Community Players Theatre opens its first show of the year tonight at the Bloomington venue. It’s a light-hearted, feel-good, fluff piece — just kidding. It's the century-old theater’s first time tackling Dale Wasserman’s stage adaptation of Ken Kesey's excoriation of mid-20th century psychiatry: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
“Dark is where I live. That’s where I thrive,” said director Jeff Ready, who works at State Farm and previously directed 12 Angry Jurors at Community Players last year.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest features some of Bloomington-Normal's most revered community actors, plus a few newcomers. Josh Nelson most recently played Mr. Peel in Heartland Theatre's production of The Minutes.
Here, he tackles Randal P. McMurphy, a convict who cons his way into a psychiatric hospital hoping for an easier way to do his time. There, he meets The Chief, an apparently deaf and mute Native American man portrayed by Rich Lau. Lau also played the role as a high schooler. Lynda Rettick plays Ms. Ratched, the nurse orchestrating patient care in McMurphy's ward.
Like Lau, Ready has a personal connection to the play — many of the women in his family are nurses.
“When they’re at work, they’re doing a job. They have to be hard. They have to be emotionless,” Ready said. “Once they leave the hospital, they get into personal settings where you then see how their patients affect them.”
Ready aimed to give Nurse Ratched humanity, despite the play revealing very little about what contributes to her hardened exterior. The script is intentionally vague about her backstory — fodder for Glee and American Horror Story producer Ryan Murphy and Evan Romansky’s imagination in Netflix’s Ratched.
The jury is out as to whether or not it’s productive to know more about her (the prequel was cancelled after just one season).
“We wanted to give a little more humanity to Nurse Ratched,” Ready said.
But the sandboxes Ratched and Cuckoo’s Nest both play in are about the struggle power — sometimes sought through brute strong arming, sometimes through subtle manipulation.
Ready first read the 1962 novel as a teenager. He describes first meeting the character McMurphy as “groundbreaking.”
“It was somebody who pushed the boundaries, who tried to break the norm and egg on authority figures,” Ready said. “It was somebody I immediately bonded with.”
Kesey’s artful critique of psychiatric institutionalization came from personal experience working the graveyard shift as an orderly in a mental health facility. In 1975, a film adaptation produced by Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz starred Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. It won five Academy Awards, including best picture and best director [Miloš Forman].
Events in the show draw parallels between mental health treatment and incarceration. McMurphy repeatedly reminds his fellow patients they aren’t prisoners — yet is shocked when it’s revealed that some of them are voluntarily committed. In moments, the chaos McMurphy wields by shaking things up is helpful to those in his ward. In others, the meticulous order Ratched imposes is the more useful approach.
“Every character in this show has a character arc,” Ready said. “Everybody has a development, including McMurphy himself. He comes in as the big rabble rouser. But he, in the rabble rousing, finds humanity.”
So, it might not be the lightest material to kick off your 2025, but Ready believes Cuckoo’s Nest is a show that’ll make you think.
“With 12 Angry Jurors, we wanted people to question the norm,” he said. “Everything’s not black and white. This is sort of the same thing.”
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest runs through Jan. 12 at Community Players Theatre, 201 Robinhood Lane, Bloomington. Tickets are $9-$17 at 309-663-2121 and communityplayers.org.
