Misery at NC Stage Co.
Edwin Arnaudin: Of all the Stephen King stories, it seems like Misery is one that would translate well to the stage.
The chilling tale of best-selling author Paul Sheldon recovering from an accident at the rural Colorado home of his self-proclaimed No. 1 fan Annie Wilkes packs the potential for an acting showdown as well as amplified tension and terror from a claustrophobic hell of a setting. And with a script by the great William Goldman, who memorably adapted King's novel for the screen with director Rob Reiner in 1990, it appears that all the pieces are present for a tremendous night of theater.
Alas, not even the venerable NC Stage Co. can make Goldman's material work. What went wrong?
Bruce: The stage is an inherently safer space, where it's more difficult to envision horrible things happening right in front of you. The one really horrible, painful moment in this production elicited as many titters as gasps, not because it was poorly staged — I thought it looked great — but because it's so hard to suspend disbelief to that degree.
And I have to say, while Goldman was a master screenwriter, he wrote few plays, and none of them was a hit — it's a different skill set. Screenplays can manipulate perception and time and build menace often by withholding or misleading. Misery the play unfolds in scenes taking place in real time and a definitive space, after Annie (Laurie Carter Rose), a middle-aged woman obsessed with Paul’s "Misery Chastain" bodice-ripper novels, rescues Paul from that near-fatal car crash, attending to his broken legs and other injuries (she's a nurse), and then keeps him captive, with increasingly unhinged demands. The story unfolds over the course of several months, during which the nature of both characters is gradually revealed.
It's hard to detach our imaginations from the vivid portrayals in the film version, with James Caan and Kathy Bates, whose performance earned her an Oscar. What did you think of NC Stage's Annie and Paul?
Edwin: They're the production's strongest elements.
I know you were a fan of Benninghofen's work last year in the three-person play Art at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, but this was my first time seeing him on stage — and I hope it's not the last. As you note, it's tough not to compare his Paul to Caan's, but Benninghofen puts his own lovable curmudgeonly spin on the beleaguered writer and sells the physicality of a reluctantly bedridden patient.
Bates' Annie is even more iconic and sets a high bar for Rose, who likewise excels. She's plenty disturbing — a scene involving soapy water that's not in the film (but maybe is from the source novel?) is particularly unsettling — and nails all the big lines. But she's missing the backstory that makes Annie so threatening and mysterious, and this version of Paul also feels a bit thinly sketched.
Were the leads enough to keep you engaged?
Bruce: They both put heart and soul into it and successfully detached the characters from the movie versions, but like you I felt they were, shall we say, hobbled by a script that didn't go deep with either of them. Benninghofen imbues Paul with a definite sense of superiority tempered by self-doubt, but the crumbs about his life (estranged daughter, career frustration) only lead so far. Rose captures Annie's quirky humor and almost childish bouts of anger, but while she is believably cruel — as in that soap water scene — I didn't get the growing sense of physical menace Annie needs as the story progresses. The violence comes, but it seems to emerge less from Annie's depths of repressed fury than from cooler strategic decisions.
Contradictory though it may be for a play set largely in winter, for me Misery was missing a certain heat — of clashing passions, of repressed desires, of two lifetimes of grievance coming to a boil. Again, maybe it's the literalness of Annie's beautifully rendered home on the NC Stage compared with the Grand Guignol of the film and novel renditions, or maybe it's that mismatch of stagecraft to Goldman's talents. I was rooting for this show, presented with the company's usual professionalism, but I left disappointed. You seemed subdued after the show as well. What were you thinking?
Edwin: To your initial point, my mind was stuck on how safe I felt — when I craved the opposite from this production. As I mentioned earlier, the pairing of material and medium, especially at NC Stage and under the direction of the reliable Charlie Flynn-McIver, has the capacity to leave theatergoers rattled. But jarring moments are sadly few.
Reiner’s film benefits from extreme, Demme-esque close-ups (of characters and objects) as well as editing to heighten emotions and anticipation. And King’s imagery-rich writing helps readers get into the psychology of his players and their screwed-up situation. Yet hardly any measures are taken in the stage version to exaggerate viewer discomfort. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps more effective lighting and sound effects, placing Paul’s bed front-and-center to make his peril more visceral, and/or the use of technology to heighten Annie’s menace — but what we get feels cold, distant, and impersonal.
While additional creative workarounds seem plausible, I do think Flynn-McIver and his cast and crew are ultimately hamstrung by Goldman. Never is that clearer than in the play’s handling of kindly Sheriff Buster (Dan Carter), whose three rushed scenes reduce a fairly rich character to mere plot device status. Sure, the single location logically limits his participation, but his borderline useless inclusion suggests that other, less embarrassing solutions could have sufficed and raises larger issues about Goldman’s adaptation overall. Much as I love the material and much of Goldman’s work, if you can’t tell your own story effectively on stage, perhaps it’s best to leave it on the screen.
Bruce: At the risk of harping on this point, Goldman’s choice to break the action into many short scenes means the audience spends a lot of time in the dark, waiting for the set to be redressed. That’s deadly in the pacing of a thriller that’s meant to barrel forward for 90 minutes (no intermission) to a gangbuster conclusion. Then the finale is blunted by some very necessary but very unrealistic fight choreography involving a typewriter. In retrospect, that moment seems symbolic: Goldman’s typewriter can’t quite connect the way it should.
Misery runs through November 1. For tickets and more information, visit ncstage.org.
(Photo courtesy of NC Stage Co.)
