Jack who?

A Cuckoo’s Nest that resists temptation

By Robert von Stein Redick

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest plays through December 3 at the Seacoast Repertory Theatre. Call (603)-433-4472.

NESTING INSTINCT: patients ready to be liberated.

It is a very cheap shot for a reviewer to cast his or her response to a play in terms of the better-known film adaptation — unless the stage production itself solicits the comparison. Such invitations are frequent, and unfortunate: one cannot help but be suspicious, to say nothing of distracted, when a pink-jacketed clone of Stockard Channing takes the stage in Grease, or Dustin Hoffman’s lost twin shuffles out with Willy Loman’s sample case. Lovers of originality should assault these tactics, but not without humility. Like Listerine and negative political campaigns, they are used because they work.

How refreshing, then, when a company resists temptation. In the case of the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the only allusion to the 1975 blockbuster occurs in the promotional poster, from which Jack Nicholson and no one else leers out (he is more Stanley Kubrick’s psychokiller than Milos Forman’s cheeky hero, but let it pass). Elsewhere, this production has the sense to let us forget the film and concentrate on its own substantial joys.

Joys, did I say? What a curious word for so dark a story, as an analyst might observe. Faithful to it source (Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel), Dale Wasserman’s play is a grim battle set in a psychiatric hospital. New patient Randle P. McMurphy (Bill Butler) is not mad but merely a bit bad; it is evident that the law has committed him more for his cockiness than for his crimes. The latter include a charge of statutory rape, but “Mack” is hardly consumed with guilt (“She was so willing I’d have needed a padlock on my pants”). Nor is he keen to adopt the hospital’s “therapeutic” speech codes, which have a distinct flavor of original sin. Expressing in a single gesture the manifesto he will espouse among the other inmates, he brandishes a chair at the orderlies who have hustled him into the ward and snarls, “Stay the hell away from me!” His enemy from the start is Nurse Ratched (Mary Lou Bagley), monarch of the ward, bent on absolute control of her patients’ minds and bodies — for their own good, naturally. On her side stands the institution in all its power; on his, rebellion in all its crass American intensity.

But that is just the outward feud. We know from the play’s first minutes that something deeper and more visionary is being contested. The darkened ward, an oppressive chamber of blue and gray prison pastels, lies empty but for a dozen tiny statuettes — some in pajamas, some in nurses uniforms — arranged like chess pieces on the tiled floor. Then the room begins to throb like an angry furnace, and a huge but cringing Native American man creeps onto the stage, pushing a broom as though it were an oar on a slave galley. The noise grows; the man throws back long hair and gazes at the ceiling:

Do you hear it, Papa? A black machine. They got it going 18 stories below the ground. They’re puttin’ people in one end, and out comes what they want. You think I’m ravin’ ’cause it’s too awful to be true. But my God — there’s such a lot of things that’s true. Even if they never happened.

And with these words, the big man sorrowfully sweeps the dolls from the stage. Chief Bromden (Leo Lunser) has worry lines that bespeak endless persecution, including, as we learn, some 200 electroshock treatments. Like several other patients, Bromden is lucid enough to know just how savagely the ward handles those who don’t play by the rules.

At its heart, then, Cuckoo’s Nest is about fascism in the guise of therapy, and the difficulty of hoping when one lives in the belly of the beast. One senses that only an innocent like Mack, who does not know how bad things can get, would ever dare try to change it. The reason why is not long in appearing. While Mack tries to reawaken a long-dormant self-respect in the inmates, through such revolutionary proposals as being allowed to tune in the World Series outside of regular “radio privilege” time, Nurse “Wretched” (as Mack calls her, along with some less flattering nicknames) sets out to convince the staff that Mack is a violent lunatic. And what does one do with violent lunatics? The drooling lobotomy patient in the corner (Chris Walters) tells us all we need to know.

As Mack, Bill Butler takes his cues from nobody — least of all Nicholson. His self-satisfied leers at the jittery young nurse (Nicole Tremblay), his conspiratorial smiles for the inmates, his swagger as he hands out cigarettes and sticks of Juicy Fruit, are quite winning and quite his own. Bagley is no less accomplished, although hers is a far less complicated role. In most scenes Nurse Ratched need simply be stern and humorless: the stuff that nurse jokes, and mother-figure psychosis, are made of.

There’s more than a hint of misogyny in Cuckoo’s Nest: if the above hasn’t persuaded you, consider that the only other woman in the play, appropriately named Candy (Donna Allen), is summoned by Mack for two services: smuggling booze into the ward, and ending the virginity of Billy Bibbit, the youngest and most cruelly teased of the inmates.

A larger concern is the extent to which the Mack/Nurse Ratched conflict absorbs this production’s energies. Lunser’s is easily the most interesting character, and most of the play’s poetry is reserved for his soulful midnight laments. Another patient, Harding (Don Labrache) transforms slowly from apologist for the system into Mack’s prime accomplice in subversion. These secondary tensions are actually more telling than the battle royale, and deserve more care than they received. But this minor blemish cannot disfigure the successful whole. Wasserman’s play is not delicate; it is riveting and raw. Like the one man who gets away, Seacoast lifts this heavy apparatus and bludgeons a path to daylight.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.