Timeless ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ provokes, plays with emotions

Randle P. McMurphy challenges authority and Nurse Ratched maintains it. McMurphy just wants to fight, fornicate and have fun, not necessarily in that order. Ratched thinks everyone would be a lot happier if they simply sat down, stayed calm and took their medicines. Incompatible creatures, penned together, they both want to guide a community of State Mental Hospital misfits into a better future.

McMurphy, as a freedom-seeking patient, and Ratched, as an administrator of a control system, create a dramatic tension that has kept people coming back again and again to the story of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" for more than 50 years. It originated as a novel by Ken Kesey in 1962, before the hit film version starring Jack Nicholson premiered in 1975, sweeping the major Academy Award categories and spawning countless regional theatrical productions over the decades since.

Manoa Valley Theatre first produced this play in 1980. Through the end of this month, the troupe returns to the piece to explore what it means to audiences today.

The costumes might reflect 1960s aesthetics; a photograph of John F. Kennedy highlights the sparse decor. Yet the rest of the set has a timeless institutional feel of linoleum floors and beige walls. The characters are clear archetypes that transfer easily to the present. The dialogue still blisters with its intensity and insightful commentary on society, mixing heavy drama and laugh-out-loud comedy, sometimes in the same line.

McMurphy, in this case, pretends to be mentally ill as a scam to get released from prison duties. Instead of continuing to suffer through hard labor, he figures he can sit out the last few months of his sentence in the hospital playing cards and watching TV. He does not anticipate, though, that he will befriend and begin to care about the people in the asylum, or that he will meet a rival as formidable and relentless as Ratched.

The psychiatric nurse keeps her tights white, her face pale, her hair high, her eye shadow blue and her lips red. She likes to play Lawrence Welk music as a way to soothe the patients, but Murphy (as portrayed by Kevin Keaveney) surges into the story as a backwoods rebel topped with a bit of Marlon Brando swagger. He immediately dominates his fellow patients, as an aggressive alpha male might, then starts to get to know and care for them. During that proc­ess he discovers their hidden potential but also unveils Ratched’s bureaucratic motivations to preserve her tiny fiefdom.

Keaveney’s fearless portrayal of McMurphy adds new shades of nuance to the character as he oscillates wildly between joy and rage. Looking a bit like late-stage Elvis, Keaveney embodies the tension of unwillingly aging — getting older but not "growing up" — through his long black sideburns and paunch, which he bares in a rollicking scene right after a morning shower.

Even when affronted by this combative clown, about to tear off his towel, Shannon Winpenny, as Ratched, shows little emotion, a cold demeanor she maintains until the play’s climactic scene.

Despite its imminent predictability, that defining moment — expertly staged by director Bree Kale‘a Peters — still provides a jolt of shock. Despite any broad familiarity of this script and its characters, Manoa Valley Theatre’s version still showers audiences with sparks of unpredictable provocation.

Remember the last time you flew against the flock, regardless of the odds? Remember an exciting idea you had that was pecked away by the chickens? Which side of the world are you on — right now — McMurphy’s or Ratched’s?

Brett Oppegaard served as a theater/arts critic for more than a decade in the Portland, Ore., area, not far from the Oregon State Hospital, where the film version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" was shot.