As ice mounds stand tall and grey on New York City streets and the sky fills with winter’s forbidding clouds, Stephen King’s Misery continues on Broadway in its final weeks, ending with a broken heart on Valentine’s Day (ticketing info here). The Playhouse begins its Page-to-Stage Book Club series this season with a deep dive into Stephen King’s suspense-filled novel, Misery. Miracles From Misery, Arnold, MO. The play will debut in late November at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania. It’s fun enough to watch, though my suspicions are more this is a commercial/meta take on the work. The bed-bound Paul is a purely reactive role; still, helmer Will Frears lets Willis get away with murder by maintaining his sophisticated-author cool well beyond the point of believability. Laurie Metcalf is a three-time Emmy ® Award winner and two-time Tony Award ® nominee and an original member of the Steppenwolf Theatre. Misery was adapted for film, starring Kathy Bates as Annie, in 1990, and has also been adapted for the theatre in the past. He suffers two broken legs and a dislocated shoulder, and would have died had Annie Wilkes (Metcalf) not pulled him out of the wreckage and hauled him home. It does not play to the expressionistic terror of something like Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd—the sets are mundanely realistic, the score does not shake us, the actors never achieve the pitch of nightmares. Directed by Will Frears. As the film and book focus mercilessly on the dramatic aspect of this lesson, I question why the stage play does not. We know what is going to happen so for a 90-minute night on the town, it’s nice to visit an old friend that’s not too scary or trying too hard. Bruce Willis stars as the romance writer held prisoner by Laurie Metcalf as his No. Sheldon is safe we later find out, or so he thinks—his savior and superfan Annie Wilkes (Metcalf) happened upon the scene of the accident and has rescued him. Miracles From Misery is an inspirational romance written specifically towards women who have lost all hope of ever finding love. Metcalf skillfully modulates her emotional transitions from adoring to obsessive to psychotic. Stephen King’s Misery is a worst-case scenario written by someone who has been in the spotlight forever and is known for a certain kind of story. If you’re in the area, you could do worse than to see this oddly-toned curiosity. He plays it with a sarcasm-infused monotone; he is never terrified, and he never stops being Bruce Willis, which means he is never vulnerable enough for the audience to feel he is in genuine danger. A style rooted more in Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty would have been an appropriate angle, to confront and reach the audience to feel and transform through the timely trauma of the story. They laughed along with Metcalf’s sometimes goofy Annie—and yes, that one scene with the sledgehammer gets a gasp—but overall I am not sure what director Frears had in mind. She is then determined to make the world right, to burn his new manuscript, which marked a new direction in his career (Annie regards this direction as vulgar). Laurie Metcalf will torment Bruce Willis in the Misery stage play June 23, 2015 by: Cody Hamman I used to be a fan of Bruce Willis, but I feel the actor has lost something in recent years. 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