Here's a review from the southwest premiere of Misery I directed at The Little Room Downstairs:
By Chuck Perroncel
A Stephen King fan? Not!!! Isn’t the world scary enough without reading ourselves to sleep with tales of terror and inhumanity? BUT Misery is a cat of another color! And The Little Room Downstairs (LRDS) production directed by Matt Joseph and starring Marcy Bannor and Jim Lawrence is an singular exception!!! This is what theater is all about!
Aside from music from the soundtrack of “Needful Things” – another King movie– this production could take place in your garage … and still be compelling. Once the stage is briefly lighted in a flash of red … blood, of course. Otherwise subtle “focus lighting” changes are IT for special effects. If it’s gonna work, it’s up to the actors and the director.
And it works!
Jim Lawrence (Paul Sheldon), an auto accident victim “rescued” by his “Number One fan,” is now imprisoned by her. He cannot walk. She has made sure nobody knows she has him at her isolated house. The first hour of the play he is in bed. He has his voice, his face and his hands to create for us the growing desperation of a captive man in physical agony. We watch him gradually becoming addicted to the pain medication his rescuer doles out with controlling love and malice. As he comes to comprehend just how crazy she is, he is, by turns, ingratiating, pathetic, infuriated, coy, determined, and more … quite a range of emotion to play lying down covered by a comforter. Lawrence is up to the demands and enlivens them with a rich believable humanity. The second half of the play he is afforded the actors luxury of a wheelchair. At least he is slightly mobile. But addicted, as he is now, he has to convince us that he can be extremely weak, yet determined. There is not a minute that he lets us go! We are his willing victims through the entire ordeal.
Thank God he is playing against one of the strongest actors in town. Marcy Bannor (Annie Wilkes) lets us watch as she slowly reveals the totally insane person only a “Number One Fan.” can be. She is by turns obsequious, caring, childlike, scolding, mad, vicious, and deadly! But what is most compelling is the way this talented player titrates the craziness in a rising crescendo. She is masterful.
All actors have their own pallet of emotions. Bette Davis did not play Little Red Riding Hood. Bannor is a specialist in roller coaster craziness … recall her comedic lunacy in Season’s Greetings. In the scene where she sits listening to Paul read the new book she has forced him to write, she licks honey, straight from the bottle … off the blade of a knife. The picture of innocence and appreciation, she still twists our guts with the knowledge of the smoldering danger just below the surface. She is BAD! (that is: really … really good!)
Matt Joseph shows himself to be a blue-ribbon director. His task in a show like this is to watch and listen with our eyes, in order to keep the actors’ crescendo smooth and gradual. It mustn’t get ahead of our emotional readiness, nor may it slip behind our expectations for the next build. He is like a musical conductor keeping the tone, tempo and blend of instruments smoothly unobtrusive, so that the music of the play grips us with its own force. He does it!
"What can you expect from a bunch of seitan worshippers?" - Reginald Tresilian
. Personally, I though ANIKA was the most amazing. I was capivated by her fabulous performance from the moment she walked out onto the stage. I was SOOO glad she won the Tony. Tonya was amazing also. Her voice... ***speechless**. The whole show is amazing. I get chills everytime I listen to Lot's Wife. WOW! 
