Misery

Romance writer Paul Sheldon frantically stares at the blank page in his typewriter. His nightly deadline looms, and he’s feeling pressure. Sheldon not only has to figure out how his heroine Misery Chastain will escape her newest peril, he has to please the only reader his story will ever have—his “No. 1 fan” Annie Wilkes.Annie, who puts the dead in deadline, is one of the most memorable characters horror writer Stephen King ever created. She first popped up in his book Misery. Kathy Bates earned an Academy Award for portraying her on film. Now she haunts the Delta King in a suspenseful theatrical adaptation of King’s literary thriller.

Annie lives in an isolated farmhouse, obsessing about Sheldon’s Misery romance series. By a twist of fate, Sheldon skids off the road in a snowstorm and is rescued by Annie. He’s in bad shape, and though he feels lucky Annie found him, it slowly dawns on him that his nurse is one wacky woman. She only gets wackier when she finds out Paul has killed off her favorite heroine, and insists he change the ending of his new manuscript.

King’s classic story layers horror with psychological drama, while examining the process of writing, and the cult of pop writers and their obsessed readers.

The always impressive Adrienne Sher gives us her own version of Annie, and, from the first time she utters her notorious “cockadoody,” she has us in her schizophrenic grip. Gary S. Martinez presents a formidable foil as the suffering scribe and “dirty bird” Sheldon. Director Jonathan Williams keeps tight reins on this thoroughly entertaining production.