Kesey Praises Staging of 'Nest'
news.excite.com
Updated 12:17 PM ET April 25, 2001
By JEFF BARNARD, Associated Press Writer
PLEASANT HILL, Ore. (AP) - Author Ken Kesey has never seen the movie
version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," his classic 1960s tale of how
mainstream society cannot abide a free thinker.
Never has and never will.
But the play? That's different.
Almost 40 years after actor Kirk Douglas bought the rights and hired "Man of La
Mancha" playwright Dale Wasserman to do the stage adaptation, "Cuckoo's Nest" is
back on Broadway, where the original 1963 run was not exactly a smash, but
accomplished what Kesey considers the launching of his success as a novelist.
"Without the play, the novel would have made a little bubble," says Kesey, sitting
among the clutter of wires and video editing terminals in his office, where he is turning
movies of his famed 1964 bus trip across America into videos.
The current Broadway revival stars Gary Sinise in a production from Chicago's
Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
The story became a touchstone of the '60s, with the 1975 movie winning an
Academy Award for best picture and the play being published in 27 languages -
including Urdu and Hebrew - and showing up on a stage somewhere 100 times a
year, according to Wasserman.
"It was a product of a time, a particular time in the United States," Wasserman says
from his home outside Phoenix. "It's a theme I love, which actually runs through my
other plays as well - the rebellion of the individual against society, and what society
does in order to suppress or even destroy that individual."
Kesey wrote "Cuckoo's Nest" in the fall of 1958, while a member of Wallace
Stegner's famous writing seminar at Stanford University. It was an exceptional class
that included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Wendell Berry, and Ernest J. Gaines.
When Kesey wasn't guinea-pigging for LSD tests, he was working midnight to 8 a.m.
on the psychiatric ward at a veteran's hospital.
"Nine months I worked there," he says. "I wrote the whole thing right there on the
ward. When I was writing it, I was just writing it. I never thought it would be anything
big time."
Kesey created a prototypical American hero, Randle P. McMurphy, then turned him
lose with the nuts.
McMurphy had faked insanity to get off a prison farm crew, but quickly finds that the
psych ward is no Easy Street. He gradually wins over the other patients, but earns the
hatred of the authoritarian Nurse Ratched. When electroshock doesn't tame
McMurphy, she has him lobotomized to regain control of the unit.
Kesey says that creating McMurphy was easy. People already knew who he was, a
big brash hustler who strides into town wearing big boots, talking loud, and taking
care of business.
The breakthrough - what made the novel different from anything Hemingway or
Faulkner had done before - was telling the story through the eyes of a schizophrenic,
Chief Bromden.
"I dealt with people all night long, people crazy as hell," Kesey recalls. "I'd sit in the
nurse's room behind this nice big typewriter. One time this guy came in. I have a
Coke on the desk. He says, `I see you're drinking from a glass bottle. You could do
a lot of damage with this.' And I'm just nodding my head and writing it down, `You
could do a lot of damage with this."'
For realism, Kesey underwent electroshock himself - in his back yard, using wires
plugged into a wall socket. "I was sure convinced never to do it again. LSD could be
hard, but nothing like this."
Kesey says that editor Malcolm Cowley was working with Stegner's seminar, and
asked to take the manuscript of "Cuckoo's Nest" with him when he returned to New
York City. Viking published it, as well as everything else Kesey has written over the
years.
Wasserman says that he worked hard to remain true to Kesey's story, and felt his
play succeeded, unlike the movie. The original play went wrong, he says, when
Douglas brought in some Hollywood writers to make McMurphy more consistently
heroic.
"Disagreeing on it, I cut out before it opened," Wasserman says. "I spent my time as
personal therapy and began writing a new work called `Man of La Mancha.'
"I understand why Kesey would not care for the movie. The movie is a good nut
house story, primarily featuring Jack Nicholson doing Jack Nicholson. But he is not
really the character. The movie omits what for me is the most fascinating part of the
novel and the play, which looks into the mind of a schizophrenic.
"By looking into his mind, we get a very fine view of what Kesey called 'the
Combine,' which is a world that cannot abide the individualist or the rule breaker."
The night "Cuckoo's Nest" opened in 1963, Kesey joined the producers, cast and
crew afterward at a restaurant to wait for the newspaper reviews. When they came
in, the score was three thumbs up, and three thumbs down.
"They all said it was not going to make it," Kesey says. "But Kirk Douglas was gutsy
enough to say, `It is going to make it."'
The play carried on for two months before closing. It was an off-Broadway success
eight years later, with William Devane in the title role, and continues to be produced
around the world.
While Kesey was driving cross-country back home to Oregon, President Kennedy
was shot, and everywhere the nation was in shock. When he got home, he began
planning the LSD-fueled bus trip later chronicled in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test."
"A lot of the success of ('Cuckoo's Nest') was that it was already happening before I
thought of it as a book," Kesey says. "As (Grateful Dead singer Jerry) Garcia said,
`The '60s ain't over 'til the fat lady gets high,' and this is all about the '60s. Some
people were driven nuts by it and some people have been made very sane.
"People who never heard of `Cuckoo's Nest' see it and their eyes connect and they
say, `Hello!' It was part of losing a president and people trying to invent a hero."
Wasserman regained control over the script, and restored his original version, which
is what is on Broadway now. The playwright still has his first draft, which he had sent
to Kesey to read. It came back covered with enthusiastic handwritten comments in
the margins.
Kesey will be in New York May 6 and hopes to see the current version. He'd like to
invite Douglas to attend the performance with him. Wasserman looks forward to
having Kesey see it.
"All the elements are there, almost for the first time," says Wasserman. "The visuals
are there, the music is there, the balanced ensemble cast of actors is there. This is the
one he ought to see."
Kesey says that for a few years, he would receive
pencil-scrawled letters signed Chief Bromden, the schizophrenic narrator who
escapes at the end of "Cuckoo's Nest." The letters said things like, "How are you
doing? I'm doing fine. I'm going to Manitoba to be a wrestler."
"You never had a sense that it was finished," Kesey says of the story. "At this time I
was heavy into LSD and I started to believe this guy was out there writing me letters."
Kesey also ran into the Army nurse who was the prototype for Nurse Ratched. She
was a volunteer at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport.
"This little perky woman comes over and says, `Hi, Ken, remember me? Nurse
Ratched?' I was bowled over. She says she has become kind of famous and
appreciates it. A few years later, I got a letter from somebody who said she had died.
"The remarkable thing about what she was doing was she was forgiving me."
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