Rage rooms in Fort Myers: Break stuff, feel good as trend finally comes to Southwest Florida

The dishes are stacked on a table in the middle of the room. A flat-screen TV stands in the corner. A framed picture hangs neatly on the wall.

Then Ozzie Morrobel and his buddies walk into the room, and they each grab a weapon: A crowbar, a baseball bat, a sledgehammer, whatever.

And then …

Smash!

Crash!

Crunch!

Crash!

Thirty minutes later, the room has been pulverized into oblivion. All that’s left is a messy pile of nearly unrecognizable debris: Shattered plates, glasses, wine bottles and even a snowman figurine; wooden table legs; and sledgehammered television parts.

And Morrobel is grinning.

“Whew!” the Fort Myers resident says. “That was fun!”

That’s the idea, after all.

Morrobel and his friends aren’t vandals or criminals. Instead, they paid for the privilege of Hulking out on that poor, unsuspecting room.

“I’ve always liked to break things,” says Morrobel’s friend, Michael Tessmer of Fort Myers. “This looked really fun. Relieving stress is just an added bonus!”

That’s what rage rooms are all about. The hot new trend is sweeping the United States with rooms popping up last year in Miami, Milwaukee, Rochester, Tucson and elsewhere.

More: Rage rooms: Why does it feel so good to break stuff?

More: You have one hour. Can you escape the escape room?

Now two rage rooms have opened in Fort Myers, too: Anger Management Rage Room (where Morrobel and his friends got their smash-on this week) and Just One of Those Dayz Smash Room.

“All your life, you’ve been told ‘Don’t break it. Don’t break it!’” says Jesse Ziegler, co-owner of Just One of Those Dayz. “But here, you CAN break it. … It’s exhilarating, to be honest.”

Rage rooms — also called smash rooms or anger rooms— offer people a relatively safe, legal space to have fun and bash away their stress and anxiety.

The world's first rage room opened in Japan in 2008. Since then, the trend has spread to Serbia, the United Kingdom, Argentina and many other countries, including the United States.

“Who doesn’t have stress?” explains Bobby Lukic, who opened Anger Management with high-school friend Josh Degnan. “You don’t have to be angry. You just come in here and have fun.”

For about $50, two people can book a rage room for 20-30 minutes — probably all the time you’ll need to obliterate absolutely every single thing in the room.

Both Fort Myers businesses stock up on breakables they buy at thrift shops, garage sales and estate sales: Dishes, bottles, computers, tables, chairs, TVs , figurines and — one of the most popular items — office printers (thanks to the beat-down scene in the cult movie “Office Space”). You can even bring your own stuff to break, too.

For safety, you’re required to suit up in a jumpsuit, gloves and a plastic visor. Then you walk into a room, select your tool of choice — everything from baseball bats to golf clubs to the almighty sledgehammer — and start smashing away.

That's what Anson Rosenwald and his family did recently at Just One of Those Dayz. They quickly suited up and walked into one of two rooms lined with (mostly) destruction-proof metal hurricane shutters.

Soon, they were laughing and joking as they listened to Judas Priest and gleefully hurled drinking glasses against the walls, took a golf club to some dinner plates (“Fore!”) and tried to kill a seemingly indestructible plastic chair with a baseball bat — but only succeeded in removing its metal legs.

“If you ever need a chair, THAT’S a good chair,” said a smiling Alisha Koyanis, 38, of Fort Myers.

Afterward, Rosenwald, his wife and his son were covered in sweat and breathing heavily. But they grinned from ear to ear.

“Oh man, what a blast, what a blast!” said Rosenwald, 40, of Fort Myers. “A lot of anger went out of me — a LOT of anger.

“I gotta tell you: That was way, way better than bowling.”

Rage rooms often advertise themselves as a form of therapy in today’s hectic, stressed-out world. And they can certainly be fun, says Scott Bea, a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

Still, Bea cautions that, if you’re really in need of therapy, rage rooms are no substitute for communication or seeking professional help. "It's not particularly therapeutic for people who have anger problems," Bea says. "Just because they throw something doesn't mean they aren't going to throw something again in the future." 

But Janean Byrne, a licensed mental-health counselor with Serenity Counseling Center in Fort Myers, sees rage rooms as a good thing for people with anger and impulse-control issues. That's partly because it feels taboo to break things.

"Just letting it go and smashing things just feels like something you're not supposed to do," Byrne says. "I think it's a more positive, controlled way for them to get their anger out."

Then again, we all deal with stress in our lives, and rage rooms are one way of relieving that.

"Everyday, just driving to work, we kind of have stress and frustration that we deal with," Byrne says. "So I think absolutely this would be beneficial to anybody."

Just One of Those Dayz opened Jan. 15, and Anger Management followed in early February. The owners of both places admit they’d never visited a rage room before opening their respective businesses. Instead, they learned about the trend online and on a radio show.

“I just came across it and fell in love with it,” says Lukic of Anger Management. “I just thought it was such a cool idea!”

Jesse Ziegler of Just One of Those Dayz knows a thing or two about stress: He’s a former Marine who suffered from PTSD after serving in the Gulf War. Breaking things helps him feel better, he explains.

“Every time I break something,” he says, “it just makes me laugh.”

The same goes for people who visit their business, says his wife and co-owner Angela Ziegler. “Everybody just walks out of here with a smile on their face.”

That’s a good feeling for the Zieglers, too. They don’t see Just One of Those Dayz as just a fun place to go. They’re offering therapy — one broken dish and shattered TV at a time.

Jesse and Angela Ziegler see how people react when they’re breaking stuff in their rage room. The couple are usually watching on a video screen in the other room and cheering on their customers.

That's therapy for them, as well.

“That’s the best I feel in my life, when I’m watching someone release that energy," Jesse Ziegler says. "It makes me feel good!”

USA Today reporter Marina Pitofsky contributed to this article.

Connect with this reporter: Charles Runnells (Facebook), @charlesrunnells (Twitter), @crunnells1 (Instagram)

Get your rage on in Fort Myers:

• Just One of Those Dayz Smash Room, 39 Mildred Drive, Unit #7, Fort Myers. 224-8971, justoneofthosedayz.com or facebook.com/fortmyersrageroom
• Anger Management Rage Room, 9541 Cypress Lake Drive, Unit #6, south Fort Myers. 690-6369, AMRageRoom.com or facebook.com/rageroomfortmyers