Firebox Theatre stages Misery at the Renaissance Centre

A writer wakes up in a stranger’s spare room with both legs broken and no phone. That is the setup for “Misery,” and Firebox Theatre is staging it at the Renaissance Centre over the first weekend of October.

Four performances run from 2 to 4 October at 405 S. Brooks St. Tickets start at $25, and the town has said the run is expected to sell out.

The schedule

Friday 2 October at 7.30 p.m. Saturday 3 October at 2 p.m. and again at 7.30 p.m. Sunday 4 October at 2 p.m.

Tickets are available through the Renaissance Centre’s site or in person at the box office, which takes cash, cheque and card. The box office is reachable at rcboxoffice@wakeforestnc.gov or 919-435-9458.

Prices are adjusted by demand and availability, which is the pricing model the venue now uses across its programme. In practice that means the $25 figure is a floor rather than a rate, and it goes up as seats sell. For a run the town is already flagging as a likely sell-out, the useful advice is unglamorous: buy early.

What you are actually going to see

“Misery” is the Stephen King story, adapted for the stage. A celebrated novelist crashes his car in a snowstorm and is pulled out by a woman who says she is his biggest fan. She takes him home. She does not call an ambulance.

The stage version is a very different animal from the novel or the film, because it is essentially a two-hander in one room. There is nowhere for either actor to hide, no cutting away, and no music cue to tell you when to be frightened. Done well it is claustrophobic in a way film cannot manage, because the room is actually in front of you and so is the audience holding its breath.

The town has flagged this one properly, which is worth crediting. The listed content warnings are intense adult themes, strong language and violence, and the production uses prop firearms, fake blood and strobe effects.

Read that list before you book. Strobe effects in particular are a hard barrier for anyone with photosensitive epilepsy, and the fact that it is disclosed in the listing rather than on a sign in the lobby is the difference between being able to plan and being caught out.

This is not a family show, and the Renaissance Centre is programming it directly alongside one that is.

The other half of the weekend

The following Saturday, 10 October, the same stage hosts Diggery’s Dino Adventure at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

The premise: a palaeontologist sets off a time machine during a fossil presentation and the audience ends up somewhere with living dinosaurs. It runs on enormous interactive puppets, music, magic and replica dino bones.

Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for ages 12 and under, again demand-adjusted. One detail parents need before booking rather than at the door: every child aged two and over requires a ticket, including any child who will need their own seat. These performances are also expected to sell out.

Why a venue programming both is the point

There is a temptation to read a season like this as incoherent. A Stephen King psychological thriller with prop firearms on one weekend, a dinosaur puppet show for four-year-olds the next.

Our read: that is the whole argument for a municipal arts venue rather than a commercial one. A commercial theatre in a town this size picks a lane, because it has to fill the same seats repeatedly from the same audience. A venue run by the town can take the run at $25 a seat that plays to adults who want to be unsettled, and the Saturday morning show that gets a five-year-old into a theatre for the first time, and count both as the job.

The Renaissance Centre sits at 405 S. Brooks St., a short walk from the White Street blocks. That location matters more than it sounds for a Friday evening performance, because a 7.30 curtain and a downtown full of places to eat beforehand are a package rather than two separate decisions.

A note on the pricing model

Demand-adjusted pricing is new enough at venues this size that it catches people out, so it is worth explaining once.

It means the ticket price moves with how many seats are left, the same way airline fares do. The advertised figure is the cheapest seat available at the moment you look, not a fixed rate. For a show flagged as likely to sell out, that has one practical consequence: waiting does not save you money, it costs you money, and it may cost you the seat.

It also means the two “Misery” matinees are worth checking against the evening performances. Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon typically sell slower than a Friday or Saturday night, and the price usually reflects that.

Firebox, and the founders on stage

One detail in the town’s announcement is worth pulling out: this is the first time Firebox Theatre’s founders will share a stage together.

For a small company that is a real occasion, and it is the sort of thing that never makes it into a listings blurb anywhere else. Community theatre is usually built by two or three people who direct, produce, chase sponsors and do the get-out at midnight, and who consequently almost never end up in the same scene.

If you have watched this company’s work before, that is the reason to pick this run over any other they have done. If you have not, a two-hander in a single room is a fairly unforgiving place to start, which also makes it the honest place to judge them.

Either way, both shows are on sale now, and both are expected to go. The town’s autumn calendar is unusually full this year, with the Halloween Boo Bash arriving downtown on 17 October a fortnight after the curtain comes down on this one.