Backyard Renaissance Presents Misery
While the country goes crazy for Wicked, a movie based on a play — well, a musical based on a novel — Backyard Renaissance is staging Misery, a play based on a movie — again, based on a book. It’s weirdly appropriate, because while the antagonist of Misery is a frumpy middle-aged woman who is so in love with a fictional heroine that she’s willing to do terrible things to the author who created her (even though she thinks he’s the greatest writer ever), her behavior is pure parasocial pathology, an extreme version of the intense personal devotion inspired in The Kids of Today by pop stars like Wicked’s Ariana Grande.
Annie Wilkes is a nice Christian lady who’s willing to torture and imprison someone in an effort to get them to do the right thing, which just happens to be the thing she wants. Bad! But then, there are other devotions that are similarly religious, and inspiring of sentiments that are similarly unhinged. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of freaky fangirl Wilkes in the film, in part because of how well she kept her nuttiness under wraps. Hobbling — the sensible choice! Here, Maggie Carney cheerfully yields to the stage’s demand for larger gestures and stronger expressions: her outbursts of enthusiasm almost as unnerving as her outbursts of rage, her face contorting in ways that are alternatingly calculated and crazed.
At first, it feels like Francis Gercke’s bedridden author is struggling just to stay on the stage with her, but by the second act, it feels like that was MJ Sieber’s directorial choice. Little by little, he begins to take up more and more dramatic space, so that by play’s end, we’re almost ready to believe that this is his story. Almost. (Nota bene: it’s a violent affair, and the play embraces that violence to impressive effect.)
When
Ongoing until Saturday, December 7, 2024
Hours
| Sundays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Thursdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm-9:30pm |