In the first moments of the play, a man tosses on a cot in a claustrophobic basement room. Lighting effects spread a murderous red flush into the darkness, and in a voiceover we hear him accepting an award to applause and laughter. Then we hear the squeal of brakes, and a violent crash. The man in the cot is the famous writer Paul Sheldon (Justin Bitton), creator of a series of trashy romance novels featuring the heroine Misery Chastain. While passing through an underpopulated rural area, he's had a nasty car crash that's left him seriously injured, and been rescued by Annie Wilkes (Donna Scott), a woman who, coincidentally, is a fan of his work.

There are a few character roles that a particular actor interprets so fully, and fits so perfectly, that any hapless actor later essaying the role, no matter their skill, inevitably finds herself or himself echoing the touchstone performance. Ellen Greene as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in the film adaptation of Misery.

Scott never seeks to imitate Bates; she simply echoes her unavoidably. Like Bates, Scott is a sturdy, dark-haired woman with a saturnine mien. Her face and eyes are expressive (though her gorgeously arched, plucked eyebrows don't quite match Annie's character), and she aptly depicts Annie's multifaceted, contradictory nature: her goofily chipper side, her vulnerability and loneliness, her derangement and fury. The emotional note of unbalanced rage she sounds a few too many times in the first act doesn't prepare us for the quiet, desperate mental agony she shows to greater effect in the second act. She moves well, mastering a tiny stage with a natural ease, always ideally placed for each soliloquy without ever sacrificing natural, realistic movement.

Justin Bitton as Paul is better at showing weakness and hopelessness than the mortal fear that the audience needs to feel in him to complete the circuit of the two characters' dynamic. This lowers the level of threat and suspense that the play is able to create, a level which could be harrowing but was only disturbing. One expects a far more palpable fear from a man in thrall to a psycho nutjob who's keeping him drugged and locked in her basement; he just looks pissed and creeped out. He's better at more passive or gentler emotions and scenes, like the quiet disgust he turns on Annie like a cold wind, the simmering hatred for her he tries (and movingly fails) to hide, or the enthusiasm he feels when swept away by his own storytelling power. Bitton never seems to buy Paul's injuries -- with two mangled legs and limited access to painkillers, he seems more pained and distressed than agonized.

A more threatening Annie and a more obviously terrorized Paul might have changed some of the audience's frequent titters to the silence of total attention.

The technical aspects of the show are uniformly good. The use of sound during the opening sound montage, and particularly in a scene where Paul reads aloud to Annie, are beautifully cued. The wound makeup on Paul's legs is suitably cringe-inducing, though his legs (reddened and sprouting purplish swellings of unknown significance) perhaps look a little more like they've been boiled than crushed. The moody, ominous lighting and sound effects that signify the passage of time are heavy-handed but appropriate. Kudos to fight choreographer Sheila Snow Proctor for choreographing a fight scene wicked enough to suspend disbelief in an audience whose closest members are barely two feet away from the actors.

OTTC Artistic Director Glenn T. Griffin does double duty with Misery, handling scenic design as well as direction. His understated set works beautifully. At first glance it's a kitschily-furnished basement room with a tired air of poverty and wear. The set is realistic, but a paint effect in its edges shows geometric jags against the black of the flats, giving the whole set a surreal, unhinged quality -- an initially normal-seeming room bleeding into madness, Garfield bookends and all. Soon we notice the boarded window, and the harmless little room starts to look more like an underground bunker or the dreary refuge of an isolationist psycho.

It's hard to find the emotional peaks and valleys in a play like Misery. "Psychological thriller" it may be, but thrills are based on the unexpected, and hardly anyone in attendance will be surprised to learn Annie's a psycho. Any doubts could be assuaged simply by looking at the glare Scott is wearing in her picture on the program. Where does the action flow then, from the initial setup, with two characters, a tiny room, the man trying to escape, the woman trying to keep him there... and little else happening? Here the director can add some emotional texture by playing down Annie's menace and playing up her warmth. A connection, however brief, between Annie and Paul, would add complexity to this most forthright of thrillers. It's a choice Griffin doesn't make, and so we miss the comforting thrill of suspense predicated on pretending we don't already know what's going to happen. All that's left to Scott is to bring into the light what was already clearly revealed in shadow.

Griffin's paced direction, though never slow, picks up in the play's last quarter, when Annie reveals more of her history and personality and Paul begins to plot against her in earnest. It's then the laughter dies, and the silence of the rapt creeps in at last.

Jennifer Saylor, February 11, 2002