Director’s Note: Misery

Secretly I have always wanted to direct a thriller.
I discovered the play version of Misery when we were touring Summer of My Amazing Luck in Winnipeg. When I read it I just knew I had to direct it.
My first impression was how much fun it would be to torture a writer alongside Annie Wilkes, a chance for me to exercise some latent frustration with fussy playwrights, my writers revenge play.
What I didn’t know until we started working on the play was just how insightful Stephen King is and how he is able to brutally reveal to us our true nature.
I am slowly realizing that in Misery he is making us look at how far we will go to survive intense pain and torture of any kind, be it self-inflicted or from another human being.
What keeps us going on after our carefully constructed sense of ourselves is entirely stripped away?
Just how much pain will we endure before we give up entirely?
Vast amounts of pain, more pain than we could ever imagine.
Pain so intense that we become forever changed by those life and death experiences that we begin again with an authentic relationship with the world we live in, and value the gift of life that we have in font of us.
Enjoy.