The bitch is back. Sadly, I was stone-cold sober, as a matter of fact.
Apologies to Sir Elton, who likely wasn't referencing nut-sandwich Annie Wilkes, who nurses-imprisons-terrorizes-maims seriously injured author Paul Sheldon—of whom she is, ominously, the "biggest fan"—whose car crashes near her isolated country house in Community College of Southern Nevada's stage adaptation of Stephen King's novel, Misery.
Competing with a timeless movie memory is a damn-near-impossible assignment for actress Finley Bolton, assuming the role so chillingly and triumphantly inhabited by Kathy Bates in the 1990 film opposite James Caan.
But in Simon Moore's stage interpretation, Finley commits a fatal error from her first lines of dialogue that dooms her performance the rest of the way. She's an alternately fawning/gushing/screaming-meemie monster from the moment we meet her, laying out her lunacy immediately, no calmness or surface kindness masking the cruelty to come, leaving us no twists and turns of character to keep us interested in Annie. Consequently, while we should feel vicariously trapped with Paul inside his nightmare, it at times seems like we're watching a vaudeville version of it.
Under April Holladay's direction, Bolton's Annie—asking, demanding, finally threatening Paul until he pens a new novel, under her demented supervision, that resurrects her beloved literary heroine, Misery Chastain, whom Paul had the gall to kill off—rides the adoration-to-outrage express, whereas a few stops at sanity would've served the play better, generating a calculated cat-and-mouse game, rather than a survivalist's free-for-all. This Annie's so over the edge, it's hard to believe she's capable of the cunning and control necessary to cage Sheldon for so long.
That hands over virtually all the play's intrigue to Rick Ginn as the anguished scribe as he hurtles through an emotional wringer trying to escape this screw-loose loon in what should be a two-actor tennis match, every psychological volley matched point for point, racing toward a violent, explosive showdown.
But this certainly isn't a tight tennis contest. It's one guy playing handball.
Ginn has the run of the court, and uses it well, realizing Paul's agony with riveting realism. When he's onstage alone in Annie's absence, barely pulling himself out of his wheelchair, dragging himself along the floor, desperate for the meds she's got him hooked on or grasping for an escape route, his torment is palpable. Ginn also deftly handles the comedy—the kind of snide one-liners born of horror that are his only emotional release besides rage—and when his suffering sends him into fevered babbling and peals of deranged giggles, it's as painful as it is funny.
Yet at the core of Misery—the novel and film, as well—is a sin of omission that weakens it. Of course it's a treatise on that tenuous bond between writer and reader. But the piece's inherent irony—that a novelist who plays God in a fashion, creating his own universe and characters and manipulating them at will, is now trapped inside an alternate reality not of his making, at the mercy of another manipulator—is never really explored.
Yes, Annie does damage to Paul's lower extremities: Forget the sledgehammer to the ankle; here, she slices his foot off (as per the novel), conveyed via a lighting trick. And the final fisticuffs feel more staged than organic, fake blood notwithstanding.
Yale Yeandel's exquisite set—Annie's home, as well as a podium area where Sheldon addresses a crowd of admirers (the audience) in moments that bookend the play—is a marvel of depth, detail and dimension, especially given the limited quarters of the BackStage Theatre, with the audience on three sides. Yeandel, who also conceived the top-drawer sets for Anna in the Tropics, Parade and This Is Our Youth, is a unique talent.
Brenda Talley's lighting plays a major role, sometimes excessively so. It's often effective, fading down, out and up again repeatedly to suggest mood, passage of time and scene changes, and nicely imparts Paul's disorientation. But it's overdone to the point of distraction.
Holladay blocks well, her actors using nearly all of Yeandel's set, despite the presence of only two characters, one of them crippled.
But a one-note, nuance-free performance makes it debatable whether you'll enjoy Misery's company.