'Cuckoo's Nest' showing its age

'Cuckoo's Nest' showing its age

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

One of adulthood’s most painful ordeals is discovering that the literary heroes of one’s youth somehow sprouted feet of clay in the intervening decade or two. Shorn of their once-Promethean trappings, “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Catch-22” now seem no more than clever, self-indulgent fantasies. “Lord of the Flies” reads like an eighth-grade civics lesson.

So it is with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a book which once filled this writer — and God knows how many others — with a rapture bordering on rebellion. To the children of the ’60s, Ken Kesey’s novel read like a basic political document, a ferocious Up-the-System battle cry for a whole generation.

“Cuckoo’s Nest” seemed a perfect bigger-than-life microcosm of Good vs. Evil, of Us vs. Them, allegorically drawn within the austere confines of a hospital mental ward. It was easy as pie imagining oneself poor Chief Broom, writhing while noble McMurphy (i.e. freedom) and gorgonesque Big Nurse (i.e. slavery) did battle for his soul.

Alas, a new and mercenary era has altered perceptions. Our nouveau young no longer want to battle the System — they want to take it over. Power and manipulation are no longer dirty words. The Me-first Revolution has turned “Cuckoo’s Nest” into an anachronism: quaint, winsome and naive. The decline in immediacy is wincingly apparent in Performance Network’s current production of Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation — it’s no more than a bustling performance of a museum piece.

Director Raymond Masters remains stridently faithful to his sources, a fact which further underlines “Cuckoo’s Nest’s” shrunken relevance. Masters makes optimum use of the back-basement confines of Performance Network’s stage, creating a perfectly hideous psych ward rank with puke-green walls, rickety furniture and the fetid air of lost souls trapped forever in forgotten corners.

The director populates this sterile Hell with characters brought vividly to life by a cast that never stops working. Jeff Smith seems a trifle too young as Randle P. McMurphy, yet he brings a ceaseless, bawdy energy to this walking life-force who browbeats his cringing fellow inmates into reasserting their lost manhood. Linda Rice’s Big Nurse leans less toward the castrating mother-figure of the novel in favor of the supra-sexual technocrat of the 1975 movie — a professional “smiler” who prizes orderliness above all else.

Joe Meshigaud doesn’t lend much life to towering Chief Broom (the book’s narrator, shamefully slighted in both the play and movie). Yet Terrance Auch gives a powerhouse performance as the intellectual inmate Harding, complemented by a company that entertains down to the lowest bit players.

Masters pushes his ensemble at a perpetual-motion pace, with multiple stage activities constantly overlapping. The director is less successful with his multi-media trimmings. Every 10 minutes or so, the onstage action blacks out, and Chief Broom’s voice-over narrative mourns his oppressed childhood — while two television sets (one hung on each side of the stage) dole out assorted macabre commentaries on the evils of corporate America.

Sadly, these surreal visuals remain far too murky, the TV screens far too small (Masters originally wanted wall-projections) to convey an effective message, good or ill. The director separates his cast from the audience by hanging netting strung across the stage — a technique smacking less of claustrophobia and entrapment than of theatrical gimmickry.

Yet the production’s chief problem remains its source. Shorn of its knee-jerk-rebel impact, Kesey’s (and Wasserman’s) once-potent tale stands embarrassingly naked, its misogynist underbelly nastily exposed (in “Cuckoo’s Nest’s” world, all females are sharp-toothed castrators, save those willing to jump in the sack when their man commands it). Shed a tear for lost literary heroes.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

The Performance Network presents a play by Dale Wasserman, adapted from the novel by Ken Kesey.

Cast Includes Joe Meshigaud, David Desimone, David Edmunds, Linda Rice, Christine Barry, Terrence Auch, Mark Kaplan, Patty Attar, David Michael Gordon, Christopher Flynn, John Efstatos, Tom Kooi, Jim Erwin, Phil Milan, Jeff Smith, Jeff Schneiter, Gerald Wallace, Kara Miller and Susan Savage. Call 663-0681 for ticket and performance time information.