione), retired nurse and “number one fan” of best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon (Andrew McNee). Sheldon has crashed his car in a blizzard and Annie has brought him home, unconscious, with two broken legs and a separated shoulder. The car is buried in the snow, phone lines are down (no cellphones in 1987) and no one knows he’s there.
From the beginning it’s clear that Annie is more than a little nutty. Obsessed with Sheldon’s romance novels featuring heroine Misery Chastain, she has salvaged the manuscript of his latest book from the crash. But when it offends her religious sensibilities, Annie’s voice drops down an ominous octave and we realize Sheldon is at the mercy of psycho-nurse.
In extreme pain and unable to walk, Sheldon is her prisoner. So the cat-and-mouse games begin. How can he make his escape? How will she prevent him?
Is she going to kill him? And what about the sheriff (Munish Sharma) investigating Sheldon’s disappearance?
Eventually, Annie will force Sheldon to write a new novel, the device that finally resolves the suspense with the help of some effective stage violence.
Sustaining that suspense and raising the stakes at regular intervals prove to be challenges for director Rachel Ditor. The script is as two-dimensional as Lauchlin Johnston’s clever set, a flat wall with doors that move around, opening and closing like a whack-a-mole game. We learn almost nothing about the characters’ lives. She wants to keep him there, he wants to get out. That’s pretty much it from beginning to end.
And the Sheldon role is a major problem. Annie is the bravura part, the madwoman protagonist. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for the film, and whenever Frangione is on stage, digging her teeth into the meat of Annie’s craziness (though never quite as creepily as Bates), things come alive.
But Sheldon, stuck first in bed and then a wheelchair, has little dialogue and even less physical mobility. Painfully looking for an escape, he does a lot of gasping and moaning. McNee is a terrific comic actor but has limited scope for comedy here except for a funny moment when he invents a sex scene for his new novel to gross Annie out.
Murray Price’s spooky sound and to a lesser extent Andrew Pye’s lighting provide much of the gothic atmosphere, but it’s never as scary or intense as in the book or the movie.