The swagger. The wide grin. The lewd, good ol' boy accent. In "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Gary Sinise exuberantly corners the market on genial, loudmouth defiance.
But then he's playing Randle P. McMurphy, that mythic anti-establishment figure who was the hero of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel and an Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson, which was released in 1975.
Coming between the book and film was a stage version, written by Dale Wasserman. The play was a flop in New York in 1963 despite the star power of Kirk Douglas, but an off-Broadway revival with William Devane succeeded eight years later.
Now a revised "Cuckoo's Nest" is back on Broadway in a boisterous production by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company that lets its actors rip through Wasserman's pulpy plot and purple dialogue with gusto.
Subtlety is not the hallmark of Wasserman's melodrama, set in the day room of a mental hospital somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. The story is shamelessly manipulative in its pitting of downtrodden good guys (the inmates) against overbearing bad guys (the hospital staff epitomized by the dictatorial Nurse Ratched).
Yet the revival, which opened Sunday at the Royale Theatre, is wildly effective, an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser that has the audience rooting for the underdogs in their battle against the system.
Yet the patients are divided, too, between the acutes and the chronics, those presumably curable and those who are not. These inmates are a menagerie of types, but the fine Steppenwolf ensemble manages to turn them into credible, if not fully developed, characters. There's the prissy Harding, played with deprecating good humor by the invaluable Ross Lehman; the stuttering, virginal mama's boy (Eric Johner), and a giant Indian chief, whose silence is perceived by everyone to be a sign of mental deficiency. Tim Sampson portrays the Indian with a dignity that manages to keep sentimentality and caricature at bay.
McMurphy deliberately feigns madness to get into the mental hospital and out of the prison work farm. What he discovers is an even worse incarceration.
The ward is run with iron-like efficiency by the appropriately named Ratched. When McMurphy arrives, he promptly takes charge of the inmates. A joyous chaos replaces sterile order as this fast-talking ringleader liberates the inmates from their emotional and psychological confinement.
With the Vietnam War still raging and protest in fashion, one can see why "Cuckoo's Nest" found an audience in the early 1970s. The play is essentially a series of confrontations between McMurphy and the head nurse, played by Amy Morton.
The actress, a tall, angular woman, brings a starchy invincibility to her role, and it's not just her crisply pressed uniform--complete with little white cap--that suggests a disciplinarian supreme. Morton's voice projects a soothing yet strangely robotic calmness. She doesn't allow her all-controlling character to become cartoonish or grotesque in a way that would undermine the story.
The same goes for Sinise. McMurphy is flamboyant, freewheeling and outrageous, but there is an essential goodness to the man that Sinise nails with precision. He captures the sympathy this blustery, big-hearted man has for his fellow patients, particularly the deceptively mute Indian.
"I'm not big enough," the chief, who happens to be the tallest man around, explains to McMurphy about why he has never told off those in authority. The rowdy McMurphy certainly is big enough, a fact which upsets those in power and which leads to the play's lurid if inevitable conclusion.
Designer Robert Brill's hospital day room, blindingly lighted by Kevin Rigdon is a model of sterility. Against this antiseptic background, the dramatic high jinks blaze even brighter.
For all these histrionics, the production never spins out of control. Director Terry Kinney keeps a firm hand on its excesses, making this "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" quite a theatrical flight indeed.
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