One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
As the house lights went dark on Lucky Penny’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I felt paradoxically energized and exhausted. The execution of such a challenging play was nearly flawless, but the play itself, based as it is, unflinchingly, on reality, can be hard to take. It’s necessary, though, because the truths one learns from art like this about how the real world really is, make one into a more sensitive, humane and thoughtful person. I was, moreso, when I left the theater.
You may be familiar with the 1975 film, based on the 1962 book by Ken Kesey. In Lucky Penny’s Production, Randall Patrick McMurphy is played brilliantly by Benjamin Stowe. He is committed to a mental institution instead of being sent to a work farm. McMurphy is not crazy in the sense that he is out of touch with reality. He doesn’t see things that aren’t there and is aware of time and place. Rather, he is simply larger than life - excited, dramatic and full of zest that nobody can seem to tame. Stowe, conjures this - an overabundant vitality. He lets forth gales of maniacal laughter, but is good natured, and seems to just want to have fun.
More famous than McMurphy though, is Nurse Ratched, whose character has practically become an archetype. Anyone who is dour, cold, and determined to enforce arbitrary rules at a time when softness is needed, could be called a Nurse Ratched, and Dyan McBride’s Nurse Ratched is spot on.
McBride is impossibly straight faced as Stowe bounces off the walls. I can only imagine their rehearsals. She has to have cracked up many times, and I’m sure it took take after take to be able to perform her role with the necessary seriousness.
Given the feminist themes of, it seems, every play being staged in the Napa Valley this year, the huge split between women and men cannot be ignored. Here, some women are disciplinarians - Ratched, her second in command Nurse Flinn, played by Emma Sutherland and the aide Warren, played by Ashley Rollins - who lord over the men. They symbolize the ruthlessness of American social norms and how those norms squelch the very life they are meant to protect.
Or women are playmates, entertaining the men, as is Moranda Marple’s Candy Starr and Laura Millar’s Sandra - who are smuggled in through an open window with bottles of vodka, giving kisses and sitting on laps, to the delight of the inmates. For them, the ladies are saviors: daybreak after an endless night or rain after years of drought. They symbolize the fecundity of life and the need for love and joy inherent in every human.
And so, the men are caught in the middle between two extremes: cold and warmth, turgidness and frivolity, the law and unconditional love. It’s the human predicament.
The idea here may have been prescient: that men have squandered their power and are now neutered by it, imprisoned by it, and now subject to the stern discipline of a woman, who may just be taking power in the one place in which she has the opportunity. Everyone wants to feel powerful, and Ratched has been endowed by the medical establishment to wield that power. But even the SS guards at Auschwitz who pulled the lever on the acid showers thought they were doing the right thing.
Lucky Penny’s set is, as usual, spot on. The back wall of the stage is a putrid, medicinal green, and a nurses station, a tower in the center, is nuclear white with what looks like bullet proof glass on three sides, from which Ratched lords over the inmates. Though none of the inmates have guns. All of the inmates are dressed in white - further dehumanizing them, stripping them of anything that makes them unique, evidence of the “one size fits all” strategy that, even today, modern medicine employs on people with mental health issues.
Besides Ratched and McMurphy, the other noteworthy character is Chief Bromden, played by Daniel Rubio, who spends most of the play in a heartbreaking catatonia. It seems that McMurphy may be Chief’s alter ego - his id set loose. Chief spends most of the play, stoic, tacit and torpid. He sits in a corner staring at the wall, or shuffles around the day room sweeping up dust that isn’t there. He should be the most vital of them all - a real life Indian - wild, savage, free. But he is a representative of the damage done to the Indian nations by our Federal Government. And the mental ward is just an extension of the philosophy of that Federal Government.
In addition to the plight of the native American, there is the plight of the homosexual as well. Peter Budinger’s Dale Harding is wonderfully articulate and thereby just a little bit effete. He is in the ward because he is gay, and terribly distraught by this, given how socially unbearable that orientation was at the time. Homosexuality was not declassified as a mental disorder until 1973 so institutionalizing gay people was normal.
When Ratched forces him to admit his sexual orientation, he is reduced to tears, being so ashamed of something he cannot control. He, though, unlike McMurphy or Chief, is there voluntarily. Is it because the world has rejected him and he needs some place stable to go? Or does he think that modern medicine offers a cure? Or is it because he feels that the rest of the inmates, with all their imperfections, won’t judge him? The answer is complicated.
But the whole point is that all of the inmates - or, maybe I should call them patients - at this facility are not really insane, they just don’t fit into civilization. They are misfits who think and act differently than what society expects of them. Or, society has no outlet for what they feel is natural and they are forced to be confined - or confine themselves - to an institution where they are cut off from that society.
You can always judge a society based on how it treats its most vulnerable. And these most vulnerable people are treated like prisoners - in ill fitting uniforms, subject to stifling rules and confined to a sterile, cold and synthetic environment where nothing organic can thrive.
In my experience of mental hospitals, first as a patient, then as a nursing student, I have first hand knowledge of the challenges faced by staff and patients alike. I can tell you that the spirit of “Cuckoo” is consistent with that experience. Nurses and doctors in psychiatric wards are only as compassionate as they are trained to be, and only as generous as the resources they are given. And in both cases, America is impoverished.
