How do you translate a classic movie thriller to the stage? The 1990 film adaptation of Misery starring Kathy Bates and James Caan was a big hit, even scoring a Best Actress Oscar for Bates. It had a dream team of creative contributors, starting with author Stephen King and his 1987 novel, then taken up by screenwriter William Goldman and director Rob Reiner.

Reiner was on the creative run of his career after directing such films as This is Spinal Tap (1984), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), and When Harry Met Sally (1989). William Goldman’s scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All The President’s Men (1976) had earned Oscars, while his Marathon Man (1976) and The Princess Bride (1987) had traumatized and charmed their respective audiences.

Stephen King, of course, is an institution. Successful film and TV adaptations of King’s work are too numerous to mention. There are the horror films, beginning with Carrie, and including The Shining, Cujo, Pet Cemetery, It, and Children of the Corn. They also include more heartfelt stories such as Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, The Green Mile and The Dead Zone. It is hard to imagine film in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s without his direct contributions or his influence.

Stephen King’s work has seemed far less translatable to stage. Among his works, Misery stands out in the stage-ready economy of its central struggle and setting. Its focus is on a simple, sustained relationship with a shifting psychological dynamic, and this is prime material for the boards. So, in 2015, Goldman, who was also a playwright, collaborated with director Will Frears on mounting a Broadway stage adaptation.

The film industry has become expert at provoking and sustaining our fear, from the haunting malignance of Nosferatu (1922) to the scarified social critique of Get Out (2016). The industry has discovered ready-to-go formulae to make audiences shudder: jump cuts that shock, camera angles that heighten suspense, soundscapes that creep and pounce. The Horror genre in film is a billion-dollar industry.

We don’t have anything quite like that in the theatre. The fear engendered in film is largely successful because of the control of the camera and the possibilities of post-production editing. That sort of precision is more difficult for a stage play. In the theatre, as we say, every night is different. And if a company manages a perfectly staged scene of horror, it might be angled to one seating section, while those in other seats might see the artifice or not see at all. And then, the effect might be diminished by a cough or the shuffling of a program, as someone looks to see who did the special effects.

Violence is another difficulty, and theatre has a checkered history with portraying violence. The Greeks tended to avoid onstage violence, as it shattered verisimilitude. Instead, they would have offstage screams, followed by the bloody remains being hauled onstage. In doing such, they engaged one of theatre’s central mechanisms—not spectacle or gore, but the ready canvas of audience imagination. In Shakespeare’s day, there was clearly a lot of swordplay, and the actors may have been well-trained in it, but the supernatural eeriness of MacBeth was more about psychology than spectacle. Of course, the Romans used actual violence in their paratheatricals in the coliseums, but one blushes to call that theatre.

Fear is the arousal of the expectation of danger in our imagination. We feel fear when we ourselves or those we love are put in danger, or rather, if we imagine they are. Now film can put us so close to violence that we don’t need to care much about the characters to have our fear triggered. Our senses tell us we are the ones in danger. Some of this effect is possible in the theatre, but if you’re in the back row—well, it’s just not as palpable.

On the other hand, if we care about the characters, then our fear is not conditional on the inundation of our senses. In that case, our empathy is engaged. Fear in theatre is perhaps most successful not when we are forced back into our seats because the danger encroaches on us, but when we lean forward in hope to protect a character we care about who is in danger, of one sort or another.

In Misery, one of the two people present is clearly in danger. The play will work best—as most plays would—if an audience can somehow connect to (and fear for) both characters. This does mean, however, resisting the casual “other-ing” of Annie implied in Goldman’s introductory stage direction: “Annie is like no one else on this or any planet.”

In this respect, Annie Wilkes fits into a long tradition of male writing—dating back at least to Aeschylus—to feature aberrant women who endanger society, generally, and men, in particular. She is a femme fatale—not in high heels and red lipstick, but a farm-raised, middle-aged nurse who loses herself in romance novels and Liberace records.

While film, as a medium, slips easily and often unnoticed, into objectifying its characters, theatre resists this. For one thing, these are actual people in the room with us. For another, theatre is found less in its sequencing of images than in its dialectic volley of character perspective. Theatre works best when one character speaks and we think “Yeah, that’s right,” and then another character speaks and we say, “Oh that’s true too.”

Now, Annie Wilkes is—to use an Annie-ism—a looneybird, but what if the theatre can represent her point of view, at least occasionally, as understandable. Yes, she’s gone off the rails, but at times she can seem tender and—what is key in eliciting our empathy—she can seem vulnerable. Annie may be most relatable when she wavers, hovering on the brink of violence, yet holding herself back. This means there’s a conscience there—however atrophied, and she is not simply a creature catapulting between fangirl adulation and puritanic brutality.

Seeing through the psychosis and suspending disbelief, we hope Annie might escape these off-kilter spirals she is subject to, when this unchecked punitive urge arises in her. We can still be afraid of her and hope her violence will be neutralized, but if we are comfortable with the notion that the only way to resolve Paul’s situation is for him to kill Annie, we may be ingesting a very old brand of theatrical misogyny.

One may make the argument that there is no need to empathize with Annie, because this is not a story about sex or gender. Surely, not every story told onstage needs to feature relatable, empathy-worthy characters.

From one angle, King’s story can be seen as a dark satire, rooted in the nightmarish fears of an author—with a long-running success in a highly popular but distinctly low-brow genre, who now feels captive and hobbled (if you will) by the claustrophobic insistences of his rabid readership, here represented by his self-proclaimed “number 1 fan.” Satires specifically work by flattening characters so we can laugh or jeer at the situation, giving us distance to make room for correcting the social ill.

The problem with this explanation is satire requires we remain in a detached frame of mind, keeping us at a level of mindful ridicule towards the characters. Misery works more like a psychological drama. We fear for Paul’s wellbeing, and so our emotions are swaying our perspective.

From another angle, one might say, it’s an allegory of drug addiction—as King has shared in interviews. The framing of the story as such may have been therapeutic for the writer, but “Annie Wilkes is cocaine” is of limited staying value to an audience that will perceive her as a person, and specifically as a woman for 90 minutes in the theatre. And the notion that an aberrant woman must be defeated, if not destroyed, for life to successfully resume its course is the perennial device of the Patriarchy.