MISERY
Featuring Nicola Cavendish, Tom McCamus. Written by Simon Moore. Directed by David Storch. Presented by the Canadian Stage Company. To May 31. Mon-Sat 8pm; Wed 1:30pm; Sat 2pm. $20-$89; Mon PWYC; ½ price rush avail one hour prior to show. Bluma Appel Theatre, 27 Front E. 416-368-3110. www.canstage.com.
The Canadian Stage Company used to present plays by Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Tom Stoppard and Michel Tremblay on the Bluma Appel stage. Its latest offering is Simon Moore’s 1992 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, a sure sign of lowered artistic goals. The only reason to see this show is to watch actors Tom McCamus and Nicola Cavendish together on stage. Otherwise, the production is a waste of time and money.
As anyone will know from the novel, or more likely the 1990 film starring James Caan and Kathy Bates, psychotic ex-nurse Annie Wilkes (Cavendish) rescues romance novelist Paul Sheldon (McCamus) from a serious car crash and helps him recuperate in her isolated farmhouse. She happens to be his “Number One Fan, ” that is until she reads his latest novel and then keeps him prisoner until he continues the “Misery Chastain” series he had deliberated ended. Instead of the ankle-smashing scene used in the film, Moore sticks to the novel’s at-home amputation scene. The Bluma staff refer to the front row as the “splatter zone” à la Evil Dead: The Musical, but if it’s stage blood you’re after, skip this puny squirt and head off to Evil Dead.
Staging a good two-hander with McCamus and Cavendish should not be hard, but the show is dreadfully over-produced. Though set in only one room, designer Bretta Gerecke gives us a skeleton of the whole house whose eyelike dormer windows make it look like a gigantic model of the Pokémon character Pikachu. It looks scary all right, but probably not as she intended. The show is accompanied by a nearly continuous soundtrack composed by James Fisher (available for purchase in the lobby) that sounds alternately like workmen dismantling an old drainpipe and generic horror-movie mood music. It is an insult to the two actors who are more than capable of frightening us without recourse to such relentless underscoring. The series of short scenes that comprise the play make it difficult to build up tension, and director David Storch has certainly not found how to do it. In his hands this is not an edge-of-your-seat thriller but a lay-back-and-hope-something-happens drag.
McCamus has little to do but communicate intolerable pain through a wide range of moans and shouts. Cavendish, however, is wonderful to watch, her folksy primness serving as a much too delicate vessel for a repressed rage that can explode at any second. Her shifts from “nice” to “mad” and back are mini-masterpieces. Yet, nothing in the play goes deeper than the surface. The situation itself resonates with no greater meaning and we learn nothing more about Annie or Paul than we surmised in the first quarter hour. With so much real horror in the world such incomparably minor stage thrills seem a pointless and pricey indulgence.