Russell Piette as R.P. McMurphy and Lisa Murphy Collins as Nurse Ratched. Photo by Peter Griggs.
A lot of people watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the winner of five Oscars that starred Jack Nicholson as the protagonist Randall McMurphy, a mental hospital patient who battled the authoritarian Nurse Ratched.
There was one notable exception to the list of people who viewed that 1975 release: Ken Kesey, author of the acclaimed novel that was the basis for the film. Kesey, in fact, was so upset with the movie version of his work that he threatened to sue its producers.
Kesey felt the screenplay reduced his novel, published in 1962, to a good vs. evil melodrama and missed his larger point that, as explained by the narrator, Chief Bromden, society is a malevolent machine called the Combine that grinds non-conformists into easily controlled cogs.
Shasta College theater instructor Ken Hill, who is directing the community college production that opens Thursday, is determined to right what he sees as an artistic wrong.
“I’ve researched it, and what the play is really about is that the evil that is the giant machine, the Combine, this giant machine they’ve got going 18 stories underground, and they grind you down to get what they want,” Hill said. “My vision for this show is honoring Ken Kesey’s original vision of what this show is about—the Combine, this invisible force that co-opts us.”
A longtime fan of the novel and Kesey’s influential role as a champion of psychoactive drugs who served as a cultural bridge between the beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, Hill said he has wanted to produce “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” since he first read it more than 30 years ago.
“I couldn’t be more excited,” said Hill, who is in his second semester as a part-time theater instructor at Shasta.
To help prepare his cast, Hill has screened “Magic Trip,” a documentary about the cross-country bus trip Kesey embarked on in 1964 with his fellow “Merry Pranksters,” including Neal Cassady, who was immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
“This cast has got on the bus,” Hill said. “They have just poured themselves into the story and Kesey’s vision as an author. I know people will come out expecting to see Jack Nicholson and a retelling of the show they saw in the movie, but it is Kesey’s vision as we attempt to honor it.”
To complete the cast’s immersion in all things Kesey, Hill has arranged for a visit by Ken Babbs, one of the original Merry Pranksters, who now lives in Oregon. Babbs and Kesey both attended the Stanford University graduate creative writing program through Woodrow Wilson national fellowships.
Kesey based “Cuckoo’s Nest” on his experiences working a night shift at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Menlo Park and he uses the character of Chief Bromden as a narrator to explain the ominous machinations of the Combine and how it will try and thwart the irrepressible McMurphy.
To help set the scene, Hill will use a sound track to generate a subsonic rumbling to represent the “black machine” as well as video projections and other special effects. “The song choices and the bits we used are things we feel are what Kesey wanted to see,” Hill said. “We’re trying to mine Kesey’s own mind.”
Russell Piette has taken on the very challenging role of McMurphy and said the background on Kesey’s life and works has helped him prepare. “I really dove into this character. It’s a fun character to play. A lot of people feel he’s a bully, but he’s not. He gets into a lot of trouble, but it’s mostly from defending other people,” said Piette, who noted that McMurphy was honored for his service in the Korean War. “He led a group out of a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp, and in the play, he’s kind of trying to liberate inmates from this camp.”
That “camp” is under the tight control of Nurse Ratched, an authoritarian figure that McMurphy clashes with throughout the play. Lisa Murphy Collins has been cast as the nurse and she has been enjoying the process as well.
“It’s been interesting to play her. I heard there were all these famous actresses who declined the role because she is just so horrible. Because the book is written through the eyes of the Chief, the book makes her out to be this horrible person, but of course, in real life, no horrible person thinks they’re horrible. They think they’re doing what they should be doing,” Collins said.
“Kesey said years later, he met the woman he patterned the character after and decided she wasn’t that bad after all … in the novel, there are a lot of references to her being just as broken as well. She has lots of failings, just as all human beings do. In the book, she’s not the real antagonist, it’s the Combine. She’s just a minion of the Combine.”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” opens at 7:30 p. m. Thursday and continues through Saturday and March 26-28. A 2 p.m. matinee is scheduled for Sunday. Tickets are $8, general; $5, students and seniors. Available at the door or by visiting www.shastacollege.edu
Photos by Peter Griggs.
Jon Lewis is a freelance writer living in Redding. He has more than 30 years experience writing for newspapers and magazines. Contact him at jonpaullewis@gmail.com.
